The Unemployed Writer

Oh man, it’s time to start the writing now? That’s awesome. So step 5 is writing it right?

Kind of? What do you mean kind of?

Slow down and chill, alright. You’re ready to start writing, but not the whole thing. It’s like getting into a hot tub. First your toe, then your leg, then slowly submerge until you just dunk the rest of your body. You’ll see. But, for now it’s just the tip of your toe. Throw a frog in a boiling pot and he’ll jump out right?

And here’s the deal. I skipped the outlining phase for now. You don’t outline quite yet and here’s why. You need to establish a tone, a voice and a basic train of thought before you start outlining any of the rest of your story. I find that if you outline the whole thing right off the bat, you end up spending the entire time trying to make all of your ideas and characters match that outline. No, that’s never a good thing, so the best place to start in my opinion is to write up a little bit and see what comes of it, then start visualizing the process into an outline.

And so….(drum roll here)….write the first sentence. That’s all. It’s not so simple as it sounds though. Don’t over think it or anything. The odds are that it will be deleted and replaced a dozen or more times before you ever actually have a “first sentence”, but I guarantee you that the amount of thought that goes into the words you first write in your story will be ample to get you rolling on an outline. A few simple rules though.

1. Don’t start with a cliche - no mentions of alarm clocks waking anyone from deep sleeps, bright and sunny days,no onces, upons, or times, and definitely no mention of ‘when i was a kid’. It’s all corny and cliche and even if you end up using it in the long run, don’t start with it. It’s like shoving a big smell sponge in between your ears and trying to fire the same neurons and synapses into green cleaning materials instead of your brain. It just stinks.

2. It doesn’t count it if it’s just a quote - Quotes are fine for starters, but simple useless speech like, “I don’t think so, Johnny” doesn’t do anything for you. So, ignore that and start with more. Who is Johnny and what did he just presumptuously ask for. Move past the crap on the surface, because that crap on the surface has probably been floating there since you first came up with your idea. It stinks and needs a flush. Get to the meaning and motivation behind it all.

3. You should mention at least one of your characters and something even you didn’t know about them in this space. It opens up the dialogue between you and what you’re going to write without forgetting the actual purpose of the story. It makes so much more sense to flesh out the characters in the story than on a sheet of paper somewhere. Just doesn’t always work out that way.

4. Don’t necessarily stop at 1 sentence. Give it a go and keep writing if you can. But don’t get too carried away if you’re not sure where you’re going with it. There should be a clear objective in every paragraph you write. Don’t just scribble for the sake of scribbling words. Freewriting is for outlining and brainstorming. This is the actual story and you’re only going to clog it up with a bunch of junk if you start experimenting here.

You should have a general idea of where you’re going now. Some kind of seed in the back of that sponge in your head that tells you what kind of character you’ve got and what you want them to do, for at least the next chapter or so. I recommend sitting down and going through this process every chapter or so, that way you don’t craft too long and unforgiving an outline later on. You’ll never stick to it and it doesn’t help your story…ever.