At the beginning

I started my novel. It feels really good to write that. But the week I started was extremely chaotic. For one thing, I panicked a little. It was a bit like a heightened version of the things I say to myself that have kept me from starting a novel for years and years. You'll never finish. This is terrible. Stop writing. This will never sell. Anyway, I paid attention to it for about a day and then I decided to stop. It isn't that I'm not worried, or insecure about my writing. I probably always will be. But if I keep giving in to that annoying, critical voice, nothing will ever get written. So, I've kind of decided to ignore it as much as possible.

The other thing that happened is that I got the flu the week that I started writing. And I wrote through it. I felt really, really awful doing it, but I got some work done. I don't think I'll ever write through the flu again after this, but I was so excited about finally starting something that I didn't want to stop after the first couple pages of chapter one.

I think the beginning of a novel can be the best and the worst thing. There's something thrilling about meeting new characters. It's fun to figure out how much to reveal about a character and how much to keep a surprise for later. And there's a sense of anticipation. What will the next few hundred pages be filled with? What are the things that will surprise me? Starting each new chapter captures some of this, but nothing is quite like the beginning.

This excitement is also why the beginning can be the worst. There's a danger in getting so enamored with the characters and the setting that the beginning is self-indulgent and that doesn't help the story. Or the fear can be so paralyzing that nothing gets written at all. Not even anything bad.

The beginning is what stopped me from writing. That first blank page kept me away from writing and pushed me into wasting so many years doing research for a book I never even wrote. I don't know why I waited this long, but maybe it had to be this way. I had to work on other types of writing to distract myself from being scared of the writing a novel.

What is starting a novel like for you?

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