Just Another Regular Blog

clairelutra:

phantomrose96:

pandoyareblogs:

ellelalee:

writing is hard

I feel this in my soul

No one asked but:

For anyone who feels this, let your first sentence be crappy.

Building up momentum while writing is the easiest way to get the story flowing but you need to start somewhere. And the start might just have to be crappy.

Like, let your first sentence be “It was raining.” “He was unhappy.” “When he woke up, his head was hurting.” It’s easy to be hyper-critical of the first sentence you write and that can lead to typing and erasing for hours and giving up. Let it be bland and generic and dull just so you can get the ball rolling. 

Edit it later.

Write a place-holder first sentence (sentences, paragraph) that sucks, and then write the rest of the chapter, and then go back and fix that sentence last.

i’d like to add that those opening sentences aren’t actually ‘crappy’ at all, storytelling-wise. ‘it was raining’ sets a tone and states a fact, and allows for the placement of characters in relation to the rain. ‘he was unhappy’ is a fact that sets a hook and allows for expansion, giving the pov character a problem to deal with right off the bat—why is he unhappy? how are we gonna fix that? (or make it worse, but yknow.) ditto ‘when he woke up, his head was hurting‘—it stands to follow that, at some point, he’s going to get out of bed to fix that, or lie still and suffer and regret whatever made his head hurt.

so, second piece of writing advice:

• start with a statement of fact
  

any fact, just pick one thing about the beginning of the story you wanna tell. if it gives the pov character a dilemma or trouble, all the better. it’s not the only way to start, but it’s simple and fairly concrete as a starting line.

definitely still give yourself permission to suck and rewrite later on, but if you just don’t know how to start, see if you can identify something about your story—where are we (location, time, in relation to some other event), what are we doing (verbs!), and/or what’s troubling us (pain, worry, discomfort, confusion, suspicion, etc.)—and slap it down.

(Source: gloomy-optimist)