Getting Started is Easier than you Imagine

How to find your way into a writing project and turn your ideas into actuality - including a guided writing exercise

In honour of the new year with its fresh starts and possibilities, I’m offering a series of articles about the where, when, why, what and how of getting started on a short or long piece of fiction or non-fiction. This one is mainly focused on the ‘where’ with a little bit of ‘how’.

The second article is Famous First Lines: How to Hook Your Reader from the Very First Sentence. The third article is The Right Moment: How to Know When You’re Ready to Start Writing Your Story.

I hope you find them useful.

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.” Beatrix Potter

In my classes and workshops, students often throw up their hands in despair, saying they have no way in to a story, nothing concrete to fix on, nowhere to start. When we have an idea or a number of ideas, it can be difficult to move from the abstract realm these ideas inhabit, to the realm of form that writing inhabits. For me there’s often been a point of overwhelm early on because my ideas contain endless possibilities but fixing something on paper means narrowing down those possibilities. What if I choose the wrong one? I ask myself. What if I travel down the wrong path?

Even now after years of writing, every time I embark on a new story my fearful mind gets in the way, but these days I just tell it not to worry, because I’ve finally understood that there simply isn’t a wrong path. Together with my muse, I create the path as I go, and that means I can change direction as and when it’s needed. However, it’s rarely needed because writing is an act of faith and when we let go of our constraints and put our faith in the creative process, we will always find our way. As we progress, as the infinite possibilities reduce, they’re replaced by a sense that this is exactly the story we were meant to write, and perhaps even the strangest of feelings - that we’re simply discovering a story that was already there just waiting for us to find it.

So while beginning something as huge as a novel or memoir can be overwhelming, that overwhelm exists in the anticipation not the process. A blank page can be a frightening thing but once it’s filled, we have something to work with and a building momentum that banishes our fear and fills more blank pages. What I am absolutely certain of is that if we keep turning up day after day, tuning into our muse, drawing on what we know, letting our Imaginations roam unfettered, we will eventually have a whole story; messy and wild but ready to be worked with.

Working with Ideas

I’ve always imagined that ideas float around in the atmosphere, searching for the people who need them, the ones who can do something with them. Sometimes they even land in the imaginations of a few people at once and when that happens their fruits emerge simultaneously, with common themes but uniquely costumed, because inevitably each person brings themselves to an idea and shapes it accordingly.

An idea can arrive in many costumes, some of them hardly recognizable as an idea. It might land as a glimmer, an inkling, something you can’t shake off but also can’t articulate, it might be a premise for a story or even an ending without a middle or a beginning. In very rare cases it might even arrive fully formed. It could be:

• a theme

• a character

• an event – perhaps a turning point

• a situation

• a setting

• an image

• a contrast between places, people, events. . .

• a feeling

In whatever form an idea arrives, it will always be carrying within it the seeds of a story. However, we often receive more than one idea with each wearing a different costume. Every one of those costumes will offer a way into the story but each is reliant on the others for a complete story to emerge. It’s often only in the writing process that we discover a number of apparently separate or even disparate ideas weaving themselves together into a pattern and that’s when the magic truly begins.

‘An idea like a ghost must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself,’ wrote Charles Dickens, and I know exactly what he meant. Ideas are usually abstract. They emerge from the Imaginal Realm, where they’re formless so in order to manifest them, we need to ground them, to take them from abstract to concrete. To do that we have to make sense of an idea, ask it questions, get to know it. We might learn something about it before we start writing but for me the explanations and the understandings usually emerge through the writing process itself. That is to say that I only discover what I’m writing about by writing about it, which seems paradoxical, but then so many of the best things of life are just that.

Beginning, Middle or End

Beginnings and ends are frames which help us to shape a story out of a larger whole, to find its meaning and to work with its themes. Wherever we start there will be threads that lead up to that moment and wherever we end there will be threads moving on from there, cause and effect threads that play an important role in how and why the story unfolds.

As writers we get to choose where a story starts and sometimes where it will end. Openings are not set in stone; they’re just a way for us to begin telling the story and they can be moved or changed at any point in the writing process. We can try starting at the end, using this as a hook to return to the beginning and lead the reader back to the end again. Alternatively, we can start at a dramatic point in the middle and then fill in the backstory as the story progresses forward, or choose to start at the beginning and run two stories side by side or move back and forth between past and present.

Any fleeting image can be a good starting point and from there the story, whether it’s short, long, fiction or memoir, will evolve. In my first novel, Gathering Storm, all I had to begin with was a persistent image of a toddler left on the Stuart Highway in the Australian outback, and a sense that I needed to work with themes of belonging and abandonment. I started with the toddler, taking the idea of her abandonment from abstract to concrete by imagining the red earth, the termite mounds, the searing heat, the arid soil, the bewildered frightened child. Then I asked question after question. Why is she here? Who is she? Who left her? Who rescues her? This helped me find both the past and the future of the story and soon it began to form and flow. In the end that first piece of writing appeared much later in the book and instead, I opened the story at a moment of dramatic change in the life of the twenty-eight-year-old woman who was once that abandoned toddler in the desert but not yet aware of it. The plot unfolds over a short period of time – little more than a year, but it’s a book about uncovering the secrets of the past so it’s peppered with flashbacks and ruminations on what happened, along with a road trip in the present that mirrors one in the past. And, as is the case in many stories, in Gathering Storm the beginning and the end are just punctuation points in a longer journey.

'There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you,' wrote Maya Angelou. Instead of indulging in paralysis and self-doubt, it’s important to step up and begin writing, to allow (and even value) the uncertainty and to trust the process, So when students tell me they can't find a way in, I tell them to just begin, to start with what they know, a single moment, a visual image, anything they can ground into form and use to begin creating a scene. Look for detail and write from there, I tell them. Describe, imagine, step into the head of a character, ask questions, follow the clues, trust in the process. From that anchoring point they can then step into the unknown and begin to build something, gradually creating a form from a nebulous idea. From here they can tell their story.

Rosie

A Guided Writing Exercise

Take an idea you want to work with, fiction or life writing. Now close your eyes, open your mind’s eye and step into the idea, allowing it to gradually seep into your consciousness.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Does it have a shape? A beginning, a middle and an end?

• Are there any main points/events/scenes you know about?

• If your idea doesn’t have a shape yet, is there a character, an image, a place, a theme or themes, that’s in your awareness?

Write a dot-point list of anything that comes to mind.

Now look back at the list and ask yourself:

• Is there one image/scene/character that stands out most vividly for you? It might seem like an apparently unimportant element but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s vivid to you.

Now close your eyes again and zoom in on the vivid element you’ve chosen. Allow it to seep into all your senses and give your imagination the freedom and time it needs to build connections.

Write a detailed description of all that you’ve observed with your mind’s eye. It might be a description of a setting, a character, it might be an action scene, a conversation, or even a scene which embraces all of these things.

When you’ve read it through, ask yourself these questions:

• Are there other elements on the dot-point list that can be connected together to create a scene? Setting? Character? Theme? Actions, small or large.

• Does this detailed description connect to the themes you want to work with in any way? How so? Literally? metaphorically? Both?

• Does it usefully move your idea from the abstract to the concrete?

• Could you make this a starting point for your story?

Now close your eyes again, imagine this piece of writing is the starting point to your story and sit with it, letting your imagination connect it to the next point. Ask yourself what happens next and make a note of whatever thoughts arise. From there you should be able to find a way into your story, keep asking questions and keep building on the connections you’re making.

Everything on Alchemy of Story is free but you can support my work by clicking the heart button, restacking, recommending Alchemy of Story and passing the essays on to others. If you would like to help further I’ve set up a Buy Me a Coffee page where you can ‘buy me a coffee’.

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I’m Dr Rosie Dub, a novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as a creative writing teacher, mentor and developmental editor. My PhD research explored the purpose and function of story as an evolutionary tool for individuals and societies. I’m also the creator of the Alchemy of Story workshop series.

I feel strongly about the value of the writing process so I do not use AI for either the writing or editing process of my articles or books. If you would like to read more about AI and the challenges it brings for writers and readers, have a read of this article: Process or Product? What We Lose When We Let AI Write Our Stories for Us

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