Part 3: Write It Down

Before I got out of bed this morning, a dozen or so ideas came to me for today’s blogging. Now, after a late breakfast and email reading, most of those ideas have fled. But by just writing that sentence, I recall one. That is: Write it down. Don’t trust your memory to be available when you want that brilliant idea you had last week, last night, or even fifteen minutes ago. I think it was Virginia Woolf who said, when she had an idea for a story (while she was already working on one, of course), she jotted it down on a piece of paper and stuck it in a drawer. When she was ready to write the next story, she looked into the drawer for the idea. New beginnings come to me all the time, the exact wording of the first sentence, and even the whole first paragraph. This has its problems, unless you do what Woolf did. If I put this idea into my computer by itself, I want to keep going with that story, and I can end up with several stories started simutaneously, with the risk of not finishing any of them. I’ve decided on a better idea, which I recommend. Start a file with a label something like “To Write,” “Starts,” or “Beginnings.” When you get these great ideas for a start─the actual wording of the first sentence, I mean─type it up on a fresh sheet of paper, don’t print it, but place it in the new folder. When you get another such idea, return to that page, skip one space, and type the second idea. Etc. If you approach the matter that way, it will be less likely you will continue writing any of the stories at that time. If it is a really good sentence to start with, it should take you back to what you would have written at home plate, and you now bat for a homer. The idea should be polished enough when you type it up. I have even toyed with the idea of a book of just first paragraphs. Wouldn’t that be silly? If they were any good, someone would say, “Why didn’t she finish this story? It sounds interesting.” And what other writer would want to finish someone else’s story, in the first place, even with permission? Ah! Perhaps it could be a textbook?

Your first paragraph would do well to convey three, four, or all of the senses, but it must not be too obvious. It must be natural. When you are in a public library again, or a good book store, look for Joanne Harris’s novel Coastliners and read the first paragraph. It’s short, detailed, and has at least four of the senses, if my memory serves me right, and all while our character is aboard a boat about to land.

To compose a first polished sentence in your head at first try, you need that imagination already referred to. I don’t know how anyone could want to write and be without it. Perhaps a first sentence in nonfiction will work the same way for those less imaginative. Just be sure you don’t waste the space by telling what you are going to write about. Whatever it is, you just start writing it, without preamble.

In case anyone misunderstood the above, I do not mean writing down an idea for a story, such as, “Meg’s story about her cats,” or “When I was in San Antonio,” but the actual first sentence of the manuscript.

♥