In Praise of False Starts
by Belinda McKeown
Write an appalling first paragraph. Write an appalling first page. Sit down tobegin a new short story, or a new essay, or a new novel, and write nothing but plodding, off-tune, cringe-inducing drivel for the first week, or the first month; for the
first year, if that’s what it takes.
That’s fine. That’s the way to do it, actually, even though it feels like disaster, failure, an unforgivable waste of time; even though it feels as though your mind has atrophied, your vocabulary has dried up like a…thing. You’re writing. You’ll throw most of it out, but if you didn’t put it down in the first place, it wouldn’t carry you towards the writing you’ll keep. The writing which, by way of all this throat-clearing, as a teacher of mine liked to call first-draft beginnings, you’re allowing to emerge, clearer and surer, like a song that’s made just for your voice, your timbre, your range. You’ll know it when you hear it. It will sound right to you. It will ring true.
That first bash at a beginning is something that the writer very much needs, which is why the writer can be tempted to hold onto it – it was so hard-won, after all. The writer is tempted to be possessive of that beginning, to dig their heels in and insist that it stay. But often, it doesn’t need to stay. In fact, often, it urgently needs to go. You as the writer needed it, but the reader certainly doesn’t need it, and they won’t thank you for it, and nor will the piece of work. So, once it has gotten you to where you need to be, lop it off. It’s extraordinary how many times you’ll find that the first sentence of your second paragraph, or the first place where the story otherwise takes a deep breath and moves on; that this point is the point at which you’re best, actually, to begin.
Or another possibility, something I’ve often found: when I’ve been hammering away at a piece for a while, when I’ve written pages and pages trying to find a way in, and I step away from the piece to take a walk, or have a shower, or wash the dishes which have once again been piling up in the sink; often, just then, the first line – the right first line – will present itself to me. Not as I’m writing – not when I’m at the computer screen or sitting with my pen in hand. It comes into my mind like a line of something I’ve known a long time, like a line on which I can rely. I love that moment, but it doesn’t happen without the prelude of all the fairly miserable and apparently fruitless hammering-away, seemingly getting nowhere, letting the dirty dishes pile up in the sink. (If I washed the dishes more regularly, would this moment come more regularly too? Don’t answer that question).
And something else, probably not unrelated: immersion is what leads to authority of voice. So you need to immerse yourself in the world and the mood and the language of what it is that you’re creating, even before – perhaps long before – you can recognize it for what it is. Jump in. It doesn’t feel great at first; it’s not meant to. When you start out on a piece, you’re not so much writing that piece as increasing, with every paragraph, with every hour spent at the draft, the chances that you will write that piece, that you will find its particular music. This is why rushing a piece of writing – crashing it – doesn’t really work. These are some thoughts about beginnings, and I think that a rushed piece which turns out to be a fine piece is often little more than a piece of beginner’s luck. Don’t bank on that trick turning for you the next night-before-deadline. That luck runs out, as well it should.
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(This wonderful snippet is just a taste of what’s to come from our soon-to-be-revamped website, which will be launched at the end of summer).
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