It’s taken me three days to start to get a rhythm. At first, I was going nuts with over-thinking my first line. I wanted it to be good. I wanted it to be perfect. I had spent some time on outlines, and character sketches, and writing down bits of dialogue or scenes I wanted to include, through the latter half of October, but I was still faced with the question of where to start, and whose voice was going to tell the story. Big Important Questions, questions I could Ponder Endlessly.
Sadly, the pressure of getting something, anything, committed to the big white blank window forced me to just start writing. I realized that I didn’t have to be perfect. I just have to be version 1.0.
Besides, in the past, when I wrote longer stories, the first stuff I wrote didn’t turn out to be the beginning of the story. It took me a bit to find the characters and the voice. It’s not that what was first was junk – it was more like clearing my throat, or warming up.
Once the logjam was broken, the story just took on a life of its own. I’m on a roll, now.
If you want to see the very first words that flowed from my brain and came out of my fingers onto the screen, this is where I started. Go easy on me.
Remember that the motto of NaNoWriMo is “Quantity, not quality”…