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I'm a few thousand words into my new "big idea". A simple synopsis for the novel already exists, so I know something about where I'm going. Some people advise that this is the time to go with the flow. Just get that first draft written at a cracking pace! Write, don't think! Scribble out the unconcious text.

That's not how it's working here. I am taking slow careful steps of the opening chapters, finding the dry path across the moor. I am watching for the brief moments when the story itself - not the skeletally lean synopsis - reveals itself. It's when a host of tiny ideas and questions and all that wonderful word stuff comes flashing into my mind. I need to catch each one before it disappears. This very slow writing pace lets the emotional plot as well as the factual plot grow and echo in my head. At least that what's I'm hoping.

I go over each paragraph time and again. I expand lines into paragraphs, paragraphs into scenes. I change telling into showing, build in snatches of dialogue, cut this or that, move ideas around. It is very enjoyable, almost as if I'm placing minute pieces of bright glass into a mosaic, watching the pattern take on beauty and shape. Yes, I have to keep the free and dreamy state, but I have to focus on the miniature details too.

A version of the "Three Pigs" I tell has the first sister building a house of flowers and grass, the second one of twigs and leaves, and the third a house of iron. The first two houses are the most immediately beautiful, even to tell, but I must get that iron into my writing too, or my whole story won't be strong enough to stand.

It often feels as if I live multiple days within the framework of one. I was writing about global health care for hours in the early part of yesterday, before I scrambled to my former middle school for the exhilarating Operation TBD, then went out with video camera and my Sony in hand to collect footage for book trailers now in progress. An hour of email, then to the high school down the road, where I was teaching a mini-course called "Very First Words." At nine-thirty I was sitting in our favorite neighborhood restaurant, chatting with one my favorite waitresses about a law school choice that she is making, her preparing to leave one life to create another.

Beginnings, then, were very much on my mind—each scene from the day let loose and catalyzed. In the class itself we asked ourselves what beginnings do and decided that, among other things, they extend an invitation, issue a caution, or lay down a bridge; they set the tone, establish a voice, and signal rhythms; they provide clues as to what is at stake; they either announce or suggest a world view. Beginnings can be bombastic or brave, ideological or explicit, dashed into place by an opening salvo of dialogue, or hushed unto themselves.

We read the prologue of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time—that streak through the dark world. We read the jiving Mum says of Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. We stole within the sensory till of Marie Arana's American Chica and the hushed deep night of Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, which is not the same, at all, as reading the clinical reportage of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking or the truly (and I do mean truly) non-cinematic opening lines of Steve Lopez's The Soloist.

Then we talked about how a writer gives a piece momentum, and while fiction wasn't on the agenda last night, I had Patrick Somerville's The Cradle with me, and so I read. For look at what Somerville does here—twining disclosure and unexpired exasperation, pairing a short sentence and a long one to rush the reader in, so that there is no choice but next:

Marissa could not be comforted, and wouldn't have it any other way. The cradle for the coming baby had to be the cradle she'd been rocked in as a child; not only the cradle she'd been rocked in but the cradle that was upstairs in her bedroom when she was fifteen and her mother came home one night from the grocery store, slammed her keys down on the countertop, slammed the brown crinkled bag onto the table, looked down at the floor, looked at Marissa, took the keys, and walked out the door, this time permanently.

My last post was about writing an ending, so – logically – I’m now starting a new book and I’m thinking about beginnings.
Up to now, my beginnings have always been clear to me when I had the idea for the story. The last four novels I’ve written, I’ve known exactly how I wanted to open them. The entry point was completely clear even if the rest of the story wasn’t yet. Sometimes I went back and changed the beginning later, sometimes not. That doesn’t matter. But feeling sure about it when I’m starting out does matter to me. In fact I already know exactly how I’m going to start the book after this one – which is not much use to me at the moment.
This time I’m coming back to a book I started two years ago. I put it aside to write a sort of prequel. And this other novel changed so much in the writing that the existing plan for this new story now no longer works.
I’ve lost my starting point. And a new one just won’t come to me. The starting point is the point from which all my other ideas flow, the anchor and the source of the narrative, the spring without which there can be no stream. And without it, I’m completely stuck, and the time to my deadline is ticking relentlessly away. Every day I delay will mean fewer days to write later in the year.
Admittedly there are other issues. I no longer want to kill off the characters I’d originally planned to kill off. They’ve become my friends. And I can’t quite sort out the chronology or timing of the story. Perhaps if I work on those, the beginning will be resolved.
But at the moment, I’m frustrated. I just want to be writing.

Although I’ve only recently finished the last one (which was agony to write), and although I swore to my long-suffering husband that I wanted at least three months off, to do ordinary things like gardening and cleaning and shopping and seeing friends – I’ve begun thinking of a new book.

At the moment it’s not much more than a hazy set of ideas floating in the darkness at the back of my head, nebulous images glimpsed from the corner of my eye.

But I’ve remembered how much I love this moment, the birth of a new idea, when everything seems magical and the real hard slog of actual writing is still in the future. This is such an exciting time, waiting for something to come into being out of nowhere. And you can’t hurry it.

At first these wispy, ghost-like notions of mine are too vague to grasp, but if I leave them alone, if I don’t try to look at them too closely, they’ll slowly coalesce, gathering mass, until quite suddenly they’ll ignite like a newborn star. And I’ll know where I’m going and what I’m doing and what the book is all about.

Writers can’t stop stories from forming, any more than the universe can stop making stars. All the wonderful books and stories that have ever been written – some shine on forever, some blaze up quickly and die, some lie hidden in dark reaches of dustclouds, some have a gravitational pull so strong that they swing whole galaxies around them… and, whoops, I suspect I have pursued that metaphor far enough. So here’s a different one, for all of us who have once again come round the circle to the beginning.

CREATION

Warmth in the dark.
Accept
what is given blind into your hand,
crumpled and wet from the egg –
stirring and cheeping –
not sure yet what it will become.
It is yours to nurture.
Your winged creature –
your tall Assyrian bull, your monster,
your mythical singing swan.

Begin with a Bang! by Robyn Opie It is a fact of life that publishers will only read one or two pages of your manuscript. They receive far too many submissions to give each one their undivided attention from beginning to end. And, sadly, some of these submissions don't deserve more than a minute or two of an editor's time. As a reader, I have given up on books that haven't grabbed me in the

How do you start a story? How do you get the story, the one that sort of floats around and coalesces in your head, down on paper? I sort of imagine it’s a bit like the way they used to make candyfloss at fairs. You know what I mean, there’s a big drum of pink sugary stuff - my brain - and you get a long stick and make a gentle stirring motion, collecting the pink sugar into a just about solid, frothy, mass – a story.

Whatever it is I’m not so professional that I can sit myself down and say ‘I’m going to write about x’ and get up from my desk 40 or 50 thousand words later job done.

At the moment I’m at that funny, fuzzy, phase when the characters for something new are just pushing themselves into my head. Which is a big relief, it’s a hundred times better than the stage which says I’ll never have any good ideas again and go around writing ridiculous one liners on the computer or in notebooks about vague things I’d like to write about. These include ‘ Channelling The Shangri-Las,’ which I never have. ‘At the White Raven Inn’ which actually did somehow metamorphose into A Nest of Vipers’. And ‘Jewish Commandos and Jazz’ which has become next years’ (fingers crossed) book The Munro Inheritance.

So after the cryptic one-liners there’s the thinking stage. If I try and do this in a rational way, sit down with notebook, turn on computer, it never works. I have to do something else, pretend I don’t care, and then the characters start doing their things. I try out scenarios and family settings; think about what it is my character does, and how she lives.

Yesterday I managed to actually write something down, even though they’ve been stewing in my head for the past month or so. I’ve been too scared to in case it comes out wrong or bad. Or at least not half as good as the swimmy, slightly ecstatic feeling I get when I think about some scene or other that’s really good – in my head.

I find myself thinking about my protagonist best when I am walking, swimming is rubbish; I spend too long looking at the sky. I go to the Lido in London Fields Hackney it is heated and it’s quite Lancelot du Lac to swim up and down through fogs of steam. Knitting is good because you end up with a jumper and a story. But walking is best.

The only downside is that of course it’s still only all in my head and writing any of it down changes it, makes it into something else and in a way I lose control of it, the story grows into itself.

All those really interesting things you were going to stick in never make it, and that great scene when your heroine quotes Shakespeare on a soapbox in the market wearing a ball gown gets the chop. But hopefully, you come away with a great whoomph of almost solid story that, like candy floss, defies air.
Catherine Johnson

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