A lot of the things on this blog are geared towards people who have been writing long enough to have questions about technique. That said, I often teach people who are not writers. I’ve taught everything from MFA workshops to intro classes. I teach a class in developing stories for interactive forms like video games and Augmented Reality and the class ranges from people who have a degree in writing to people who have computer science degrees and no interest in writing. I try to make writing lessons that are flexible enough to teach something no matter what your skill level is.
This question is a hard one for me and yet I see it a lot. How you start is such a hard question to answer because I don’t really know where you are starting from.
Do you outline your idea or just write?
Even if I did know where you were starting from, how anyone starts is different from person to person and from style of writing to style of writing. For example, if I’m doing a project for hire, I do a high level outline, then a comprehensive outline. Then I write the project, often changing the outline and consulting with whoever hired me.
When I write a short story, I just write it. I don’t outline at all. Most people I know don’t outline a short story, but there are people who do, and there are people who, say, jot down a phrase for the beginning, a phrase for what they want to do in the middle, a phrase for the ending. I would recommend writing a short story without an outline, but outlining is not wrong if it works for you.
When I’m writing a novel, I write ten or twenty pages and then I do a high level outline. My last novel I used the writing software Scrivener, and listed my outline points as chapters, then fixed that as I wrote. But my first published novel wasn’t even supposed to be a novel, it was supposed to be a short story. It has an overarching character arc, and all that jazz, but it wasn’t planned ahead of time. The structure of the novel grew organically from finding that I wanted to write more. The structure grew organically from my desire to figure out what happened. My other writing decision was I didn’t want to do what I thought of as ‘connective pieces’—the boring parts of the novel. So, I skipped everything I thought was just ‘getting to the next part’ and wrote the next part I wanted to see.
If you’re asking ‘How Do I Start’ you may not even be at the point to join the argument over which is better, plotting ahead of time or letting the novel take you where it will. You may not even know if you’re writing a novel or a short story.
At a certain point, I’d say just start writing. The way to learn to write is to write. Chances are your first piece won’t be great for pretty much the same reasons that your first game of tennis, or basketball, or baseball, wasn’t professional level. Let’s face it, the reason I write stuff is because I want to read certain stories and since they don’t exist, I have to write them. Even if your story isn’t a great read, you’ll have written it and chances are very good you’ll feel the story more vividly as you write it than anything you’ve ever read that someone else wrote.
What about characters?
I am a character driven writer, so I would say, as I almost always do, start with character. Very few books or stories are about a single person who never interacts with another person although some very good stories are, in fact, just about one person, it’s not like you can’t do that, but stories are, at their heart, about things going wrong and whether or not they get fixed or dealt with. It’s easier to have things go wrong when there are two people because two people are always going to have different things they want and need. If you’ve ever tried to decide where to go to lunch with someone, you’ve probably done the dance of ‘I don’t want to just say a place because what if they don’t like Chinese food, but they think I want to go there?’ Two people are going to have conflicts whether that’s ‘I don’t really like that kind of food’ or ‘I want the other person to like me so I’m afraid to say the wrong thing.’ (That’s an internal conflict, that last one, but it counts.)
Put a couple of characters into a situation from your idea. You might say, I don’t know yet! It’s just an idea. Yeah, having an idea is the easy part. A lot of writers have way more ideas than they will ever be able to write. I probably have at least one idea (often a bad one) a day that I think, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to write that.’ I also think, ‘I should exercise more’. I think a lot of things. But if you want to write, then I say, write.
You can write for yourself. You can write for an audience. You can write for both. Writing for an audience isn’t better than writing for yourself. Writing can be cathartic and can be consoling. It can be personally engaging. The nice thing is, as hobbies go, it’s cheap. It’s not like boating, or owning a horse, or even collecting something. So if you want to start something, I say, just try.
Next week, Jane will talk about how she works with her ideas.
Jane here with a quick message. We've been working on getting a podcast together! Our dream is that this podcast be interactive, kind of like a radio show but not exactly. That means we'd love to hear from you all: send us any questions you'd like us to address in the podcast by filling out this form. We can give you a shoutout or you can remain anonymous. Thanks so much! -J
