Make Beginning Ordinary

A writer who waits for the right day turns the start into an event. She holds out for a free Saturday, a clear head, a day without errands. The day comes and the Work is cold, and cold Work is harder to enter. Where was I, what was this scene for, was it any good? Each question is small, but a long gap multiplies them until sitting down is a decision that takes courage, and by then avoidance looks reasonable. The usual remedy, a heroic weekend of ten thousand words, repeats the pattern, because three weeks of cold Work follow it.

A start has three costs. Reconstruction is working out where you are, decision is choosing what to do next, and exposure is the plain fact that the page will show you how good it is today. Repetition lowers all three. Work touched yesterday is still warm, the next act is usually visible, and the page has seen you fail before and gone on existing. That breakdown, like the point about cold Work, is the authors’ own reasoning and not a finding, and the cases below are what it has to answer to.

Anthony Trollope wrote with a watch on the desk. He says so in his Autobiography, which his son published after his death in December 1882: three hours every morning, a requirement of two hundred and fifty words to each quarter of an hour, and the words, he reports, arrived as regularly as the watch ran. Easier to miss is what came first. He began each morning by rereading the previous day’s pages, which took about half an hour, because by hearing what he had last written he caught its tone and avoided the fault of seeming unlike himself.

Octavia E. Butler, in her essay “Positive Obsession,” says that after college she did office, factory, and warehouse work, and that she got up at two or three in the morning and wrote, then went to work. She hated the jobs and says so. What she describes is a small act repeated under bad conditions, early enough that nothing else had yet claimed the day.

Toni Morrison’s account in a 1993 Paris Review interview holds both halves of the argument. She describes rising before dawn for years, first because she had small children and later by choice. She also says plainly that she has never been able to write regularly, because of a nine-to-five job, and that for a first draft she would, when something was urgently there, move everything aside and write for sustained stretches. Asked whether she has to do a first draft straight through, she says she does, and adds, “I don’t think it’s a law.” Her method, as she describes it, is bursts supported by a dawn habit. A writer with nothing but bursts starts cold every time.

The start should be unremarkable, with no ceremony and nothing anybody, the writer included, would think to describe. How often it has to happen depends on how quickly a particular Work goes cold for a particular writer, and the interval would probably differ by form. A poet with a short poem in hand may lose little in a week, while a novelist inside a long draft may lose the thread sooner.

Practice. Define the smallest session that still keeps you in contact with the Work. It can be a duration (ten minutes), a count (one hundred words), or an act (reread the last page and add one sentence), and it should be one you could keep on a bad day of an ordinary week, not a catastrophe. Over the next two weeks keep it on at least four days of your choosing, noting each time how many minutes pass between sitting down and writing the first word. At the end, compare the first number with the last. If you could not meet the floor, it was set for a different life; lower it before you blame yourself.