When I sat down to write this post, it wasn’t unlike starting a new story, other than opening a new document instead of a new scene file in yWriter. I started with a blank page, typed the title, thought for a minute about all the stuff I’d been planning to put in this post, and put my fingers on the keyboard.

And I just stared at the blank page - suddenly, inexplicably wordless.

This is a phenomenon I don’t think you can fully appreciate until you sit down to write something. It’s like watching that super-good looking guy across the room, imagining what you’d say if you talked to him, how witty and funny and charming you’d be. Then when he comes over and introduces himself, you suddenly have a hard time forming coherent sentences, never mind the whole witty/funny/charming thing you had planned.

I love starting a new story, and nearly ninety-nine percent of the time I have the entire first scene in my head before I get started (none of my scenes are ever the same once they come out of my head, but that’s another blog post). Then I sit down to put that first sentence into words, and I start questioning myself:

- Is this really where the story starts?

- What led him/her to this place?

- Do we need the back story first, or will it be okay to jump right in and sprinkle his/her past in along the way?

- If I start the story here, will I have enough story to hit my desired word count? (I always disregard this question in the end – for me, it’s a simple case of insecurity/cold feet. There’s always enough story, and word count is flexible in my world anyway, so it’s a non-issue.)

As you can probably imagine, it’s kind of hard to write with all that noise in my head. At the same time, they’re important questions to answer because I don’t want to redo it later (back to that no big revisions thing). So inevitably, I end up opening the original idea file again, and working out back story and the scene before the “first scene” so I know exactly how the characters got to where they were when I found them, and whether or not it’s an interesting enough place to start or not.

Once I have all that hashed out, I can decide where to start writing. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), I almost always go with a hybrid of my original “first scene” and a decent helping of the back story I figured out while answering my list of questions. This time when I go back to that blank page, the words come pretty easily and I can knock out the whole first scene without too much trouble.

Readers, are you surprised at what it takes to start a new story? Have you ever tried to start one, and frozen up?

Writers, what happens when you encounter a shiny new blank first page? Are you so nervous/enamored that you forget how to form a sentence, or are you witty and charming right from the get-go?

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