Writing Advice

Writing Advice:
I Have a Great Idea, How Do I Start Writing?

I have been to quite a few events lately, and have talked to a lot of “new” writers, be it unpublished, or those who are literally new to writing. They ask a lot of questions but one that came up a lot was this: “I have a great idea, but how do I start?”

One of the most successful authors I can think of is Stephen King. I saw the movies based on his books, but I don’t read his books. Plain and simple, I have plenty of nightmares on my own. I don’t need his assistance. Yet I eat up what he has to say (and write) about writing. So he has had a huge impact on me.

It’s like Louis L’Amour. I have never read one of his books, but he changed my life, because I read an interview he did for an in-flight magazine when I was 14. The first question was long, listing all of his accomplishments, then ended with “How did you do it?” His answer was two words: I started. It was like a shaft of light came down through the roof of the airplane and left me forever changed. Whether it was school, work, or other things in life, particularly if it was something I dreaded doing, I would start. If it was writing, I would write a paragraph. If I wrote one, it often turned into three. If it was three, it often became a page. If I wrote a page, it often became five pages. Next thing I knew, I knocked out a first draft. Here’s that same process through Stephen King’s lens. He said, “Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”

So that’s my best advice: start.

Yet some look at me like I just spoke to them in a foreign language. So let’s break this down and look at it through King’s lens (where I can).

I think that a big part of the problem is looking at writing as the great mountain to be climbed. In King’s words, “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” The truth is, it doesn’t have to be a mountain or that scary moment. You don’t start by choosing the “right” idea. You start by choosing the reachable one. Which is what I was doing when applying L’Amour’s revelation. I was choosing a reachable goal: a paragraph to nail down the idea.

Writers get stuck because they try to begin at the altitude where the whole story already exists. But guess what? Beginnings don’t live up there. They live at ground level — in the moment you can actually see. King said, “When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘One word at a time.’” He also said, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

That is so important to understand. Writing requires work, whether it’s research, rewriting, moving chapters around, or whatever it might be. That said, stories are not engineered so much as discovered and dug up, like fossils. You don’t design the whole skeleton before you dig. You start brushing away the dirt where something is already poking through. That’s the reachable idea — the part of the story that’s already visible.

In King’s words, “I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That’s how I feel. It’s like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: ‘If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.’”

So do that. Look at the chimneys poking up out of the dirt and pick the one that’s tallest. Not the most impressive, not the most complex — the one that’s hardest to look away from, because it keeps drawing your eye every time you look away. As King said, “The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.” So write the part of it that already feels alive: a scene, a conflict, a line of dialogue, a character doing something they shouldn’t. Don’t worry about where it fits. Order is a problem for later.

King said, “Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map .... A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.” That really is the heart of how to start. You don’t need the whole plot. You need one character doing something with enough force that you want to follow them. Let that character lead you. That character knows the way long before you do.

Here’s another option. Start with the clearest image in your mind. The scene that already has color, motion, temperature. Write that. Momentum doesn’t care about chronology; it cares that you start. As King put it, “When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.”

Here’s a third option. Start with the question your story is trying to answer. Every idea carries pressure. Identify the pressure, and write toward it. When I first heard this (a long time ago, high school?), it inspired me. King said, “Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all ... as long as you tell the truth.”

I started writing when Science Fiction and Fantasy were not cool. There were people who made fun of me because of it. I can’t tell you how many people asked me, “When are you going to start doing some real writing?” (They weren’t happy when I was writing news, either, so what could be more real than that?) So those experiences helped me understand that what mattered was that I wrote what I wanted to read, not what someone else thought I was “supposed to write.” As King put it, “You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.” If it’s something that would interest you, then it would interest others. If it would thrill you, comfort you, unsettle you, fascinate you — then it will do the same for others. Do it because you want to, that you enjoy it.

As King said, “I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it ... I have written because it fulfilled me .... I did it for the pure joy of the things. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

That’s your compass. As King said, “If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.”

That’s it! The secret is simple: you don’t need the whole story to start. You need one vibrant piece of it. If it gets a visceral response from you, even better! The rest reveals itself once you’re moving — once the characters begin to talk, once the world begins to breathe, once the story starts tugging you forward instead of the other way around.

Start where the energy already is and, as King said, from there, “you have to go where the book leads you.”

W.D. Kilpack III: Official Web Site