Wearing the Inside Out
People often struggle with the question of how to start. Beginning a project can sometimes feel like being at the bottom of a large hill, staring up at the many paths and dips and feeling instantly knackered. Planning can help, but can also often hinder. It’s just more work, which generally means the plan becomes a different hill with different dips and different paths. Either way it is just more boring climbing.
Luckily we don’t have to think this way at all! In some ways we are already at the top- all we need is a little push and we can soar downwards, letting the idea take us where it will. The idea is very often the hardest part, and we’ve already done that bit.
The key to feeling as if you’re at the top is to work backwards, or inside out. At the very least we should try for the wrong way around. So what does this nonsense mean? Let me explain. Say you have an idea for a book. You have the characters in your mind- you know where it’s set- you may even know what happens chapter by chapter. Yet when you sit down to write, nothing comes.
Building a world from scratch is a huge task. You are suddenly like God, which is a huge responsibility. No wonder you seize up- there are a hundred decisions to make, what if one of them is wrong? Like a Rubix cube, it might affect the other decisions and then the whole book will probably collapse. Maybe you should have another cup of tea and look at Facebook forever.
The only way to start is to make it part of your every day routine. Go inside out. If you like social media then get a Twitter account as one of your characters and write tweets as them. Follow the people they would, comment as them. Get to know your characters as real people. If the novel is set in a certain place follow accounts from that place and interact with people from there. If it’s a fantasy novel set those accounts up- you could have multiple accounts from different parts of your world.
Not bothered about that? Write a little bit of a diary every day as your characters detailing what they are doing and feeling. Take photographs as if you were them, bookmark the articles they would like. Embody your characters, feel close to them and get to know their emotions and inner dialogue. Think like a film director- when the sun is out write the parts that are sunny... linearity is overrated. The idea is to kick start your own curiosity in a way that isn’t overwhelming.
There’s a million other ways to start, but you have to make it fun. By breaking things down into exciting, easy tasks you will be much more likely to want to start weaving together the myriad parts of the whole. See yourself as being inside the project already- it is not a solid entity and you are not outside of it. The idea of ‘starting’ itself is ridiculous in its own way, you already started the book the minute you thought of it. You are already on your way downhill.