Getting Started

At the beginning of a book, you are the lone participant in a ceremonial ground breaking. The ground all around you lies perfectly undisturbed. The building to come is only in the planning stages. The architectural blueprint is your outline, if you even have one. You know that the future edifice will be glorious, but all you have right now is a shovel in your hand. You are going to keep shoveling, one day at a time, for months to come.

You should take heart. You are not alone if you feel overwhelmed. Every author who has faced a white sheet of paper feels the same. (quote) Your mind is whirling with good ideas. You can see so clearly, for example, how writing about that nasty man you met on the bus is the ideal metaphor for the frustrations we all face in daily life. Yet when you try to write the first sentence, you become stumped. The opening line that seemed so fabulous when it was chiming in your head looks insipid when it’s set down on paper. You cross that out. You sit at your desk, straightening your back, thinking that might help, but the longer you wait, the more that whorl of thoughts congeals into a hard gray mass—of nothing. No thoughts, no way inside your head at all. Sorry, the Muse is not coming to visit today. 

For an experienced writer, such temporary setbacks are par for the course. No one is lit by the spark of genius every day. Yet for a novice writer, a few days like that in a row can be a devastating blow to your confidence. You don’t even know if you can write at all. Composing effective office memos, for which everyone at the office praises you, is not adequate preparation for revealing your characters’ inner lives in fiction. Just having a knack for words will not be enough to fortify you for all the ups and downs you’ll face when you’re sitting in a lonely room hammering out the endless details that fill a book. 

Many people have the notion that they can write a novel. They know they are bursting with creativity. They have a terrific premise for a story. And they have just finished another disappointing mystery or romance, and they just know they can do better than that. So why isn’t the world deluged with all of that wonderful promise? To sum up in one word: practice. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told, “I’m writing a novel.” To be polite, I’ll ask what it’s about, and often I’m delighted by how original the idea is. Yet somewhere along the line I always ask one key question: How often do you write? The most common answer is: “When I feel inspired.”

I would like to think that I dwell in an exalted precinct where its denizens tap into  inspiration with great frequency. After all, I am either writing or editing books every single day of my life. I am well aware, though, that true inspiration is a fleeting, elusive minx. I wake up many a morning feeling tired, fog-encrusted, knowing that I am as far away from being creative as the benighted soul composing the daily stock index. In fact, to put a number on it, I think I average two days out of five when I can genuinely say that the Muse is guiding my hand.

How does a fledgling author fight these odds? If you write only two days a week—that is, when you feel inspired—that novel is going to be decades in the making. More likely, you will give up entirely because you are so seldom connected to that pulse of creativity. Make no mistake: life wants to intervene. Writing is hard work, and many days you may not feel adequate to the task. When you’re stumped, when the words just won’t come, you can be easily distracted. If little Harry pops his head in the door and asks if you’d sit with him and watch Sesame Street, you may very well greet him like a conquering savior. “Are you kidding? I’d love to!”

What the first rule of writing? Keep your hand close to the pen. If you’re not having a great day, remember that you must go through the sloughs in order to scale the peaks. Great thoughts about your book will come to you, with great frequency, if you keep the book’s fictional world revolving in your mind. Yet when you are not thinking about it, the pipeline to that creative fountain is dead. You may have a stray thought here and there, but if you added up all those sporadic eureka moments, you probably wouldn’t fill two pages. Writing means deliberate practice. You can encourage the Muse to come visit by taking certain steps. Of course, your decision to take deliberate steps in itself means you are making a commitment to becoming a writer.

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." —Thomas Mann

Copyright @ 2026, John Paine