How to Start a Novel
Keep a notebook, for all your novel ideas.
One of my clients has just begun to write her first novel. The story had been brewing inside her for a few years, but for sundry reasons, many of which may be familiar to you if you heard them, she had talked herself out of writing it. Until now. Now she’s ready.
“So, how do I start?” she asked me.
Any way you can, I thought but didn’t say because I didn’t want to sound flip. But I stand behind the sentiment. However you begin, get words down on the page.
Even with this low stakes blog post, I’d been putting off writing it all morning because I didn’t know how it should begin. Should I start it with a reference to Joan Didion’s essay, On Keeping a Notebook? Should I start by emphasizing the importance of embracing the messiness when kicking off a creative project? Because I didn’t know how to start, I didn’t. Instead, I returned texts and emails and made a hotel reservation for a trip in July, all things I needed to do but could have done after writing. Finally, I opened a blank document on my computer. An expanse of white space loomed before me. “Just write a sentence, like you’re talking to a friend,” I told myself. “Just start writing.”
In talking with my client about how she should start writing her novel, it came to light that she has a particularly formal relationship with her computer. It has something to do with how ceremonially the black letters appear across the page as she types, but when she opens a blank document, it signals to her that she must write well and with exactitude. She’s an extraordinarily skilled writer, so mostly she does this. She employs language, syntax, and grammar at an extremely high level. No wonder then that the idea of simply popping open a new file on her computer to type up an entire novel feels daunting. If you’re accustomed to producing impeccable writing, how on earth do you decide the perfect place to begin an 80,000-word novel? How do you decide the first scene, the first sentence, the first word? What if you choose… wrong?
I have some thoughts on this. First, of course, you will inevitably choose the “wrong” opening sentence the first time around, so free yourself of any other expectation. But also, free yourself of all of it. Free yourself of good sentence structure and perfect word choice. Free yourself of writing in scene or even in paragraph form. In fact, free yourself of your computer.
“Why don’t you start with a notebook?” I suggested to my client. “Designate a notebook for only the novel. In the notebook, write down all your ideas—on story, character, scene, theme, imagery, and real life observations that may work their way in. Let it be as messy, disorganized, and fragmented as it needs to be to receive all the thoughts in your head.”
The strategy here is to provide a bridge or a middle ground between the ideas whirling around in your head and how those thoughts will eventually become formally organized and presented in print. In a notebook, in your own handwriting, you are free to scribble. You can create lists of potential scenes, jot down snippets of dialogue, dash off fragments on theme. You can circle certain ideas that seem important and even draw entire diagrams. I love a good bubble map—for character development, plot, setting, whatever! I don’t know how to make a bubble map on a computer, so… bring on the notebook!
Be free in your notebook. Be messy. Write sideways, write illegibly, write badly. Just write. The story must find its way out of your head and onto the page, any way it can. A notebook provides a way.
That said, don’t feel as though you must limit yourself to a notebook. Use a corkboard and 3x5 cards. Use Scrivener if that works for you. Use a combination of notebook, cards, computer, and cocktail napkins. Just write down words. Also, you do not need to decide when it’s time to close the notebook and transfer your attention fully to your laptop. You can use both interchangeably! Move back and forth fluidly as long as the process serves you. If it works for you, it works. If you’re putting words to the page, you’re writing your novel.
Didion used her notebook in a different way, or so she tells us in her essay, On Keeping a Notebook. She marked down observations, imaginations, reflections, moments, feelings—not necessarily ideas for a particular novel, although one of her thoughts perhaps spurred an entire book. Still, what I’m talking about here and what she explores in her piece have aspects in common. Didion writes—
We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.
“With meaning only for its maker.” Keep that in mind and run wild and loose in that notebook of yours.
Immediately following our conversation, my client went out and purchased a notebook. In it, she’s been scribbling ideas and notes for her novel for a few weeks. Now, she’s ready to open that blank document on her computer and start the first draft of her first novel. She’s on her way.