Making the Beginning WORK

(Note: this post was composed about a month ago and lost in the deep dark depths of my harddrive.)

The beginning of anything is often the hardest: you have to overcome the intertia of not doing whatever it is you're about to start, and often you can be plagued by doubt or fear. What if I do it wrong? Can I actually do this? What will people think?

I've been writing for long enough now that beginning a new draft doesn't scare me so much any more. Where I used to prefer editing to drafting (my perfectionism was happy that it finally got a chance to make things RIGHT!), I now enjoy the freedom that drafting involves; it doesn't MATTER if I get it wrong, as long as I'm having fun :o)

That doesn't mean that beginnings are perfectly easy, though - they're just difficult in a different sense. As the Twitter peeps among you might have seen, I'm editing Sanctuary right now. Sanctuary is a YA fantasy, and I drafted a tentative blurb/query for it yesterday:

Moving halfway across Australia to Nowra, capital of nowhere, is the worst thing to ever happen to Edge. Three months on, she has no friends, the world’s most horrible bedroom, and no one to celebrate her fourteenth birthday with. Maybe that’s why she starts hallucinating that the butterfly is talking to her – though her dog seems to think the fairy is real enough.

Sure, finding out she’s a Traveller, able to cross between worlds to Sanctuary, home of the fairies, is a definite bonus. Making a new friend and realising that Sanctuary might be everything she misses from home is pretty great, too. But then the shadows appear, ominous and blacker than black. Edge is determined to find out where they’re coming from – until she’s dragged from Sanctuary into the land of death and almost killed by them. Now Edge must decide if her new home is something worth fighting for – or if, you know, running away to the circus might be the saner option.

But I'm editing! How does this relate to beginnings? Because it's in edits that beginnings are now brain-pretzeling difficult. The internet is full of really good advice about how to begin your story: begin in the middle of the action, show your character's voice, avoid excessive backstory, avoid shock-for-the-sake-of-shock lines, show your conflict, and so forth. However, while this advice is all great an necessary, it's not what I'm struggling with (though, granted, there is currently ALL THE BACKSTORY eating up my first page, which is not so good >.<). What I'm struggling with is something that not a lot of people seem to talk about: the themes.

See, the first draft of Sanctuary ended REALLY WELL. I'm completely in love with the last handful of lines, and they never fail to generate that 'Awww!' feeling, which is what I want. But in order for them to work, they have to be set up in the beginning.

The beginning has an epic amount of work to do: it has to hook the reader, establish the action, set the scene, introduce the plot conflict - and it also has to introduce the thematic conflict. It has to give a taste of what's going to matter in the story, what the MC's main drive is, what they're fighting for. And that, right now, is what I'm struggling with.

The More You Know...

So, I was catching up on my blog reading the other day and came across this post by Natalie Whipple - Have You Seen My Confidence Lately? It Ran Off. I read it, and went - wow, have I been there. The last year-and-a-bit has been one big long episode of I-have-no-confidence. Other than the fact that I was sick for at least 3/4 of last year, which seriously screwed with my mental abilities, for some reason, finishing Sanctuary was like holding up a metal rod to the Electrical Storm of Doubt.

Which is stupid, because Sanctuary was the easiest book I've ever written - less than 3 months, start to finish, which for me is pretty jolly awesome. Especially since I had a sisterous wedding and started working full time in the middle of that.

But for some bizarre reason, that's kind of WHY I started freaking out over writing. After writing a book that was so easy, all of a sudden everything else I tried to write seemed hard. Yeah, okay, I was spiralling into health-induced depression too, but it was more than that. It was like I developed this fear that if something was hard to write, it must be awful - and since everything was hard to write, clearly everything I was writing was awful.

So I didn't. And then what with dealing with the health issues and whatnot, by the time I had *brain* again to start writing, I felt like I was back at the very beginning again, trying to convince myself that I really truly could write a first draft, and that no, it didn't matter if it was terrible (only it did, because by now, I'd totally failed at my first attempt to revise Jesscapades too, which added to everything else the lingering suspicion that I'd never actually be able to fix any of my drafts).

Slowly, slooooooowly, I got back into the swing of things, and started rewriting Jesscapades. And then I went and decided to grow a parasitical minion inside my own body, which sapped all my available brainpower :P

But the other day, I came across this awesome wiki article. I can't remember how I stumbled on it, but it really hit the spot, and although it's an appeal to the logic circuits rather than the emotional centre, I found it really quite comforting. It's about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which in essence boils down to that lovely pithy truism, "The more you know, the more you know you don't know." I.e., the more proficient you become at something, the more likely you are to think you suck, because you assume EVERYONE has that base level of proficiency, and you can see full well just how far you fall short of perfect.

How is that comforting? Well, it means that if I'm doubting my ability, I'm objectively speaking more likely to actually be competent in that area. If I'm sailing along thinking everything is fantastic and that I am amazing, it's most likely that I simply don't realise just how crap I am. So doubt is awesome, because it means we're on the right track. As long as we don't let it overcome us, of course.

And you know what? I think I actually have improved. I picked up Jesscapades again last night, because I'm determined to fix the thing by hook or by crook... And, yes, there's stuff that still doesn't work - but there are things that do. I haven't fixed all the problems - but I've fixed some.

So next time you start feeling dismal about your own work - remember to take a break, and read about the Dunning-Kruger effect *grin*