Where should I begin the story?

It’s not a question I have to ask myself very often when I’m writing. Even when I write a book out of order—which is almost always—there usually comes a point at which I think of an idea for a chapter (or a paragraph, or a single sentence) and immediately know that’s how the book should start. So, I’m a little surprised at how hard it’s been to decide on the topic for my first blog post.

For a while, I planned to write something about my debut novel—if only for the fact that its title (The Beginning) seemed apt. While it’s the first book I’ve published, though, it’s far from the first I started writing. If you ignore the necessity of extensive editing, it’s not even the first book I finished. Nor is it the second. I’m not even sure it’s the third. (Maybe the fourth? Fifth? I lose track.)

So, instead, I decided to go back to the first words I can ever recall writing “for fun” as I described all non-school-related writing back then (though there were plenty of times at which the word “fun” probably could have been replaced by “necessity” or “near-compulsion”).

“Sometimes, a person just does not want to read a sad book.”

That’s what I wrote.
There was more. Even on that first day, I think I wrote several paragraphs, but those first few words are all I remember clearly. They were scrawled across the top of a page in a notebook that was probably otherwise filled with calculus formulas or chemistry equations.

It was spring semester of my third year of college. Back then, I had no time set aside for outlining, writing, and revising. I had no journals dedicated to jotting down my own thoughts or plotting fictional worlds. I did have books, though. Lots of them. Written by other people. Purchased at the now-closed bookstore in the mall in my college town, or at the Barnes and Noble across the street, or at the tiny shop on the other side of town where I exchanged the ones I’d already read for other used books.

The night before the multi-paragraph rant about sad books, I had fallen asleep reading what was, to the best of my recollection, a beautifully written but horrifically sad novel, and awakened teary-eyed from crying in my sleep. I was determined (for a few minutes, at least) that I would start writing my own books so I would never again risk stumbling upon one so unexpectedly heartbreaking.

That plan didn’t last long. Knowing how obsessively I was reading back then, I had probably bought and read something new by the end of that week, but the idea of writing what I wanted to write instead of just reading other people’s words seems to have planted itself in my mind that day.

That single sentence at the top of one page of a school notebook became about ten chapters of a novel and a loose outline of what someday might still become a completed story. I abandoned my work on that book (temporarily, perhaps) in favor of another idea, then another, then about a dozen more in the ten-plus years between that first sentence and publishing my first novel.

There will be more on those ten-plus in-between years in future posts, I’m sure.