As long suffering TOA readers know, I'm a major advocate for rules of thumb, regularly collecting quotes or phrases to guide my various self-improvement projects. I often catch these ideas drifting through my mind right as I'm about to make an error. For example, just yesterday I reminded myself one thing at a time when I realized a second topic had bubbled to the surface of a work email. And of course, at some point on every run I'll recall lean forward, choppy strides, usually at the exact moment I sense my shoulders tilting back, the clearest signal that my technique is drifting away from the standard.
In terms of writing, I've long thought when an ending appears, grab it was my best rule of thumb. I understand many writers wrestle with endings, their ceaseless struggle to pin down the muse locked in fruitless grappling, so I felt fortunate to have the assurance that if I chose to keep going, I would win by decision, and reach the finish line. As the old saying goes, it's always the last thing, but it doesn't come until the end.
But in the early days of The Great Lockdown, I discovered a new foe - The Beginning. The beginning had never been a problem before, mostly because even in my most prolific days I gave myself two to four weeks of lead time for each post. The opening line probably never came easy, but it never seemed like a problem. I was like the gazelle living in the land without cheetahs - it never occurred to me to worry about a lack of speed.
I turned to my alumni network but, alas, I learned that Internet University has no graduates in the field of Getting Started - in fact, the internet seems to have a special attraction for procrastinators. It seemed like the writers who can do it should be sponsored by Nike because they just do it, and have no insight into their own gift. There is a common extension of this problem when these naturals still try to explain their ability, like the baseball players who talk about seeing the ball before hitting it (science says it is impossible to 'see' the ball - it means the skill is different than the explanation, perhaps unexplainable, not that these players are unskilled). On the other hand, people who can't just get started are given the blanket diagnosis "writer's block" and prescribed a random assortment of remedies including going for a long walk, going for a short walk, or playing with toys.
It's possible I'm in denial, maybe I'm just one prompt-a-day calendar away from solving my problem, but I always felt that my issue was a little different. I knew what I wanted to do, I just couldn't get my word count from zero to one. My situation resembled more of a functional issue, like an office worker who found his tires slashed during lunch break. I knew what I wanted to do - call the police, fix the tires, cancel my next meeting - I just didn't know what to do first.
I eventually went back to the source, and dug out another winner - just say the most important sentence first. It's great advice (and by the way, combining it with when an ending appears, grab it is an unassailable Twitter strategy). The problem I've had with writing is my set of ideas about writing - I should have an intro sentence or paragraph, there should be a buildup of arguments or ideas (preferably in threes), I should acknowledge other points of view. In other words, my recurring problem is worrying about ornaments before I have the tree. It's not like I should or shouldn't do any of those things, but decorations go across leaves, petals, and branches. The writer who worries about any of that before planting the seed of the idea is as crazy as the writer who ends the piece with the first thing that popped into his head.
