Salutations!

     Greetings, internet!  Let me inaugurate my first writing blog with a fond hello to all the writers, artists, hopefuls, and to-bes out there!  It’s hard to collect my thoughts for this post, but I think it’s appropriate to ring in the blog with an entry about beginnings—specifically, a writer’s beginnings.

     I know that there are a lot of aspiring writers out there--people who desire to set pen to paper and pour their souls out to the world--and that many of them are afraid to do so.

     It's natural to be afraid.  Really!  We all got scared, especially when facing down something so personal--there is no part of writing that isn't, honestly, because the art of the written word is derived from us and us alone.  We take our thoughts, our feelings, characters we become attached to, storylines we can't live without, and we throw it out at the world, hoping it will strike someone's fancy, and that our audience will come to us with affection in their eyes rather than disgust.  I've been writing novels since I was nine, and I'm still afraid.  So let me tell you why you don't have to be.

     I was not afraid when I was nine, not of anything.  I was top of my class, I loved books, and damn it, I was going to be a famous author if it killed me.  For Christmas I received a little green notebook with a few pretty flowers on the cover and said, "The time is now."  I wrote my first novel over the course of maybe six months, and I thought it was amazing.

     I typed it up on the computer, single-spaced, unformatted, with space-bar indents and a crude understanding of all things grammar--they don't teach that in school like they used to, I'm told. It totaled out at ten or twelve chapters, coming to forty-two pages in all; the main character was literally myself, only a superhero, and all her supports were direct copies of my best friends and our pets, also superheroes.  The villains were bullies from school who had no motive except to fuck up my life who somehow woke up a dragon sleeping under the school, which the protagonist befriended by pulling a thorn out of its foot, and in the end all of the bullies were frozen in blocks of ice and carted off by the police while the heroes basked in the glow of the commoners' praise.

     Oh, and in the middle, there was a three-page digression where the protagonist discovered a new species of rainbow-colored weasel and set them to breed for the sake of science.  Beautiful writing right there, just wonderful.

     Okay, so I'm sure you're asking why I'm telling you this right now.  Do I just want to ramble about a scrapped story?  No.  No, that's not it.  So what's the point?  The point is, it.  Sucked.  Ass.  And I didn't die!

     As I started to realize how far from ready it was for the public eye, I was frustrated, yes, and I wanted to make it perfect, only I didn't yet possess the skill set.  Young, undisciplined, and a little put off, I didn't dwell too long.  Recognizing my limits, I dutifully filed it away on a flash drive and promised to be back for it later, then moved on to the next thing, absolutely certain that it would be a thousand times better.  I've tried to come back several times but, ultimately, if it will ever be worth reviving, it hasn't been yet.  That's okay.  I failed, and that's okay.  Better than okay, it was what I needed!  I can learn from that, I can look at everything I did wrong and I can say, "I won't do that again," because I know, first-hand, that it doesn't work, and there's no authority to spite in trying.  There's only me.

     My point here is; start.  Whatever it is, no matter how old you are, how much you've read, what you want to accomplish, how complicated your story is--start.  Once you begin, you'll find it's hard to stop.  As a stone rolls down a hill, it gathers momentum, and the more momentum available, the more force it takes to halt the object in motion.  Our brains are wired to be more likely to finish something if we start it, and we're more likely to learn from our own fuck-ups than from someone else's.  Skill, finesse, experience, they're all important, but you will never have them if you don't put pen to paper and write.  Write, finish, and learn.

     Seven and a half years later, and the very worst thing that first, awful, despicable manuscript gave me is something to laugh at when there's nothing else to think about.  Three pages of rainbow-colored weasels?  What was nine-year-old me on?

     You don't need to be perfect the first time.  No, let me rephrase that; you will not be perfect the first time, but that's what the revising and editing steps are for!  That's what practice is about!  It's why you read these kinds of articles in the first place!  So go pick up a notebook or open a word processor, and start honing your skill.  You don't have to be afraid--more importantly, you don't have to let your fears consume you.  The only way to finish is to start, and the only way to start is to start.  So start!  There's no one to impede you but yourself.

     To beginnings!