Hi! This is Good Ideas, a newsletter about writing, creativity, and craft (and sometimes animals), with weekly prompts designed to help you make progress in your current writing project. If you’re not working on something already, the prompts will help you start.
Greetings, writers—
The week before last I got a text from one of my former students: I think I have a novel in me and I sorta was hoping to run the architecture by you.
I was glad to hear from her and excited that she was thinking about a novel, but my first thought might’ve been something along the lines of architecture, scmharchitecture—the trick is in the writing, in the sitting down and doing it. You can have a great idea that goes nowhere or a crappy idea that morphs into something magical; it’s all in the execution.
I was going to prove this to you, right now, by talking about how Milan Kundera began The Unbearable Lightness of Being with only the gesture of a woman’s hand to guide him, and how Geoffrey Wolff started The Age of Consent knowing only that a girl would dive into a too-shallow pool. But these are 25-year-old memories, and it turns out that Google won’t prove me right on either one of them. (Kundera’s novel Immortality literally begins with a woman waving, but was that image the genesis of the story? And if The Age of Consent was loosely based on Henry James’s 1897 novel, What Maisie Knew, can the girl on the diving board truly have come first?)
But my failed examples don’t matter: the truth holds. You can begin a novel with anything. It’s where you take it that matters.
As my former student and I talked about her idea, and how she might get back into writing after years of not-writing, I was thinking about this Substack and the advice it occasionally dispenses. How did what I was telling her compare to what I’ve written here on Good Ideas? What advice came to mind first when talking to someone embarking on the exciting but daunting task of writing, in my student’s case, a semi-autobiographical novel with fantasy elements?
Here are three things I told her:
Start by writing the scenes you know. It’s okay if some are in the beginning and some are at the end; later you can string them together. Just start with stuff that you can see, that you can write quickly. For one thing, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment. For another, you’re starting to build the book’s foundation.
Matt Bell, Substacker, novelists and author of the eminently sane writing guide Refuse to be Done, calls this strategy “writing the islands.”
Instead of writing scene after scene in order (and then and then and then) write the big scenes you already know, no matter how far off they seem. Once those scenes exist on the page, the task then becomes writing between these known destinations, creating bridges to connect these islands.
The islands will need to be revised by the time you arrive at them again, once you know what else happens, but you're going to revise everything anyway. Don't let not knowing exactly what goes into a scene keep you from writing it.
Set a very low writing bar, so that you can regularly clear it. Clearing = winning, and winning is fun. Plus, it’s highly motivating: success, as they say, breeds success. If you tell yourself you’re only going to write eight minutes a day, you really have no excuse not to do it.
Here’s Matt Bell again:
Sometimes my daily goal is only a single sentence, because that’s all I can manage with my schedule, but I try never to go a day without looking at the book, which seems to keep my subconscious working on it.
I should do this. We all should do this! As journalist Chip Scanlan of Chip’s Writing Lessons puts it, “Never a day without a line.”
And finally, I said to her:
Maybe don’t think of yourself as the main character, even in a novel based on your life. Because it can be hard for us to see ourselves clearly, autobiographical characters sometimes seem like the least vivid characters in a story. And it can be tough to put “ourselves” (even fictionalized versions thereof) into the kinds of trouble that our characters probably ought to get into in order to make our stories satisfyingly dramatic. Borrow personality/predilections/attributes/stories from someone you know. (But consider “pulping” this character so your friend/cousin/acquaintance doesn’t take umbrage.)
I know my former student has already written at least one of her story islands, so good on her.
I also know that I’ve beaten the low expectations drum many times here on Good Ideas. But I stand by that piece of advice more than any other. Because at the beginning of any project, your job is just to keep going.
P.S. My friend Robin just wrote a funny post about creativity and its frustrations and why her spirit animal is Sesame Street puppet Don Music.
This island advice is so good. I always get stuck at boring bridges, so I should write what I want to write first.