Write With Me Club: January

The theme this month was beginnings

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So here we are on the other side of my Twelve Days of Christmas Writing Advice series. I hope you enjoyed all those essays from bestselling authors as much as I did. Remember, members of White Ink will find these posts in my archive, so you can go back to them whenever you need to, or if you missed any, you can always catch up.

Free subscribers who missed this brilliant series (a very warm welcome to this week’s news subscribers by the way, there are a lot of you!) can find them in my archive by upgrading.

Of course, the other thing that members of White Ink have access to is my Write With Me Club, my monthly online creative writing group, and last week we had our first meeting of 2024.

The form this hour-long meeting takes is:

• a catch up chat at the beginning

• a themed talk each month

• an exercise to take away with you

• then an ‘ask me anything’ Q&A at the end where we can discuss your work-in-progress and any areas where you are stuck and I can set you accountability targets should you so wish.

It was unfortunate for some of you that this month’s fell on New Year’s Day. I know it can be a busy time over the festive period and so I’ve put together this post so you can find out what you missed, and it’s a bit of a catch up for those who were there. See it as me taking notes for you! The post including the exercise was getting a bit long, so tomorrow I’ll send out the exercise with some bonus content for White Ink members too.

So to kick us off in 2024, January’s theme was beginnings.

It seemed an obvious one really, but then, the more I thought about it, the less obvious it became. For example, beginnings mean different things to different people. Are we talking about the beginning for the reader? The first chapter, or the prologue? And in that case does ‘beginnings’ as a theme mean the point at which we decide to start the story? Or perhaps beginnings applies to the writer, the first person, after all, who is going to bear witness to this story appearing on the page?

I searched for some inspiration from other writers, and some of the quotes I found explored many of these different types of beginnings. So let’s have a recap and take a look at some of them we discussed in the group.

Here, first of all is a quote from Stephen King:

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

I don’t think there is a writer alive who does not identify with this quote. Beginnings, whether you are a newbie or a bestseller, are always terrifying, and I think this is a thought worth holding onto because sometimes it is that fear that may keep you away from the page – thinking it is only you who feels it. Reader, it is not.

I talked with the group about how I overcome (note: overcome not overcame) my fear of the blank page. Two thoughts always occur to me: Firstly, getting hit by a bus and dying before I have chance to write the blinking thing would make me very annoyed with myself indeed. Ok, that one might be a bit dramatic, but it’s true, and then secondly, if I just bring my idea into existence, it is there and it will never not be there. Once it’s there I can edit it and I can make it good, but I can’t edit a blank page.

I talked about the diary that John Steinbeck kept as he was writing The Grapes of Wrath, and I mentioned an essay in my archive which you can find here. (You will also find in this essay what Kazuo Ishiguro told us about his own secret of writing a first draft, as mentioned in our group.)

In this diary, John Steinbeck writes how agonising the process of writing this novel was, how he felt it was all complete rubbish, how he would never finish it – basically, all the same neuroses we all feel, and if one of the great American novelists felt this way, then I think we can all cut ourselves a bit of slack, right?

Here’s another quote on beginnings, this time from Plato:

“The beginning is the most important part.”

Yes, it’s true, but again, I ask, for who? On writing courses students are piled with pressure about how brilliant that first chapter must be to grab the attention of the agent, the editor, the reader. ‘You’ve only got one chance!’ they tell you. And yes, this is true, but don’t you think that might feel a bit paralysing? Have these tutors ever heard of writers block?!

There is another way of looking at this, the beginning is the most important part — for the writer. After all, you are the person who has to birth the book. When I work, I can never sit down in front of my keyboard until I find that way into my story, my own inspiration. I liken it to having a tangled ball of wool and searching for that loose end so that I can start unravelling the story in some kind of uniform way. And once I’ve got that, I’m away. But I can’t force it, it has to come naturally, I have to walk around, wash up, drive, shower, hoover, do all these daily tasks, all the time thinking, thinking, thinking, until the form of the narrative comes to me and almost fizzes out of my fingertips onto the page. Then I don’t stop writing.

So yes, beginnings are important.

Here’s another quote from Ernest Hemingway about beginning your work:

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

Now I think this is very good – and perhaps not wholly unsurprising – advice from Hemingway, but not because I’m an alcoholic, but because I understand that what he was saying was lose your inhibitions, let go of that inner critic, stop judging the words you put down on the page and just get them down. If it happens that having a glass or two of wine helps you with this, then go ahead (although always drink responsibly). But the wider point is that your first draft is meant to be messy – see again that essay I’ve linked to above featuring advice from Kazuo Ishiguro. And also see Victoria Smith’s essay for the Twelve Days of Christmas Writing Advice, and AJ Gnuse’s essay for the fiction Twelve Days of Christmas Writing Advice.

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Here’s a quote from Graham Greene:

“A story has no beginning or end, arbitrarily one can choose that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

I want to discuss this with you in more detail another time – we explored it a little in the group. But what does this mean to me? Well,