Stop me if this sounds familiar. You have the whole story planned out and you’re ready to sit down and write but you can’t get past the opening chapter. You write and rewrite and re-rewrite that first page and the moment you think you’re ready to move on you get an idea in your head and you realize you have to start over. By the end of the week you can’t get yourself to come back to the keyboard. You are blocked.
We’ve all struggled with writer’s block every now and then--or most of the time. The key to overcoming it is learning how you get stuck and figuring out a way to overcome it. Today I want to talk about why we get stuck on the first chapter and how to move past it.
Why the first chapter?
The first chapter is important. It’s the first thing a reader sees, and no matter how good the rest of the book is, if the first chapter doesn’t hook the reader they’ll never stick around long enough to read it. Similarly the first chapter can act as a hook for the author. The opening is where we tend to start writing when we don't know if the idea holds water. If you can convince yourself with a stellar opening then you might have the energy to stick with it, right?
The opening also sets the stage for the main conflict. Even if the conflict doesn’t arise in the first chapter, the starting conditions do. And those starting conditions can be crucial for understanding the arc of the characters and plot. Novel readers don’t want to see a character start out one way and end exactly the same. As writers we want to understand the psychology of our characters and know what they will and won’t do right from the get go. So it’s understandable that we want to feel like we have a hold of the beginning before we move forward.
The opening also sets the rules for the story. If you work in fantasy, like I do, you know that the story won’t make sense if you don’t take the time to explain what all these fantasy bullshit words mean. The opening acts as a place for us to explore the rules before they come into question during the conflict.
There’s a lot of pressure in the first chapter both as a selling point of your story, and as an explanation of what is to come. So it makes sense that we would start there, right? Well maybe not.
How do we get stuck?
The simple answer—and the one you’ve probably already heard—is perfectionism. But that answer doesn’t quite feel complete. Yes, a huge factor in getting stuck is wanting our stories to be perfect right away. If something isn’t right then we want to fix it. However this idea that writers are just "insufferable perfectionists" ignores something fundamental about what writing is. Writing is not just the process of putting an idea on a page like an amateur art student copying an image from a picture. It’s a thinking process.
You’ve probably been in the middle of writing an essay for class when you suddenly realized that you were completely wrong about whatever it is you were talking about. That’s because while you were writing you had to really pay attention to your sources and experiences. And because you were paying attention you noticed something you didn’t before. In fiction terms this might mean that after really getting into your character’s head and describing things in the way that she feels, you realize that your nervous, stuttering main character would have no reason to stand up to the big bad evil guy.
Maybe that means you just need to change a small thing, but often times it can mean making a big fundamental change to the world or characters. Those kinds of changes are terrifying. They can leave you paralyzed on the first page trying not to make any mistakes.
Learning to Be Okay with Mistakes
The first thing you have to accept is that you are going to make mistakes. That thinking process that made you realize you needed to rewrite your first chapter three for four times? It’s going to be there in your second chapter, and third, and even your fiftieth chapter. But if you don’t move onto writing that second chapter, you won’t know what you’ll need to change.
It’s impossible to write everything perfectly the first time—no matter how much you’ve outlined—because you will inevitably come across something you didn’t think of. You will have to make a second draft. You may even need a third or even eleventh draft before your
story comes into its final form.
Adding to your word count isn’t the only value you can get out of writing.
You will waste your time writing a couple thousand words that you’re going to delete later, but adding to your word count isn’t the only value you can get out of writing. The thoughts you got out of it are going to have to be enough for you.
How to Cope
You’re not going to miraculously get past your writing hang-ups just from reading an article. But there are ways to cope.
One very obvious solution is not writing your opening first. A plot is conflict and change, it’s the pitch of your story. If your character building is wonky that’s something you can edit later, but if you can’t figure out how the conflict should work then the whole story falls apart. Working out of order can allow you to nail down the major thread of the story and identify what needs to be established beforehand. Think of it as writing the body of the essay before the introduction.
If you feel like you need to get a better grasp on character interactions or the setting or how the world works, try writing something short. This can be connected to your project, like a character study or scene that doesn’t appear in the story, but it shouldn’t be a scene in your story. By making this distinction you can allow yourself to ignore the hassle of connecting it to what you’ve written and allow yourself to explore and be open to new ideas. Even if it’s not connected to your story at all, the writing itself can also help you loosen up and think of scenes and settings you might not have before.
For newer writers, who are anxious to get feedback: don’t be afraid to explain yourself in an author’s note. If you’re getting a critique online or from a friend, they may not have the time to read through your whole draft and you may not even have it done yet. So an author’s note can help you explain where the scene is coming from and where it’s going so that the reader can just focus on giving you relevant criticism. There’s nothing worse than getting a draft back that has a dozen notes asking questions that get answered somewhere else in your manuscript, so do your best to explain things like that upfront. Remember that surprises are for beta readers, not critique partners.
You will never completely overcome writer's block, but hopefully some of these tips, and a better understanding of why you're getting stuck, will help you keep climbing.
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