In the small amount of time since I started taking writing more seriously than ever in the past, I’ve come to loathe nothing more than page one.
Not so much the blank page itself, but what I put on it. Because more often than not, the first few jabs at a beginning aren’t beginnings at all. They’re false starts.
False starts are an inevitable evil in the entire writing process. Perhaps there are people out there who enjoy false starts, that feeling of starting and striking and starting all over again, the way some people enjoy loose bowel movements or the cries of a hungry puppy.
“Every false start is a stepping stone to something great,” writers/entrepreneurs/life coaches/strangers on the Internet say soothingly, their words right-justified within stock footage that looks appropriately Zen. “How can you recognize success until you have failed numerous times?”
Screw that. Whenever I realize that the article I’ve started isn’t working, I don’t laugh and say, “Time to commemorate another moment in my growth as a writer!” I’m too busy fighting the urge to gouge myself in the eyelids.
“Can’t every word I write already be perfect?” I ask the universe. In return, the universe gives me another sentence that ends in a conjunctive.
The inevitable evil
I’ve accumulated thousands of false starts since I first began writing. They litter the wastelands of my digital history, these shriveled, unrealized ghosts of stories trapped in floppy disks, CDs, USB drives and portable hard drives formatted in something incompatible. My compulsion to start on a fresh page every single time resulted in document names like “StoryV1.2” “Story 1.2.1” or “StoryV2.45” as though I were writing a new operating system, not a YA fantasy that would never get off the ground.
Most come from stories that never made it beyond infancy, though now they start to come from features. Every piece of writing I’ve finished, which is not a remarkable number, sits atop a landfill of broken beginnings and dead ends. The ratio is somewhat akin to this:
Finished writing IS TO landfill of doom AS tip of iceberg IS TO the rest of the scary shit beneath the water, the kind that sunk the Titanic and everything
Here, I speak specifically of articles I’ve been commissioned to write. The abandonment of longer stories at the 20 or 30,000 word mark, or even the 50,000 word mark, are another topic entirely.
These days I write most of my drafts on paper first, but that hasn’t helped reduce the false starts. On the contrary – it’s helped highlight them more, Some drafts begin only after 5-6 pages of angry strikethroughs and supportive notes to self (ex. “Why are you finding it difficult to write about dead celebrities?”). Some drafts will hit the 1000-word count before I realize that I’ve written myself into a corner, the angle of my story morphing into a geometric shape of its own. Sometimes I have to go back to the beginning; take it somewhere else, somewhere on the opposite side of where I was, and salvage what I can.
Page one is supposed to suck
If we’re being honest, one of the main reasons I despise false starts is that they’re unavoidable. They are part of the work that goes into writing. Every writer goes through false starts, a fact that should be more comforting than it is. Of course, if you work in a high-pressure writing environment – the news, digital media, advertising – then the aggressive deadlines tend to force your hand more than, say, a novelist with a deadline a few years from now, and presumably the false starts are dealt with more ruthlessly.
But another more important reason: false starts represent the first imperfect translations of whatever nugget of an idea inspired us in the first place. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his essay One Hundred False Starts, describes the difference between the pleasure of an idea and the horror of actually writing it down: “[Hunches] were opium eater’s illusions, vanishing with the smoke of the pipe…. The pleasure of thinking about them was the exact equivalent of having accomplished them. It is the six-page, ten-page, thirty-page globs of paper that grieve me professionally, like unsuccessful oil shafts; they represent my false starts.”
False starts feel like solitary failures because writers don’t usually make them public. False starts are a writer’s shame. They are intimate mistakes that no one beyond a trusted circle of editors and beta readers is meant to see. We all want our readers to think the best of us, and to read the best of us. YA author Keira Cass once told me that she had to gut the final book of her Selection trilogy, The One, twice. I wonder what it looked like when she first began, but I doubt those pages will see the light of day.
I have no such qualms. Then again, my stakes are much smaller than “finale of a bestselling YA trilogy.”
A walkthrough of false starts
Recently I was tasked to write an article about living fast and dying young — “namely your thoughts on drugs, sex, and drinking,” my editor explained. I thought this article would be to easier to write than it actually was. I went through the standard process of outlining an article – freeform brainstorming, then a rough outline on index cards – and flexed my fingers for what should have been smooth sailing ahead.
The experience was more like trying to draw blood from a live eel.
Here are some of the false starts that I went through before getting to a point where I could actually…make my point.
1
Every year at the major award ceremonies in Hollywood, a memoriam is showcased to pay tribute to those who have gone before. And every year, there is a face – or two, or more – that we never expected to see. Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, and _____ [NOTE: it was left underlined to fill in with a name later] are just some of the latest in a long history of tragic deaths come too soon. The signs may have been as loud as a Vegas sign: “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said no, no, no.” Or they may have simmered beneath the surface of pleasant waters, like Cory Monteith. Either way, the message is clear: life is short, so live it to the fullest.
I’ll have you know that passage was just as excruciating typing that out as it probably was for you to read. This type of opening would work only if I were decked out in my blackest, most somber dress and actually at the Oscars to deliver this overwrought spiel with all the restrained drama I can muster, but not for any other purpose.
What’s the opposite of stuffy and overbearing? Teen slang. Ooh, YOLO. Let’s talk about YOLO.
2
There are over 22 million photos tagged “YOLO” on Instagram.
In just a few years, the phrase ascended to the forefront of young adult vernacular as swiftly as heartburn, and with similarly painful results. Thanks to the millenial tendency to document every change of expression, we have ample evidence of YOLO preceding
I probably stopped mid-sentence because I had fallen asleep to my own words.
3
There are over 22 million photos tagged “YOLO” on Instagram. Depending on how old you are and/or what time you go to bed at night, the phrase — an acronym for “You Only Live Once” and a common preface to the type of activity you wouldn’t want ending up on Facebook — triggers a wide range of reactions, from vindication to scorn. Vindication, because for the millenial generation, YOLO serves as both rallying cry and modern prayer, excusing away future misbehaviors in two short syllables. Scorn, because those who see beyond the filtered glamour of youth know better. Also, it sounds goofy. Have you ever used it without an ironic eye roll?
Wink, nudge! Hey, look how I’m so in with the times. I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom! This paragraph did actually lead to more text, about half the word count, but I had to stop when I realized it was taking too long to get to my main point about living fast and dying young. The tone of it was strained cheekiness, mixed with musty facts and a sort of matronly gravity that threatened to take over if I didn’t try to lighten the mood. Not exactly compelling stuff. It had to be completely scrapped.
Quick, find something compelling. It has to be recent and young and related to the theme. Has any celebrity said something related to this? Oh, Lana! Lana del Rey. She’s always good for a ruckus.
4
“I wish I was dead already.”
Those 6 words that Lana del Rey uttered in an interview with The Guardian made headlines,
This sounds like the lead-in to a sensational Daily Mail article. In other words, ABORT. ABORT NOW.
5
Live fast, die young, work hard, have fun.
When it comes to the 6-word tribute to an early glamorous death, look no further than singer Lana del Rey. She may not have coined the phrase — its earliest prototypes date back to the late 17th century, though it was immortalized in pop culture by actor James Dean — but she is its most current and vocal champion. In June, she got even more directly to the point, telling The Guardian, “I wish I was dead already.”
Okay, we’re getting somewhere. The topic is current, the lead-in specific and straight to the theme. Except the tribute is 8 words, not 6. D’oh. And the information lacks organization. But this is promising. Removing the focus from the more abstract YOLO to Lana – a person I’m actually interested in and who has her own share of controversy – has effectively removed the dry dourness of previous efforts.
6
“Live fast, die young, be wild, have fun.”
Love her or hate her, Lana del Rey knows how to make something sound good. When the brooding singer isn’t pouting through fantasies of an early demise into a microphone, she’s leaving no room for interpretation in the press. In a June interview with The Guardian, she intoned, “I wish I was dead already.”
Those 6 words made national headlines, overshadowing the news she was actually there to promote: the launch of Ultraviolence, her second album. “Is this a cry for help?” some asked, citing her tendency to sing about bad boys, bad substances, and taking her body to no-good parts of town. They feared for del Rey’s entry into the 27 Club, a dubious honor bestowed on young, troubled celebrities who died at the age of 27 (their fears became unfounded when del Rey turned 28 this summer).
This is the beginning that I ultimately sent with the rest of the article, because it’s the only that carried through to the end. Is it the best, most amazing beginning I could have written? At some point, you have to close the book and consider the job done. Everything is a work in progress. Whether it retains this form remains to be seen, but I’m happy with how it turned out – even if it took more than 5 false starts to get there.
And then?
I share these false starts primarily because it’s something I wish more writers did. For all that is said about writing — that it’s hard, that beginnings are hardest, that revisions are the lifeblood of the story and an editor is its high priestess — it’s different when the writing itself is demystified. We have a tendency to worship our favorite authors, to mark their turns of phrases as sacred, that to imagine them writing shitty sentences is a near-impossible task.
I think that’s one of the reasons we’re so hard on ourselves and never get past page one – because we can’t imagine ourselves reaching such vaulted heights, because we can’t forgive ourselves the suckage, because going back and starting over, again and again, until we find the words that feel right under our pen, is exhausting.
But it’s something we have to do, because page one is supposed to suck. Because false starts are part of the job. False starts are how you warm up.
And the only way to get over them is to write through them, because the zen-loving writers/entrepreneurs/strangers on the Internet are right: at some point, you will end up where you are trying to go, one stepping stone at a time. Like the tip of the iceberg, you need all that scary stuff lurking beneath the surface, keeping you buoyant, your head above water, closer and closer to the light.
Featured image is copyright Zara Gonzalez. Used with permission via Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
