Beginnings Aren't the Hardest Part

I've read a lot of writing advice in my day. Sometimes I just scour the Internet, pretending I'm actually doing work, when in reality, I'm just reading what other people have to say about writing. And despite being widely heralded as the greatest authors of all time, most of their advice can be boiled down to the Nike logo: "Just do it." While that's plenty inspiring, it does not change the blank Word document staring at me while I set up my work space at Starbucks. Here I set out my pens, here I flip my notebook to a blank page. Plug my headphones into my ears and scroll through my thousands of songs to find the right album to fit what I'm writing today. Check Facebook. Check Twitter. Check this blog. Play a Facebook game or two. Take a sip of my overpriced but delicious coffee. Watch kids outside play in the rain.

And lo, I have still not Just Do(ne) It.

A lot of this writing advice centers around beginnings. They say beginnings are the hardest part. I can only partially agree with this, because the lazy, work-avoiding part of me wants to do everything but write. I can sit around in my own brain for hours and hours, thinking up stories, but when it comes down to beginning, I'm just lazy. It's not that it's hard. It's that I'm being a baby.

If you are reading this, I'm pretty sure you're just being a baby. You should be writing right now, banging out that NaNoWriMo 2011 word count. Beginning isn't the hardest part. Beginning is the easiest, but we want our masterpieces to just come to us, fully formed, without any work from ourselves. Beginning may be scary and everything you start out doing may turn out to be utter crap, but, to quote another athletic adage, "No matter how slow you go, you're still lapping everybody on the couch."

I hope my procrastination was sufficiently inspiring. I'm off to actually work now.

Origin Story

Unfortunately, I am not a superhero. This tale will be short and without radioactive spiders or kryptonite. But it belongs to me, and for some reason that makes the dearth of superpowers alright.

It began on a rainy day in fourth grade. My teacher, Mrs. Applebaum, made us all write short stories for our school's annual writing contest. Mine was about a cat who could talk, who whisks her owner off into a magical land inhabited by talking cats. It was awful. I was nine. Mrs. Applebaum told me that my story definitely had a shot at winning, with what I recognize now as a kind but patronizing smile. I did not win the writing contest, nor the medal they handed out to the winner.

And on that day, I decided: I will prove them wrong. I will become a writer.

Fourth grade redemption, here I come. Young Cass will be shaking her fist in triumph inside of me the day that my debut novel gets published.

No, but for real, guys: I like to write. I like to get lost inside of the words, to spiral, spiral, spiral down until me and the story are one and the same. I am currently hard at work on my debut novel, an as-of-yet-titled fantasy novel. I tweet (twitter.com/ihartcass) and I blog and I bang out that word count.