Why I have to start at the beginning
While exploring your warm-ups a few weeks ago, I promised more about my conflicted relationship to outlining. It turns out my relationship to it is even more conflicted than I thought, so I need some more time to work through it. In the meantime, I want to share a craft exploration that makes me feel like I might not be totally misguided or delusional to sit down to write without first clearing a path to follow: a lecture by Zadie Smith at Columbia in 2008, which came to me via the newsletter Counter Craft by Lincoln Michel. Smith talks about obsessively, agonizingly revising the openings of her novels, sometimes for years, because until she has that beginning the rest can’t be born:
When I begin a novel there is nothing of that novel outside of the sentences I am setting down. I feel I have to be very careful: I can change the whole nature of the thing by changing a few words. This induces a special breed of pathology for which I have another ugly name: OPD, or Obsessive Perspective Disorder. It occurs mainly in the first twenty pages. It’s a kind of existential drama, a long answer to the short question: What kind of a novel am I writing?….Yet while OPD is happening, somehow the work of the rest of the novel gets done. That’s the strange thing. It’s as if you’re winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter…when you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months.
Michel attended the original lecture as an MFA student:
Sitting in that auditorium, I felt my own process validated. Mine wasn’t quite the same, but there was a similar sense that the rest of the work is pulled from the opening and one must go back to it again and again to figure out what comes next. I’ve never written a story starting in the middle or the end. I can’t even conceive of how you do that, although kudos to those who can.
I don’t write fiction (yet!), but I also frequently feel that sense of the story being pulled from its beginning. Which means until I have the right beginning, I can’t go anywhere else. Even if I try to circumvent this process and start writing in the middle (easier to do with a news or feature story than a novel), I usually have to completely rewrite those parts once the beginning is in place. An opening paragraph—sometimes an opening sentence!—can take me days of work, and I can’t explain to you what I’m looking for in advance, or what my early attempts are missing. I just know it’s not right, not right, still not right—and then, at last, it’s right. I feel the opening click into place, often followed by the rest of the story. It’s not unheard of for me to spend days working and reworking a piece’s first sentence, and then mere hours on the rest of the story, even a long feature. As Smith said, the work was getting done, even though I couldn’t see it. It’s as if the opening contains the outline—maybe even the whole piece—but curled up into one of those tiny extra dimensions in string theory, forever inaccessible to me but present nonetheless.
Do these agonized-over openings always survive editing and make it to publication? Not always, but usually. More importantly, once I have the opening, I know what kind of story I’m writing. I know its focus, its tone, the perspective it’s taking. I can articulate and defend those choices in editing, or I can evaluate them against other options and decide to revise. The point isn’t that the “right” opening is perfect, or even that it’s the only possible opening. It’s that it’s the signpost that shows me the way into the rest of the story. My story, whatever it’s going to be.
Clearly, this is not a particularly efficient, predictable, or comfortable way to write, but I’ve been doing some version of it since I was 15, so here we are. I remember the first time it happened more vividly than I remember stories I wrote a few years ago. I think I’m stuck with it. Can you relate, or does this sound like the most terrifying nightmare you can imagine? Let us know!