You have had the idea for three years. You can describe the opening scene in the shower, in the car, to a friend at dinner. You have bought the notebook and, possibly, the software. What you have not done is write the first page, and every month that passes makes the first page heavier, because now it has to justify the wait. People in this spot tend to explain it with a verdict on themselves: lazy, untalented, not a real writer. The verdict is almost always wrong, and it is also useless, because there is nothing to do with a verdict except feel it.
There are better explanations, and they are more specific. Most writers who are stuck before they start are stuck for one of three reasons: their taste is ahead of their hands, the project they are trying to begin has no edges, or they are waiting for a feeling that only shows up after work has started. Each one has a different repair. None of them requires you to become a different person first.
Your taste got there before your skill did
Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, described this in a 2009 video series on storytelling, and the clip has been passed around writing groups ever since. People get into creative work, he said, because they have good taste. For the first stretch, what they make is not as good as what they can recognize, and they can tell. That gap is where a lot of people quit. His advice was blunt: do a large volume of work, because volume is the only thing that closes it.
What Glass describes is not a delusion. You really can hear that your opening paragraph is worse than the opening paragraphs on your shelf. The mistake is concluding that the gap says something about your ceiling. It says something about your mileage. A reader who has finished four hundred novels and drafted none has a trained ear and untrained hands, and the ear will be harsh about the hands for a while. That is the ordinary order of things, not a warning sign.
The practical consequence is that the first page has to be allowed to be worse than your taste. Anne Lamott made the same argument in Bird by Bird (1994), in the chapter whose title cannot be printed in most newsletters: almost every good writer she knew produced terrible first drafts, and the good work came out of revising them. A first page that meets your standards on the first try is not the goal. A first page that exists is the goal, because only an existing page can be revised toward your taste.
If the pages you do manage to write sound like a writer you admire rather than like you, that is a related problem with its own fix, covered in why your first draft sounds like someone else. Imitation is a phase of the gap, not proof that you have nothing of your own.
The project you are trying to start has no edges
"Write my novel" is not a task. It is a category that holds several hundred tasks, most of which you cannot see yet. When you sit down to "start the book," your mind tries to hold the whole category at once: the plot, the ending you have not worked out, the middle you are worried about, the market, the query letter. No sentence can satisfy all of that, so no sentence gets written.
Lamott's title comes from a story about exactly this. Her older brother, aged ten, had a report on birds due the next day. He had had three months to write it and had not begun. He sat at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by paper and unopened bird books. Their father sat down beside him, put an arm around him and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." The advice works because it shrinks the task to something with a beginning and an end. One bird can be finished tonight. "Birds" cannot.
For a novel, a bird is a scene you can see. Not the opening, necessarily. Pick the scene you can picture most clearly, the one that made you want to write the book, and write only that. Give it a place, two people and a problem they cannot solve in one conversation. Lamott also suggests looking only at what would fit in a one-inch picture frame. The frame is a better starting point than the whole wall.
If you cannot name a single scene you can picture, the issue may be earlier than starting. You may have a category rather than a subject, and finding your voice when you don't know what to write about walks through how to narrow one into the other.
You are waiting for the mood
This is the cause with the most evidence behind it, and the evidence is not flattering to inspiration.
In the early 1980s the psychologist Robert Boice ran a study with academics who wanted to write more and were not managing it. He split them into three groups for ten weeks. One group was told not to schedule writing at all and to write only when they felt compelled. A second group scheduled sessions but wrote only if they were in the mood. A third group scheduled five sessions a week and wrote in every one, whether they felt like it or not, with a penalty if they skipped: a check made out to an organization they disliked, which Boice would mail if they missed a session.
The results, reported in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 1983 and later in his book Professors as Writers (1990), were lopsided. The group that wrote on a schedule regardless of mood averaged about 3.2 pages a day. The "when I'm in the mood" group averaged about 0.9 pages. The group that waited for compulsion produced about 0.2. The scheduled writers also logged new ideas for their writing more often, roughly daily, compared with every couple of days for the mood-dependent group. Inspiration, in this study, mostly followed the writing instead of preceding it.
Two honest caveats belong next to those numbers. First, the participants were academics writing articles, not novelists, and the sample was small. Second, the "write every day" message has been oversold. Stephen Krashen's re-analysis of the same data found that the forced group produced fewer new ideas per page than the others, so pressure bought volume at some cost. Helen Sword's later interviews with productive academic writers, summarized in a 2016 paper titled "'Write every day!': a mantra dismantled," found that plenty of them did not write daily at all. What they shared was a pattern they kept, not a particular frequency.
So the lesson is not "write every day or you are failing." It is narrower and more useful: if you only write when you feel like a writer, you will rarely write, because the feeling tends to come from having written. The mood is a result you can collect, not a gate you have to wait at.
What the professionals actually did
Anthony Trollope wrote most of his best-known novels while holding a full-time job at the British Post Office. In his Autobiography, published after his death in 1883, he explained how: he wrote for three hours each morning before going to work, with his watch on the desk, and held himself to 250 words every quarter of an hour. He was not pretending this was romantic. He was describing a mechanism that worked around a job.
Toni Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993 that she wrote her early novels before dawn, in the hours before her children woke, while working as an editor at Random House. Her reasons were practical, not mystical: that was the time that belonged to her, and she had noticed she was sharper then.
Neither of them waited to feel ready. Both chose a time that was available and protected it. If you have a job and a household, that is the encouraging part. They did, too.
Make the start smaller than your resistance
The research on "implementation intentions," summarized by the psychologist Peter Gollwitzer in American Psychologist in 1999, adds one more useful tool. Goals phrased as "I want to write more" do little on their own. Plans phrased as "when this happens, I will do that" do considerably more, because they hand the decision to a situation rather than to your willpower in the moment. "When I sit down with my first coffee on weekdays, I will open the scene file and write until the cup is empty" is a plan. "I'll try to write this week" is a wish.
Put the three causes together and the fix is not dramatic:
- For the taste gap: decide in advance that the first draft of the scene is allowed to be bad, and that you will not reread it until the next session.
- For the missing edges: pick one scene you can see, with one place, two people and one problem. Ignore the rest of the book until that scene exists.
- For the waiting: attach the session to a time and a cue you already have, and keep it short enough that you cannot argue with it. Twenty minutes is plenty to start.
Once you have a few of these scenes on the page, there is finally something to look at. That is when it becomes useful to ask what your pages sound like, which is the job of the author voice audit, and later how to revise them without losing the sound, covered in revising without sanding off your voice. Neither question can be answered about a book that is still in your head.
The page you write tomorrow
Being stuck before you start feels like a fact about you. Mostly it is a fact about the shape of the task: too big, judged too early and scheduled for a mood that has not arrived. Change the shape and the stuckness usually changes with it.
Tomorrow, at a time you already have, write one scene you can see clearly, for twenty minutes, and do not reread it. Do the same the next day. By the end of the week you will have more pages than three years of planning produced, and some of them will sound like you.
Sources
- Ira Glass, Ira Glass on Storytelling, video interview series (2009), part 3.
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Pantheon, 1994).
- Robert Boice, "Contingency management in writing and the appearance of creative ideas: Implications for the treatment of writing blocks," Behaviour Research and Therapy 21, no. 5 (1983); and Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing (New Forums Press, 1990).
- Stephen Krashen, "Optimal Levels of Writing Management: A Re-Analysis of Boice (1983)."
- Helen Sword, "'Write every day!': a mantra dismantled," International Journal for Academic Development 21, no. 4 (2016).
- Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883).
- Toni Morrison, interviewed by Elissa Schappell and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, "The Art of Fiction No. 134," The Paris Review 128 (Fall 1993).
- Peter M. Gollwitzer, "Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans," American Psychologist 54, no. 7 (1999).
