maybe you chose THIS as your excuse?

1. “I don’t know where to start.” Really?

You’re an author, or you want to be or you think you can be, start where the story starts, you know THE BEGINNING! This is not to say that this is where my books start, as a matter of fact I am your 11^th grade English teachers nightmare. I hate outlining, note cards and rough drafts, as far as I’m concerened they are all a waste of time, and every moment spent on those ridiculous tasks is more time that you cant spend doing something more productive. Like sleep.

Really. Sleep is very important, and when I say sleep, at my current age, I do mean sleep, however if you are younger than I am or in better physical health than I am, than you probably mean any one of a dozen other activities that are ever so enjoyable in bed. But for those details you’ll have to go look under Adult Fantasy, next to leather goods. But on a more serious note. Here are a few suggestions on where to start:

• At the beginning. I know rather obvious isn’t it, but sometimes the most obvious is the best place. But not everyone is a serial writer, you know someone who writes from beginning to end adding in all the middle parts as you go. I know for me, I often see the big climactic scene of an issue and work backwards from there.

• Maybe start with the Table of contents. Personally I like that idea, because then I write the TOC. I can go back and write in a few descriptive sentences. Then go back and make some paragraphs and before you know it I’m calling my editor yelling DON’T CUT A THING! Yes I know that sounds an awful lot like writing and working from an outline, but really its nothing like that at all. After all if you had turned in an outline with a forword and a conclusion in it to Mrs Bobsled your 3^rd grade social studies teacher she would have laughed herself silly. But it can work.

• But if it doesn’t you are welcome to try my method of developing the big climax for your story and fleshing that out and then working backwards. The tric here is remembering that youre not trying to work back all the way to the beginning, but just to the point where it would make sense for them to be in THAT situation. Like say the heroe is in the power plant with 90 seconds before it explodes, how did he get there? Car, airplane, city bus? Maybe he made a HALO Jump off the evil Dr. Deaths orbiting satellite platform after having disabled the laser guided sharks. Hey that’s pretty good, anyone writing this stuff down?

The point is this, if you’re following my system you know your have already committed an hour of your time to writing today, lets make it worthwhile. If you cant imagine a dramatic conclusion, maybe you just need to write about some of your characters and flesh them out a little. Family, background, schooling, unrequited love is always a GREAT motivator. Of anything FOR Anything. Try it you’ll like it, I promise.

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Still havent hit it? Try back next time…..

Until then keep on writing and absolutely keep on reading!