Every time I start a new book, I become a completely different person. A wildly optimistic one. The kind of person who opens a fresh document and thinks, This is it. This is the one that’s going to flow effortlessly from beginning to end. This time I’ll outline properly, stay on schedule, avoid plot holes, and never once question my life choices.
It’s adorable, really. Because three weeks later, I’ll be sitting in front of chapter nine wondering why I ever believed I was capable of writing in the first place. And somehow, despite having lived through this exact cycle before, I fall for it every single time. You’d think experience would protect you from the illusion. If anything, experience just teaches you that the illusion is part of the process.
Every novel begins with an unreasonable amount of confidence. The private belief that this tiny spark of an idea can somehow become a living, breathing story.
When you say it out loud, it sounds a little ridiculous. I have one interesting premise and approximately zero evidence that I can turn it into a compelling novel. Wonderful. Let’s dedicate the next year of our lives to it.
Halfway through, you’ll become convinced the story has no purpose. You’ll compare it to every book you’ve ever loved and conclude yours has somehow become the literary equivalent of wet cardboard. You’ll briefly consider deleting the entire manuscript before deciding to make tea instead. Then, for reasons no one can fully explain, you’ll keep writing.
This is the part of the process I find most fascinating.
Because the beginning of a novel is all possibility. Every scene is brilliant until you actually have to write it. Every plot twist is genius until it creates three new problems you now have to solve.
Somewhere around the middle of every project, I become convinced that I’ve forgotten how stories work. I start rereading old drafts as if they were written by a more competent version of myself. I wonder whether I accidentally used up all my good ideas on previous books.
People might imagine writers beginning a novel because they’re absolutely certain they can finish it. I don’t think that’s true. I think most of us begin because we’re hopeful enough to try.
Looking back, every book I’ve finished started the same way: with an idea that felt impossibly exciting and impossibly fragile. At the time, I couldn’t see all the problems waiting ahead. I didn’t know which scenes would refuse to work or which chapters would take twenty rewrites. Thank goodness. If I had seen the entire mountain from the bottom, I might never have taken the first step.
And page one, more often than not, is all a writer really needs.
— Montse
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