Mystery of the First Page

“He who fears is literally delivered to destruction.” – Howard Thurman

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Today’s Topic: Mystery of the First Page

There are plenty of things that can make writing an unpleasant experience. Some writers report that the hardest thing is knowing when to stop. They prefer to tinker and edit and tweak, hoping to attain a perfection no human could create. I’ve met unpublished writers who’ve been working on a single Magnum Opus for over a decade. One man had worked on his for the better part of his life.

But today, I want to talk about the opposite fear-inducing struggle: The Mystery of the First Page.
How do you start a new piece of writing? Do you outline? Do you ponder strategy in a journal?

When I think back to my early writing days—and I mean really early (high school through early college) I had plenty of unearned confidence. Or maybe it was the ignorance of babes? In both high school and college, I had gigs writing for low-circulation magazines. One was a neighborhood journal called Mid-City Vive la Vie published by a kindly and somewhat mysterious woman named Debra Dretar. The other was a magazine (Riverside) produced by the Public Affairs Office of the military organization I worked for, The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-Mississippi Valley Division. I can tell reams of nostalgic stories about that time—one of my coworkers was a lovely older gentleman named John Hall who thought drinking soda with lunch was an unforgivable waste because it obscured the flavors of the meal, but who kept a menagerie of hot sauces next to his desk, including one called Gun Powder!—but those are tales for another post or perhaps my memoirs.

One thing I don’t recall having then was anxiety around starting new work.

In fact, now that I think of it, neither did I have that kind of first-page fear in my law career. Legal scholar Bryan A. Garner once told a roomful of law conference attendees, “lawyers are the world’s highest paid writers.” That nugget of wisdom sat like a millstone on my lap for many months. I wanted to be a writer. But here this guy tells me I am a writer.

I cranked out a couple of briefs a week, on average, for—what? Sixteen years? Six hundred years? And while I had plenty of anxieties around my career, which are best left, for now, to me and my therapist, I never missed a deadline. I occasionally wrote briefs that were over sixty pages long. I wrote briefs that my bosses hinted my career hinged on. I wrote a brief to the Louisiana Supreme Court. But I never hesitated.

Compare that to the dozens of short stories and essays as well as the several novels, both published and unpublished, that I’ve made. Too often I can remember sitting at a desk in my house, or my apartment, or in a hotel room, or at a coffee shop watching the fabric of my shirt patter from the rapid beating of my heart.

The paradox of trying the be the writer I want to be rather than the one who collects easy law firm checks or spews out stories without thinking about them is this: It’s harder to write what you care about, but also it’s hard stop writing what you care about.

As Mark Twain famously said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

But also, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Some of us writers are masochists. I mean, statistically speaking, some of you readers are masochists. But that’s between you and your therapist. Still, few of us want to bleed, either physically or metaphorically. Honestly, this is probably why I lean toward fiction rather than memoir because at least in fiction I can hide a little. In memoir, no quarter is given for your tender feelings, and none taken. Yet, there’s plenty of fear baked into that first fictional blank page. Who is my character? Will I be able to do them justice? What if I write their story well and no one cares? What if I write a good story, everyone cares, but I’m still not satisfied?

From about 2005 until about 2010, it took me about two years to complete a story. As the kids say, no cap. So even though I might have two or three stories cooking at a given time, I didn’t get much done. I still remember some of those early titles, “Ruins” (my blatant rip-off of a Jhumpa Lahiri story), “Fit”/”Whatever Happened to the Woman of Tomorrow” (a story on my body anxieties and fears of having children; filtered through the experience of a professional woman—see there I go hiding from my real life narrative again…), “Abracadabra” (an ex-con magician on the day of his release from prison tries to reconnect with his estranged teenaged daughter). I can call up a half dozen or more stories from that epoch. None of these stories are published, by the way. But a big part of my slow production came from that fear of the first page. It felt good to start those stories, even though it sometimes hurt like a bugger. Hmm. Maybe I am a masochist?

In about May 2010, I went to Garden District Books for a book release by Rick Barton (Rowing to Sweden). Rick, a real sweetheart, was the director of the program I applied to when I was ready to change my life. Coincidently, it was the only MFA I applied to. Either I got in, or my writing journey ended unceremoniously before it really started. With my family obligations, I couldn’t apply to other illustrious programs around the nation like Stanford, Syracuse, Sarah Lawrence, or even programs that don’t start with the letter “S” such as Cedar Crest College. * I went to the book release, if I’m being honest, not to be a good literary citizen, I didn’t know Rick at the time, but to scope out my chances for acceptance. In the signing line, Rick broke protocol and spilled the beans: I was in. Also—I’ll never forget this—he said, “this will accelerate you by ten years.”

He was right, of course. If nothing else, the program required me to turn in a story per month. My fear of missing a deadline was always stronger than my fear of the blank page. But as I finished the program in 2013, I’d learned something else. A fear-based approach can only get you so far.

Today, I still get nervous when I open a new document to start a new piece, but there are techniques for everything. The techniques I employ have kept me from being paralyzed like I used to be in the old days. One of the ways I got past the paralysis was to think of it like so: this story isn’t me, it’s them and all I need to do is ask them to tell me their story.

There used to be a comic back in the 50s called Journey into Mystery (JIM). When I was a kid comic collector, I’d see it referenced in the mail order guides I sometimes used. JIM is known today for the first appearance of Marvel Comics’ Thor. Now, I never ordered JIM. It was out of my price range, and I was never a “sword and sandals” fan anyway. But that title, like so many phrases in our writerly minds always held an allure for me. Today, when I look back at the work I produced over the past decade, I rarely knew where the story would take me. Each and every little thing I made was a Journey into Mystery. And my life is better and more adventure-filled for it.

As with everything, this post is about identifying the stumbling blocks that get in our ways. Do you fear the blank page? Woo-hoo. That means you’re a writer. The question, my dear friend, is what will you do about it?

*I’m not sure if the Cedar Crest College MFA even existed back then. I surely wasn’t aware of it, but my awesome alliteration joke works better if we just go with it. lol Thanks. MCR