When I was a child, I couldn’t write in fancy notebooks. I was a young writer, everyone knew it, so people always gave me leatherbound, feather trimmed, kimono-clad monstrosities. I could never write in them. Something about the pages intimidated me. Like the thoughts that populated the paper had to be important and lyrical. They had to justify their existence. 

The writing had to be art.

So I packed them away and I wrote in margins and on boxes and in the corners of books. I tried to type but it never felt right. 

While learning how to start, I– bookish, budding story teller– talked and talked and talked. I think they gave me the notebooks to shut me up. It worked eventually, one day, when someone finally gave me an old school notebook. She had forgotten my birthday and wanted to give me a gift. She got me a 20-peso school shop notebook. I destroyed it. I filled it with characters and plot lines and little scenes. It didn’t matter what it was, I wrote it down. I rolled it up, slipped it in pockets, got it dirty. But I kept it with me so I could write as soon as I wanted to, whatever it was.

The writing doesn’t have to start as art. It just has to be present, it needs to be created. I put a pen to paper. It didn’t have to be nice paper.

So I went out and I bought Corona (sigh.) notebooks, 50 pesos worth each, and filled them with words. People still gave me notebooks, but those were left untouched. Instead I destroyed spiral, lined, chipipay notebooks. I found pens that I loved that made the writing process easier. I crossed out beginnings and started again on new pages. Sometimes because I found better words, sometimes because I didn’t like how I wrote the word “cup”. The “u” might have been weird. 

But how does one make the words go after that first scratch of the pen? When I can’t begin, I look to history for advice. 

One of my favorite novels, Gone With The Wind, started as a hot mess. The author, Margaret Mitchell, wrote the ending first and the rest out of order and had a heroine named “Pansy O’Hara”. She kept all her bits in Manila envelopes and denied its existence. She started with what she already had in her head and just got it all out. 

I started wherever in the story I felt like. I’d plot it out later. I still write that way for articles. I am a practicing editor.

Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, would shut out the world and go on writing benders. She would just go until the inspiration stopped and then stop. Fix it later.

I turned off the music and let there be silence. And I stare at a page. 

Jane Austen kept her writing space free of clutter. That doesn’t work for me, I write anywhere and everywhere, but I must write it physically. 

Michaelangelo is credited with saying “The Sculpture is there, you simply remove the rest of the marble.” That part? The removal of the marble is hard; it’s painstaking and it’s not the fun part. It’s work. 

Michalangeo drafted his work ahead, he parsed it out. He suspended his draft of the famous “David” in water and let the level drop and executed that part to manage his energy and inspiration levels to discipline his creation. The David is considered his masterpiece. 

He learned his process. He started with a draft, and he got to the masterpiece eventually. 

I love having written. The writing process is hard and starting it is the hardest part. But no one likes the actual writing part. We like the after. The finished, the editing.

The first draft has to be done, nothing more. 

Blank pages don’t scare me anymore. They delight me, they excite me. I put my pen to paper and I write. In a few hours I’ll get to read it.