The course I’m teaching with the National Centre for Writing this January is called Start Writing Fiction. I like the title (I didn’t come up with it). But it does what all the best sentences do: it makes each word count.
- Start: A command, a call to action. It implies a beginning and beginnings are such lovely places – full of hope and potential and possibility. Beginnings suggest a blank page, a free afternoon, a moment when you say to yourself ‘I wonder…’ or ‘What if…’. When you’re at the start, anything could happen. Excitement lies ahead. I think it’s a gift to allow ourselves beginnings every so often in life.
- Writing: While ‘Start’ is a clear and direct command, it’s reassuring that what follows is not an impossibly difficult first step. It’s a simple ask – start writing. It’s not complete a masterpiece or produce a Petrarchan sonnet, but just start writing. Sit down, open your notebook or your computer, and do it. We’ve all got to start somewhere, and writing is as good a place as any.
- Fiction: One of the reasons I like writing fiction is that it’s a chance to slow things down in a world where it seems like so much hurtles by at a furious pace. It’s hard to know what something means to us or how it makes us feel or what its importance is before we are swept up in another deluge of events. For me, fiction is less about whether something did or didn’t happen and more about considering the events, relationships, and characters that preoccupy my imagination and exploring the complexities and possibilities surrounding them, imagining different outcomes or perspectives than the ones I think I already know.
Those are some of the thoughts that come to mind when I hear the sentence ‘Start Writing Fiction.’ What about you? Are you curious to start writing fiction? Are you ready to give yourself a beginning? Do you want to use writing to examine your world and fiction to broaden the possibilities of meaning? If so, please consider joining me in January. Let’s see what happens when we start.