The start is always the worst.
Most people don’t think about the start. It’s just something thats there, that they have to go through to get to good part. But the start is the foundation of everything else and without a good foundation everything else will fall down and crumble.
The start is tricky for a few reasons. You have so many things to balance. Where does the story actually start? If you go too early, you have a dull and pointless start. To late and its confusing and throws off the balance of the rest of the story. How exactly do we meet the characters? Does it feel seamless and natural; like we just started watching people in the middle of their day to day lives? Or is it jarring and uncomfortable, like a badly put together lie?
The start is where you gain readers. You may loose them down the road, but you don’t get readers with an amazing middle. You may stumble through your opening like a drunk idiot only to sober up and craft an amazing tale further down the road, but only the most dedicated fans will put up with your drunken nonsense at the start.
And so you sit there, looking at the empty page. You know where the story goes. You know where it ends. But the start; the start is hard to pin down? How do you decide exactly where one story ends and where another begins? And once you do decide, you have to make it interesting. Believable. Natural. All of which, on their own is a monstrous task.
A good middle will keep them going, a good ending will bring them back, but the start, the start is how you hook them in the first place. And without everything working in perfect harmony with everything else, it won’t work. They’ll put down the book before getting to the second page, stop the movie before they get past the first five minutes.
And so you go through the trouble of crafting a wonderful start, something that will catch them, hook them, keep them. And chances are they won’t even think twice about the trouble you went through finding that perfect start.
The start is always the worst.
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