Sometimes a problem or project just seems too large to delve into. Concepts are too obtuse. Situations simply too large. Gravity, or the need for gravity, keeps some ideas flat on the ground while the others hover ahead, just out of reach. No matter how wide your arms are, there’s no getting them around the situation.
This was certainly a problem I found myself in when I returned from the war. It was a situation so large, so otherworldly that I could not find a place to sink my fingers in, to start to rip the skin off in order to get to the meat. That I had spent the majority of my time over there writing emails, short stories, and a modern lit novel was cause for great dismay with my literature professor from the Academy. I told him the war was too big for me.
The same problem was plaguing me when I recently sat down to start working on a novel. I had issues that I wanted to deal with, and characters that I wanted to have show them, and a desire for complexity both in the portrayal of society but also in the plot structure. The entire situation screamed out that it was big. Real big. As in “damn, where do I start?” big.
In the years since the war, I’ve grown to love the outline. I’ve learned to love multiple drafts. I’ve learned to love the phrase, “I’ll fix it in post.” I have acclimatized to a non-linear work process.
And I’ve got a ton of index cards.
Not my actual bulletin board
The start of my story was that first index card. I forced that finger hold by writing down the very first thing I knew about my story. I then wrote one or two clarifying notes about that first though. I grabbed another index card, and repeated. Before I knew it, I was tacking up a rather detailed organizational structure onto my bulletin board.
After a single night, a significant amount of whiskey, and dozens of index cards, I suddenly had the playground on which on my novels would unfold.
The lesson? Sometimes, you just need to find “a” starting point rather than “the” starting point. After all, you can always fix it in post.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.