Stop re-writing your opening chapter

Unfuck your writing habits

This is a personal callout post to myself and every writer I know or work with.

(Sorry.)

But seriously. Stop re-writing your opening chapter.

(Or your opening paragraph, if you’re writing something shorter.)

(See also: your opening line.)

Let it be. Let it sit. Let it wait.

Move. On. You know — to the rest of the story?

Especially if you haven’t finished the rest of the story.

Consider that perhaps your opening chapter does not need to be perfect right now.

Or for a long while.

Perhaps not until you’ve actually told yourself the whole story and figured out where it’s actually going and how it actually ends, and what goes in the middle, and therefore how the whole thing should actually begin.

Look, I rarely know what I’m doing when I start writing something.

I might have an exciting idea and a heap of enthusiasm and a buzz of anticipation for where it might go, but I have never — not once — known enough about a story to bash out a beginning that was definitively representative of the final piece.

Because how can you know what you don’t know?

How can you confidently introduce what you haven’t written yet?

How do you measure the perfect run-up when you don’t know where you’re going to land?

Your opening chapter/paragraph/line is entitled to be dog shit when you’re just starting out. And no one needs to waste time trying to polish a turd.

Because I guaran-fucking-tee, by the time you’ve finished your draft, or the next draft, or your fifth edit, your opening chapter is going to need to be vastly different to how it is right now.

And therein lies the problem with trying to make it perfect early on.

Sometimes we spend so much time trying to get that beginning section ‘right’ that we never get past it. Or we’ve invested so much sunk-cost time into tweaking and refining it on a surface level, that trying to make any structural or developmental changes later on becomes a massive psychological block. Or we get so stuck in the initial voice or tone or style of that opening chapter (sometimes months or years after we started the damn thing) that it stops us from experimenting with the story enough to make it work.

I see this a lot in the writers I work with. No matter how experienced they are. And no matter how beautifully written those first chapters are!

I’m also saying this as someone who does all these things, and has struggled with all these things, and even understands why I do all these things, and yet still finds it hard not to do it anyway. Believe me, I am here in the trenches with you. But guys, we gotta stop.

For me, it comes from a place of:

“Well, if I can just nail this opening chapter, it’ll set me up for the rest of the book and everything will somehow be easy…”

And also:

“There’s so much to establish in this first chapter: setting, character, concept, conflict, narrative voice, style… If I get it all perfect right away, then I’ll feel clearer about how the rest of the story is supposed to go.”

And maybe sometimes:

“If the beginning is really fucking good then readers will be lured in immediately…”

Or:

“Huh, this competition only wants the first 5,000 words — I can polish that right up and send it out before I’ve even written the rest of the book and maybe that’ll give me a bit of a motivational boost to carry on.”

I mean, none of those reasons are bad or necessarily wrong. They all come from a well-intentioned and even fairly logical place (albeit driven by impatience and perfectionism).

But I also know that’s not how it works for me.

I know from long, agonising, frustrated experience, that re-writing and re-drafting and re-editing the living hell out of that opening chapter is a lesson in futility.

And I know that if I let myself get stuck there, I run the very real risk of never moving the fuck on to the good part.

If I let myself, I will get bogged down with the minutiae of this ostensibly hypothetical beginning, and remain completely untethered to wherever else the story might want to go.

It’s like trying to open a ‘pull’ door with a ‘push’ sign on it.

You can shove as hard as you like, convinced that you’re following the instructions correctly, but you’re not getting through that door until you take a step back, consider the whole picture, and try another angle.

It was actually academic writing that helped me figure this one out — returning to university as a mature student after my kids were born, I had to re-learn how to write an essay, and quickly realised that despite all my careful research and planning, the introduction I started out with never quite matched the finished product.

Every time, I had to go back to that initial “in this essay I will…” statement and rework it — to align my intentions with what I’d actually ended up exploring in the process. Sometimes I started off assuming I was going to argue a certain point but found a different viewpoint along the way. Sometimes I couldn’t quite prove my original stance so was forced to find a different one. Sometimes my citations and references took me down a whole other, more interesting rabbit hole.

And so, the introduction inevitably became the very last thing I wrote for each essay. (Even my dissertation.) Sure, I might bullet point what I thought I was going to cover, but I never spent much time trying to make it pretty early on, because I realised it was a massive waste of effort and I always ended up throwing it out regardless.

Of course, my essays weren’t as close to my heart as my fiction is. It was easier to be objective and dismissive of those early ideas. I could see that the process of crafting the essay was about learning as I wrote. To come to the conclusions along the way. To reinforce my viewpoint or challenge my initial perspective. I was open to it, because that’s why I was there — to learn.

Creative writing is no different, really. We’re learning as we go. Hopefully enjoying the process. Discovering new routes and layers and facets that we couldn’t possibly have predicted when all we have to start from is a tiny seed of an idea.

Trust that you can sketch out the bare beginnings and keep moving forward. Launch yourself into the unknown expanse of your story.

You’ll circle back around to that opening section eventually — hopefully with more context, more knowledge, and more clarity on what it’s supposed to look like.

It will be perfect eventually, but it might just be the last thing you write.

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Ok, so... what do we do instead?

I mean, the tl;dr is right up there in the beginning of this post:

• let it be

• move on

• figure shit out as you go

(Orrrr you could throw your opening chapter at me and see how I can help?)

But if you want more tangible suggestions on gently breaking your opening-chapter-cycle-of-doom then here are ten listicle-style things you can also try:

Ten steps to unfucking your first chapter habit