How to start writing

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By Liz, embracing fall and looking forward to spooky season!

I love starting a new story. Once I start turning a new idea around in my head, the first couple of chapters just flow. I can’t get them down fast enough.

It’s the middle that gets rough. And sometimes the end. So yeah, for me, the beginning of a book is as good as it gets.

I’m in the middle of a new book now, and I’m starting to feel that familiar floundering feeling – the one that makes me want to clean the house or suddenly embark on a new hobby. I’m resisting, but still.

I know this is not true for everyone. For some people, the beginning is the hardest, especially if this is your first book. People often ask me, how do you start a book? In fact, it’s one of the questions I get asked the most.

Here are three ways I center myself in a story:

Start with a character. Sometimes it’s the protagonist who leaps onto the page first. Other times it’s the villain. Maybe it’s a particular job that you hear about that intrigues you and gets the wheels turning for a character. (This is how Shonda Rhimes created Olivia Pope on Scandal.) Maybe you read about a crime in the local news and start thinking about what kind of person would commit that crime. Or what the victim was hiding that got them killed. Before you know it, you have the seed of an idea that you can flesh out.

Find a setting that resonates with you. Setting can be as much of a character in stories as the actual people. I came up with the idea for my Pawsitively Organic Mysteries while I was on a walk at an historic town green. I saw a house and thought about who might live in it, the neighbors she might have, the community that gathered on the town green, and voila – my series was born.



The town green where the Pawsitively series was born

One little nugget that can trigger a lot of “what ifs”. You don’t need to know the entire story before you start. You may not even know MOST of the story (especially if you’re a pantser). But once you have one nugget of an idea that grabs hold of you, you can start from there. When I started writing my Full Moon Mysteries, I knew only a few things about my main character, Violet Mooney. I knew she was about to find out she was a witch. I knew she had a complicated history with her mother, from whom she’d been estranged. And I knew there was something bigger at play in the witch realm that was driving all of these events to occur at this point in time.

Did I know what it was? Hell no! I actually built the first three books around this, and I had no idea until the third book what it actually was. But I didn’t need to. Once I started writing with those three ideas in mind, the rest evolved naturally with the characters.

So I guess the headline here is, pick a path and start. The ideas will start flowing once we show up – I promise.

How to you break down tasks that feel hard, writing or otherwise?

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Published by Cate Conte / Liz Mugavero

Cate Conte writes the Cat Cafe Mysteries and the Full Moon Mysteries. As Liz Mugavero, she writes the Pawsitively Organic Mysteries, the first of which was an Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel. She lives in the Boston area with her rescue pals.

19 Thoughts

  2. I started dabbling in writing in college but really didn’t get serious about it until I accidentally started to wite book by trying to write a poem for a friend that turned out to be way to long so I kept writing and made a book out of it

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  3. I find beginning a new book hard, even when I have quite a few ideas, so I always start with research, which I love. Right now I’m planning a book about a judge, so I’m attending trials and interviewing local judges and district attorneys. The problem is to make myself stop researching and start Chapter One. So far, my original Chapter One has never turned out to be the same as the one in the final draft, but we all have to start somewhere, even if we end up throwing those initial chapters away.

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  6. To me, it’s not looking at the whole picture, but remember the saying “one foot in front of another – one step at a time”. We experienced it when there was a death that required clearing an estate. What I learned, I passed on to my sister-in-law when Mom died. Don’t worry about “all” that has to be done. Each day set a goal, be it a room, a closet or even a draw, and then do it. You’ll be surprised what will get done in a week – in a month. They that feeling of accomplishment gives you the incentive to more forward – maybe at a faster pace. Eventually, it all gets done. It may have detours or routes you hadn’t thought about, but it all gets done.
    2clowns at arkansas dot net

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  8. I have an idea for a cozy series. All of my books are sweet romance so it would be a stretch for me starting out in a completely new genre but this idea does excite me. First I had the town. Then I had the main character and her aunt. Your post today is making me think it might be time to start. It’s like a green light saying ‘go’.

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  9. I find it works beautifully for me if I write more than one book at a time. When I’ve got more than one idea of how to move the plot with one book, and I’m not sure which way I want it to go, I take a break from it and get to work on the other. It keeps matters lively and I’m lovin’ it!

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