Starting to write is just terrible. You sit down to that horrible blank screen with the cursor blinking accusingly; or that empty page that seems full of promise when it isn’t sitting right in front of you. You start clicking your pen or tapping it. You poise your fingers over the keys and start to write and the first word has a typo. Such a bizarre one that you can’t quite believe the disconnect between your fingers and your brain. How wide is that gulf? You start to wonder if maybe you have a tumor and it is slowing but surely eating up the healthy braincells and turning them into monsters. You erase the offending word and wonder if maybe you need to Google brain tumours to see if that might be what you have. You know this is a stupid and scary idea. But like that awful movie you want to change the channel from, you just don’t because...well, you can't bear to go back to that blank page. Forty-five minutes pass. After sufficiently scaring yourself, you’ve already moved on to Who Wore It Best or movie news or something else totally irrelevant in order to put internet history distance between yourself and the scary medical pages.
In a frantic wrench you close the Safari window and stare momentarily again at the blank page. “Write!” You command yourself. “Come on! You phoney!” You stare again at the page. You realize then that you have absolutely nothing to say. That story you were working on yesterday? You can’t remember what you were trying to do with it. Suddenly everything seems like crap. Everything you've already finished probably needs to be rewritten. “Well,” You try to pep talk yourself, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and all that.” The page still stares at you--platitudes don't take you very far when you are trying to jump start your productivity. “What is the matter with my left hand?” You wonder. “Do I have carpal tunnel already?” You are almost overcome with the desire to Google carpal tunnel just to see if you have the symptoms.
No. No. You need to start writing! You have a word count goal to meet. You have got to start. You write a sentence. Any sentence in the hope that it will get the juices flowing. Again, it is full of typos. What the heck? Your fingers feel so disconnected from your brain. Almost shaky. Out of practice. You start writing crap. It is horrible and melodramatic and you know that you will have to delete it. You know it because if you died and someone found it, you would be, actually, literally, mortified. (As an aside, can we just all agree that the word ‘literally’ is misused to an embarrassing degree? No joke, I heard a very intelligent person who was working on their masters say that their roommate was ‘literally on another planet...’.)
All of this brings me to my advice. Before you start writing on anything that matters, open a blank document and just start typing. It turns out, like the rest of your body, your fingers and your brain need a warm up before they dive into the actual work of the day. Just start writing. It will probably be stream-of-consciousness garbage that no one else should ever read, ever--but it will get your fingers and brain functioning. Don’t correct your typos. Don’t edit as you go. Resist that urge and you will see how your fingers warm up and you stop making so many mistakes. It is astounding how obvious the need to warm up is. I now keep a separate warm up document and add to it every morning. It usually takes about 700 words to get my fingers and brain in shape to work. And, come to think of it, it is usually those first 700 or 800 words that feel most like blood from a stone.
Honestly, I don’t know how I missed out on this crucial bit of information. You know you need to warm up for a couple of minutes before working out. You know that you can injure yourself if you suddenly exert your muscles without any attempt to prepare them. It was like that time in my junior high gym class when I arrived late and missed the track warm up. When my group had to run the 100 meter dash, I just started sprinting after standing around and talking with my friends. I pulled a muscle and determined I hated track and field. Why do we think that our mind or our hands operate on different principles than the rest of our body? Warm up, writers. I promise it is a good idea. At the very least, you won’t scar yourself psychologically by looking up medical conditions on the Internet.
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