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A friend once asked me how to start writing. He’d done all his research, he’d written a pretty detailed outline. He felt like he was ready only…he just didn’t quite know how to start. Not when or where or what place to start but how.

Every writer has scenes she approaches with trepidation. The first line of the first scene of a novel is a common one. Maybe it’s because she hasn’t quite decided how things should go. Maybe it’s because she really isn’t sure, deep down inside, where the story as a whole should go. Maybe it’s because 50,000 words requires a lot of time and what if, at the end of November, all you end up with is a piece of crap that doesn’t go anywhere and doesn’t mean anything and an accumulated total of 100 hours of your life that you lost to the stupid thought that maybe someday, you could actually write a book.

Well, okay. But how many hours have you wasted on social media or Netflix? Or trying to master the perfect smoky eye? Are you ever going to get those back?

Maybe the how of writing has to do more with fear than with fact. Maybe it has to do with the thought, ‘What if, at the end of all of this, I really am just a hack?’

Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, but there’s only one way to prove it, isn’t there? Throw your brilliance down on the page where all of us can see it.

And that’s where it gets real, doesn’t it? Because what if it doesn’t mean what you want it to? Or say what you thought it would? What if it doesn’t turn out like you meant it to?

Here’s what writers know: you can’t edit what you don’t write. It doesn’t really matter what you write in the first draft. What matters is what’s there in the last draft. The answer to how to start writing? You turn your computer on or dig your typewriter out, or find your favorite pen; you grit your teeth, and you start. It doesn’t matter where in the story you start. You could write the last scene first if you want to. The most important thing is just to start. Because to make the story better, first you have to make the story.