Let’s Begin, Shall We? (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, the theme is “begin”: how to find inspiration to begin a book, how in fact to begin it, how to start a chapter, yadda yadda yadda.

The answer to this question is completely different for all writers, and I don’t believe in proselytizing.

Or, of course, I may simply have no idea what the answer is.

First, there are plotters, and there are seat-of-the-pants writers. And there are any number of mutations between those extremes. Many roads to Oz, as one of my writers’ groups always says.

I’m at the extreme end of seat-of-the-pants writers. I almost never have the faintest idea what I’ll write before I begin writing for the day. (Yes, this is sometimes nerve-wracking, but I also love adrenaline rushes, so luckily it works for me.) Over the years, though, I’ve learned a useful little trick so I’m not utterly lost at the beginning of each day’s writing: at the END of each day’s writing, I write the first sentence of the next chapter, scene, paragraph, etc.

But how to begin the book itself? How to find inspiration for it?

Some writers keep a file of ideas for future books. I don’t. (Seat of the pants to my core!) The only overall advice I can give is that when I’m first figuring out what sort of book I want to write next, I take long walks to think about it. That’s it. Aside from that, each book is different, but I’ll give two examples.

My Bennet Sisters YA series, beginning with Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras, began as a simple writing assignment in an online writer’s voice class taught by Barbara Samuel. She told us to type out the first 2-3 paragraphs of a book we loved, then rewrite them in our own voice. (Before doing this, I hadn’t written any YA novels, but the whole class agreed that I sounded like a teenager. I’m sure this was a compliment. Like, totally.) I chose Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and the 2-3 new paragraphs I wrote for that assignment became the start of my first YA novel.

The summer my daughter turned 12, I started writing another YA manuscript, not yet published (even though it may be the best book I’ve ever written, and what’s up with that, agents? heh heh). In the span of three terrifying weeks, two different creepy strangers tried to lure my daughter into their cars. She did everything right – quite brilliantly, in fact – but as her mom, I might’ve had even more trouble getting past it than she did. At the moment, I was between books. A writer friend finally said that since I was dwelling on it nonstop anyway, I should consider writing a similarly harrowing story, but with two girls ... and give only one of them a triumphant and happy ending.

I’ll note that for the first (and probably only) time, I started writing that book on its last page: showing the heroine in the aftermath of beating the odds. In all of my other novels, I’ve always started on page 1 and just kept going, without skipping around, but I couldn’t have written that book that particular summer without knowing for a fact that the girl survived. Also, surprisingly, the heroine started out (very, very loosely) as some version of my daughter, but she soon turned into some version of teenage me. And that change also helped me get over the events of that summer. But I will note that I’ve never before or since had to eat such a ghastly amount of chocolate to get through a book.

I have examples like this for almost every novel I’ve written, but like I said: every novel is different, and every writer is different.

So how should you begin? In whatever way works for you.

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her at marystrand.com.