The bad first page

Every essay I publish starts with a page I would be embarrassed to show anyone. This is deliberate. I have a rule, written inside the cover of my current notebook, that says: the first page is allowed to be bad.

I came to the rule late. For about ten years I started each piece by trying to write a good opening, and I would spend an hour on three sentences. Then I would write the rest in a rush, relieved to be past the opening, and the rush showed.

What the first page is for

The first page is not an opening. I had that wrong for a decade. It is the place where I find out what I am actually writing about, which is usually not what I planned.

Last month I sat down to write about my grandmother’s sewing machine. The first page was about a sewing machine. The second was about the sound of the room it lived in. By page four, I was writing about the particular quiet of a house in the early afternoon, when everyone who lives there is somewhere else. The sewing machine became a small part of the finished piece.

If I had tried to write a good opening about the sewing machine, I would have written a good opening about a sewing machine. I might have been quite pleased with it. It would not have led anywhere.

The deletion ratio

I keep rough numbers. Of the last twelve essays, the first page survived intact in none of them. In four, it survived as a paragraph further down. In seven, I cut it entirely. In one, I moved it to the end, where it worked better than anything else I had written, and I felt I had been given a present.

That is a lot of throwing away, and I do not say it with regret. Cutting the first page is the cheapest edit there is. You do not have to agonise over a sentence you are about to delete. You only have to stand somewhere to start walking.

I used to believe that a draft should be a straight line, that good writers wrote forward and trimmed little. I have not met many of them. The ones I know write like they are digging, throwing dirt behind them and only later looking to see what they uncovered.¹

1 A friend who writes novels told me she throws away roughly the first forty pages of every book. She says it with a cheerful shrug, as if describing a commute.

There is a small trap in all of this, which is that the bad page can turn into a place to hide. I know a person who has written four hundred first pages and finished none of them. A bad page is only useful if a second page follows it, and a third, and eventually a reason to stop.

A practical note

My method is almost too small to describe. I open a new file. I set a timer for twenty minutes. I write without stopping, and if I do not know the next word, I write “something” and keep going. I do not read back. When the timer goes off, I stand up.

The “something” is more important than it looks. It stops me stalling on a word that is not the real problem. The real problem is nearly always three sentences earlier, where I said something I did not quite believe. I find it later, in the standing-up part, because by then I am no longer holding the sentence in my hand, and I can see it from the side.

I should add that I do not always follow this. About one time in five, I write a decent opening on the first try and the whole piece comes quickly. I treat those as weather. They are pleasant and they say nothing about my skill.

What I tell people who ask

When people ask me how to get started, I usually say, write the worst version you can. It is the only advice I have that I have never had cause to regret. It also tends to be the advice that they find most irritating, since they were hoping for a trick.

There is no trick. There is a bad first page, and then there is the rest, and the rest has to come from somewhere.²

2 Sometimes I keep the bad page in a folder called compost. I have never gone back to it. I like knowing it is there.