Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

The assistant commander at any post is supposed to be a ruthless son of a bitch.

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it — that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book. I'll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I'll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn't come to more than one page, but if I'm lucky, that's the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Most articles and stories are improved significantly if you delete the first page of the manuscript. Start with the action.

Where do begin, he asked, Where you always have to begin, at the beginning,

To begin at the beginning.

"I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail.
Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850. (2004)

As a wit, if not first, in the very first line.

Every time I sit down to write a book I feel that I have to start from zero, that I have to re-learn how to write.

The first draft of anything is shit. — ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Read it like a motherfucker.