Up too late for morning writing today, so I tried it at my truncated lunchtime. Steph and I discovered a new (for us) coffee bar some months ago, which I quite like. The tea is near on undrinkable, but the surroundings are good for me to work in (small, out of the way, plenty of background noise that blots out individual conversations).

Quite a few years ago, I started writing what I thought would be a novel. Back then, I didn't really know much about writing. I wasn't any good at it. The attempted first chapter of the novel was complete crap. I abandoned it, but a few times over the last year or two I've gone back to the idea. It's now a short story in my mind. I've never managed to go beyond the first scene. I've been rethinking the idea,though, and thought I'd go back to it today. It came to me, as one of these really basic revelations that you know already and have known for ages but which you haven't applied. See, this story involves four friends and something that happens to them. I knew what happened and how the story ended but I couldn't get going on the story. My simplistic revelation today was that what I needed was something to upset the routine, a disturbance in the force. Something that changes the established pattern and makes the story start. Equilibrium is disturbed, entropy gets ruffled, story flows. That kind of thing.

I already knew what the speculative disturbance would be, but I couldn't get to that point. So what I decided to do today was to change the story from being about what happens to four established friends to a story about three established friends and a newcomer. The story then begins with the arrival of the newcomer, which disrupts the normal equilibrium situations.

Deciding this should not really have been much of a challenge, nor anything revolutionary. Many stories start with arrivals. One of the first exercises Connie Willis made us do at Clarion West was to identify stories that started with particular disturbances of the force, such as deaths, weddings, arrivals and so on. But even though I knew this, I wasn't actually implementing it. Lessons take a long time to learn, sometimes.

Now that it has been learned, the story has started quickly to flow. I didn't have long at lunchtime, just enough to scribble a page, but at least I now have momentum and don't have to just rewrite the opening scene over and over again.