Here’s a complete shocker: J is one of my favorite letters 😉 . But I had a really hard time thinking of something for the letter J. I was going to do an acrostic—but I still couldn’t think of anything for J, and then I’d have to think up even more letters? Blech.

So instead, I’m jumping in. This works on two levels in writing. The first is that we need to jump into our stories. In medias res is the common phrase: in the middle of things. Don’t spend five or fifteen or fifty pages warming up, giving us your characters’ life stories, waiting for something to happen. Readers don’t like to be kept waiting!

But we have to balance between opening too early and too late. We don’t have to have the central conflict on page one, line one. We need to have some sort of conflict in the first section of the book, but sometimes the biggest conflict of the book takes some time to set up. I’ve been more guilty of starting too late: at a point where the conflict is obvious, but the reader doesn’t know the character well enough to sympathize, or at a point where the conflict itself takes a lot of explanation instead of playing out in front of us.

The other way we need to jump into our writing is to do it now. So many people wish they “had time” to write. But having time to write doesn’t mean you have hours of down time (I certainly don’t, with three kids five and under). It means making time by making choices—and making sacrifices. Time you spend writing is time you can’t spend watching TV, playing piano, painting, knitting, practicing the piano, with your children, sleeping, etc.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s not that we’re not ready and willing to make the sacrifice—we’re scared. Guess what: you don’t need a degree or a certificate to write. Heck, I know people who write without a basic grasp of grammar and punctuation. There are no requirements to be a writer: just pen and paper. (Or a laptop. Oh wait, are those requirements? Crap.)

What do you think? Do you jump in?

Photo credits: plunge—Konrad Mostert