How do you start writing something?

First, the title must reflect on the very ink you are trying to inject into the page—the “OPEN” neon lights we see in the window of a store we may have overlooked. The first page is the most crucial, of course, because it is what hooks us in with a fishing line that must pull us down to the depths of the authors true core, their swallowing darkness of an ocean of possible worlds and universes.

Although, even with the crippling anxiety those pressures above ensue, there is only one true thing a writer should imperatively see, an obligation to one’s self: do not worry, just put the pen on the paper and run! Making the first draft perfect enough to pass as the final is a intangible dream. It is a rhetorical impossibility we sometimes forget about, even with day-to-day life. Mistakes happen, but we know how to correct them.

All the while life itself is so closely related to writing. Life, O Life, it seems as though with the obstacles that are set in motion, coming to a full stop, walking to a hill, and enjoy the sun setting, feeling the breeze brush across our finger tips almost seems more like a dream than reality these days. Occasionally, to break the mold and move towards healthier and happier living, thinking, and writing, turn your phone off, along with all the lights in your house, sit by your open front door, and just listen to the city. Hear her gentle breathe flow into your home, notice the sweet comfort in her darkness, close your eyes and wait until your mind matches hers.

Align yourself back into the spot in life you were wrenched from ever so slightly. We cannot rush life, or try to lie that rushing and stay true to ourselves in such a lightning-fast society is achievable. So, why rush art? Write, edit, read, and sleep, next write, edit, read, sleep, and dream! Then start it all over again, until you even forget to eat, when putting the next few lines on the page as if it were your last breath on this world, and then, maybe then, you feel like you can drink some water.

Writing is ugly, and beautiful, and painful, and healing, and breaks anything to its core, and rebuilds it back to the top, and there is nothing in this world that can take away your passion to let the fires inside of you ravage the forests of the page, showing all which blazes inside. An inferno starts with a spark, so feed it and watch the light dance with the winds that carries it further across to the end of your book, consuming all that is your body.

The mind is a dangerous prison. It is a curse upon us who want to be writers, and only evil itself must swim in our veins who choose to be writers. No one in their right mind would think this is fun, because we wake up every day feeling the due date pounding at the door of our soul saying, “Hello? Anyone home? Do you have today’s quota? The deadline is at sundown.”

Hemingway once said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

And sometimes it is that easy to bleed out as if we cut our throats intentionally on stage, and other times it is hard to break the skin, even for a tiny drop of blood to fall onto the page, leaving us wondering if we are still alive and not have any left to spill. “Writing is an addicting fascination that eventually evolves into a beautiful obsession“, Jim Rohn said to compare writing to life. Therefore, we are a rare, insatiable breed that keeps trying to satisfy our thirst to tell a story worth more than life itself.

Believing in ourselves to take the first step, because the end does not matter in the slightest, and it is the journey that is the story. Beginning to write is the hardest part. But once you get up and your pen races across the paper without exhaustion, let it go until you collapse upon yourself from dehydration. So, that leads me to ask, how are you going to start page 1?