The First Sentence Is Never the Hardest
Every writer has heard it. "So... how do you write the first sentence?"
It's usually asked with a smile, as though the beginning is the great mystery, as though stories arrive fully formed, waiting only for someone brave enough to type the first few words.
The truth is, the first sentence has never frightened me. Long before it appears on the page, a story has already been quietly unfolding somewhere in the background of my mind. It begins with a feeling I can't quite explain, a fleeting image that refuses to leave, a piece of music that seems to belong to someone I haven't met yet. By the time I write the opening line, I've often been living with the story for weeks, sometimes longer. The first sentence isn't really the beginning. It's an introduction.
The real challenge comes later, somewhere around the middle of every novel, when certainty starts to fade. The excitement of discovering something new gives way to the quieter work of actually understanding it. Characters become more complicated than you expected. Scenes refuse to behave the way you outlined them. Entire chapters get rewritten because one honest conversation changes everything after it. Those are the moments that ask the most of a writer. Not inspiration. Commitment.
Still Here taught me that lesson directly. It didn't start as a novel at all, just something I was writing for myself, with no ending in mind because it wasn't going anywhere in particular. I'd write a little, set it down for weeks, forget about it. Then, somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like something I was inventing and started feeling like something that already existed, and entire sections I'd been certain would stay had to go, not because they weren't well written, but because they belonged to an earlier version of the story than the one it was actually becoming.
Anyone can fall in love with the beginning of something. Staying with it, especially on the ordinary days, is what turns an idea into a finished manuscript.
There have been afternoons when the words arrived so easily it felt like I was just trying to keep up. There have been others when every paragraph demanded more patience than confidence. I've stopped measuring a writing day by how many pages I finished, because progress doesn't always look the way you'd expect. Sometimes it's finishing a chapter. Sometimes it's realizing a chapter doesn't belong at all. Sometimes the only thing I've accomplished all day is discovering that a character has been hiding the truth from me, and oddly enough, those are usually the days that make the story stronger.
I never worry much about the first sentence anymore. It's only the doorway. The real story gets built one ordinary day at a time, one honest decision after another, and every novel asks you to let go of something before it can become what it was always meant to be.
Until next time, may you always find beauty in the quiet places where stories begin.
Warmly,
Sheridan Laine
