I’ve been writing the occasional blog post now for a site called The History Quill, which is devoted to historical fiction in all its variety. It’s primarily an editing service, providing services for writers keen to hone their work-in-progress, but the book club and the blog are great sources of interesting ideas of new books to discover — or old favourites to revisit.

The most recent blog I wrote for The History Quill considers whether or not a prologue is a good — or useful — or effective — way to start a novel. Is the prologue simply a place to pop all that tricky detail it’s too hard to weave into the story itself? Or can a well-written prologue set the tone, introduce the themes, present the backstory, or foreshadow the ending?

It was an interesting one to write. My work-in-progress has a prologue. Sort of. And I’ve been wrestling with whether or not it works that way. I think it does. At least, I hope it does. It feels like the right way to start.

And my students, almost without exception, finding starting a piece of writing — whether that’s an essay or an exam answer or a piece of creative work — the hardest part.  I watch them (or I used to, before our sessions all went online for the duration) hover their pens over that blank space on the page where they think they should begin, waiting for inspiration to strike. Probably hoping, if truth be known, that I’ll give in and give them a clue.

My top tip, particularly for exams, is don’t start at the beginning. I often tell students to leave a few lines and then get straight into what they want to say. “You can always go back later and fill it in,” I tell them. And they rarely do. Instead, they start where they were supposed to start — just a few empty lines further down — and that ends up being just fine.

I’m working with a client right now, too, on writing a book about her work. We’ve talked a lot about why she’s writing it and who’s it’s for — and now she’s gone away to write the introduction. I’ve broken up this first piece of writing into 8 questions she’ll need to answer — and asked her to write as much as she can about each one. Then send me each one, unedited as she finishes it. Most of what she writes, honestly, won’t make it into the final draft, of that I’m certain. Right now, we’re in the ‘write drunk’ stage of the ‘write drunk, edit sober’ process. But writing it out, with the luxury of time to hack and slash… I mean, hone and craft carefully… later is just the right place to start writing. Might not be the right place to start reading, but we’ll end up there eventually.

It’s the starting that’s the hard part. And it’s not always pretty. But it’s always important. One foot in front of the other. One word, then another, then another. You’ll end up somewhere. And who knows? Might even be where you thought you were heading in the first place.