Writer's Bloc 2 - First Page

I've held off this article mostly to let the Blogger challenge get noticed, I've had two takers so far, one dropped out on reasonable grounds and another who'se blog is apparently to high brow to stoop to my level! The challenge achieved it's main goal, which is to get people to actually read and comment on this thing, and it got at least one participant who was completely new to my blog. The standing record is Seven - if anyone is interested read the previous post and see if you can beat it.

The other reason I've held off is because I've not really written much and it's kind of embarrasing - but honesty is what these articles are about so I've decided to press on regardless. In one sense a first page is a meaningless thing, it's just a tiny fraction of what will be a large piece and by the time the whole thing has been written, rewritten and edited no two words will remain the same.

But on the other hand it's a big step and a good sign of things to come. Writing the first page means taking the idea from your head and actually putting it on paper (or screen to be accurate) and making what could be into what is. This can be an ugly and disillusioning process and can serve to show which of your wild imaginings that seemed genius at the time simply don't work. Writing it down means testing your writing skills as well as your imagination, putting the project onto a different playing field. Working through the first page, which took me well over an hour, made me face the reality of writing a book and reminded me of the seriousness of the task.

I've got a long way to go, but the first step is there to spur me on and while starting to write shows the greatness of the task it also shows the goal ahead and the pleasure of creating new work. I've currently taken it as far as it can go without more research so expect to get more snippets of information in the near future.

Farewell for now

Word of the post: Exemplar - noun

1.	a model or pattern to be copied or imitated