All writing begins with a blank page. Actually, for me that is not true. All my writing begins in my head. I have never sat down at a computer screen and stared at a blank Word page waiting for ideas to come. The ideas are usually kicking about my head for a long time before I decide to sit down and start tapping keys. I have tried writing ideas down, but the weird thing is that as soon as I do that, I seem to lose interest in them. Many writers keep jotters for this purpose, and it seems to work for them. I think that I prefer to mull the ideas over mentally and not commit them to the page until I feel ready.

One of the good things to come from this approach is that the blank page holds no terror for me! Nope, I am already to go as soon as I see that cursor blinking at the start of the first line. This does not mean that the idea that I am about to commit to the page is always going to work. My current project, Pomerania, is in fact a conglomerate of notions that I have had for stories but realised that they lacked the depth to run for a full 70,000 words. Quite a few of my concepts do not make it past the first draft. This is one reason why I work loosely on the first draft; if the idea is good enough then it will survive, and I will not have spent too much time in discovering this fact.