To Begin

In 2007, I started my first blog. These are the words that I started with. They are still completely relevant.

Beginnings are awkward and uncomfortable. They are full of frozen moments where you don’t know the right words or how you should act. You wonder how you will be judged or if anyone will even listen.

In starting this blog, I am taken back to my first attempts at short story writing. I realize that I still haven’t gotten over my aversion to beginnings. I was always better to just jump in, start writing, and then once I had the ending figured out, the beginning would become so beautifully apparent.

I’m doing this because I love writing. I’ll most likely veer off on more tangents than imaginable, but then again, isn’t that the point? Maybe one of these days I’ll even figure out the perfect beginning.

The most beautiful beginning that I know:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

– from Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston