The tyranny of the blank page

Yesterday was a decent day's writing. I wrote over 1500 words which took me over 25,000 in total, leaving me 3000 ahead of the 1000-a-day total. Those 1500 words also took me to the end of a chapter, which meant that I had to snap from one stream of the story to the other. (And in this story the two streams are currently about 600 years apart, so it's a big a leap)

Getting to the end of a chapter after writing so many words would normally feel like a natural place to take a break, but I made myself go on and write the first sentence of the next chapter before finishing. One of those natural stumbling blocks for me in writing is having a blank page in front of me. Once I've got a few words down on it, it's easy enough for me to pick up the thread and follow on from there, but while it sits there with nothing on it, it's so full of potential and possibility that it can be off-putting.

The longer I look at a blank page, the harder it becomes to work out what the first word on it will be, let alone the first sentence. I remember all the great opening lines in literary history - and some of the not-so-great - and realise that how you start a story, a book or a chapter matters, and suddenly the critic within me starts pointing out that every word I think of is far too cliched to begin a chapter with. Any sentence I write looks clunky and horrible, and is immediately disappeared by the backspace key, and before long I'm just staring at the page, unsure if I could even write my own name on something, let alone creative words on a page.

So that's why I made sure to finish with one sentence on the new chapter last night, and now I'm looking at it again, I've already got an idea of what follows it, thanks to the lead I laid down yesterday, and I'm hoping for a good day's writing. I say that every day, don't I? But I'd like to get a big chunk of this done and then have a quick bash at some short stories I began last year - one of them's been nagging at me again, and I want to give it another try. I know I should be concentrating on the story I've started, but I did promise myself that on some days of this challenge, I'd get a 1000 words or so of that done, and then do some more on another project. Maybe today is the first of those days.

Total so far is 25,068, anyway. On we go...