Your Quote of the Day

Some say to write a first and second chapter and then toss the first chapter.

Just one more, sorry. And then I'm done for awhile...
(It's supposed to be one a day, I know.)

From Spartacus (1960):

Senator: "Crassus is the only man in Rome who hasn't yielded to republican corruption, and never will!"
Gracchus: "I'll take some republican corruption along with some republican freedom, but I won't take the dictatorship of Crassus and no freedom at all!"

There are no hard and fast rules on a thread like this.

That's what stops people writing, micro editing before they even start. Don't do any rewriting until the 1st draft is finished. Keep going forwards.

That's good advice. When I get finished with my novel, I intend to rewrite at least half of Chapter One.

When I write I've only got a vague idea of where it's going, so it's not until I get there that I know how I should have set off. Sometimes things just come when I'm sat down at the desk, characters, plot twists right out of the blue.

Jason Goldman is a prime example of what happens when you spend to much time researching and setting things out instead of getting on with it.

NaNoWriMo was the best thing I ever did. It makes you advance the work without wrestling with your better judgment. The results for me did not seem different than if I used a slower method. I also usually have only a vague plot in mind in the beginning.

It was my wife's illness and death that finally kicked me up the arse. I'd been plodding through my first novel for years. That galvanised me right enough. I finished it just about 2 weeks before Wrimo started, and that was the first I'd heard of it. I didn't have any energy left.

One tactic I use is to stop when hung up, long enough to write or at least start another book or short story. It often helps.

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.”
― Groucho Marx

"Man, you're ill. This isn't Spain, you know. This is England."

--Duke of Norfolk to Thomas More, A Man For All Seasons

"Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great."

- Cher (Singer, actress, producer, 1946-)

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami

“To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”

This invisibility is political.”
― Michael S. Kimmel, Privilege: A Reader

That's "white privilege" in a nutshell. This country is a changing, but it's going to take several more decades.

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right
look like wrong, and wrong like right.”
― Black Hawk, Black Hawk: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.
- Mexican Proverb

“In the middle distance, sails were gliding like butterflies, and farther away, ships dotted the mouth of the bay between Awa and Sagami as if brushed in ink in a single flowing stroke.”
― Haruo Shirane, Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900

Japan has an interesting history beginning with Commodore Perry, and followed by General McArthur. They both had huge impacts on that country.
I have visited Japan twice; once with a Buddhist Church group, and on another trip on our own in 1982. It was interesting to visit the city of my ancestors; Hiroshima, where I met some family members, but could not communicate with them. We also visited my wife's ancestral home in Okayama, and saw the house her father had paid to build, but it stood empty. My first reaction was, what a waste.