Is it OK to eat your pudding before your main course?

Eating your pudding before your main will fill you up and you won’t have room for your dinner, you’ll miss out on the nutritious part of your meal and it will go to waste. But wait, that’s just stuff your mum worried about when you were a kid, right? Go ahead, eat your dessert first, who cares. If anything it will only stimulate your tastebuds and get your saliva flowing in preparation for your main. That’s right, you heard it here first, dessert is the perfect appetiser, just the thing to whet the appetite before the satisfaction of the main course.

When I was in 6th form I had this friend called Jed. He had the same thing every day; chips and gravy, followed by an iced bun. After he had finished his iced bun, he would return to the left-over gravy on the plate and spoon it idly into his mouth why chatting about girls or music.

This makes my think about writing. Is it OK to start at the end and leave the beginning til after you’ve written the middle? Of course it is. It doesn’t matter which way round the parts are written, what’s much more important is that you actually write something.

Often, finding the beginning causes the most frustration. You can write and delete a 1st line many times in an effort to perfect it, but where does that get you? If you start writing with the attitude this is not going to be the first line of the final draft, you’ll get more done because it’s out of the way then isn’t it, that dreaded 1st line:

“coffee aromas drifting bitterly from the mug in front of me, heading for the window where a world of barista heaven promises an exciting adventure. And while I watch the steam drift loosely into the frosty January morning air, I remember myself as a 10 year old, my first day of school, on a morning just like this.”

It doesn’t make much sense to begin with but by the end of the paragraph it’s the beginning of a story.

The important thing is write. Don’t hum and haw over it.