Choice paralysis

Starting a completely new story is exciting. There aren’t any constraints to worry about:  no dangling plot threads that you have to tie up, no previously established background that you have to stay consistent with, no inconvenient mysteries or revelations that you’re stuck with. It’s a clean slate, full of fresh new possibilities.

At least, it is until you sit down and try to start writing. Faced with a clean sheet of paper, a blank word-processor screen, or an empty file, a significant number of writers are immediately struck with choice paralysis.

Choice paralysis is the term I use for the inability to move forward because the author has a) way too many possible options to choose from, and b) a deep and abiding fear that whatever they pick, there’s a much better choice out there that they’re missing. In extreme cases, the author is convinced that not choosing the “best” option will result in a substandard book, or even in one that’s a total, horrible disaster.

This isn’t a problem for everyone, and the folks who don’t suffer from it are often unsympathetic. “Just write it!” my extremely decisive mother used to say. “It’s fiction; you’re supposed to just make it up!”

The thing they don’t always realize is that it’s not a problem with making things up. It’s a problem with making too manythings up. It’s usually worst during the story-development stage and early chapters, when the writer starts with infinite possibilities and every single word that goes down on the page eliminates great swaths of them. “She” – eliminates an entire gender – half the human/elvish/dwarvish/animal race, and maybe more if one is dealing with aliens who have more than two sexes. “She sat” – eliminates, in addition, the possibility that “she” is a fish or some other creature that can’t sit, as well as eliminating many, many other things she could have been doing – running, standing, swimming, fighting. “She sat in” – eliminates a whole lot of things that you have to sit on, rather than in – a rock, the floor, a table, the hood of a car.

Maybe it would be better if it was he and not she, thinks the paralyzed writer. Maybe she should be fighting something – aren’t I supposed to begin with action? Or thinking something. Or…maybe I should start with dialog. Yeah, that’s good; she can be talking to an elf…wait, I was going to make this a hard science fiction story, not fantasy. An alien? OK. So she’s talking to an alien, and says…And the minute the first word goes down, the writer is back second-guessing. If she says “I think the problem is a leak in your stardrive generator,” the story is going one way; if she says, “I’m here to negotiate the terms of the peace treaty,” the story is going a completely different direction, and what if the broken-generator story would be better than the diplomatic-mission story? Or the other way around?

At which point, the writer needs to back up a couple of paces, take a deep breath, and remind himself of a couple of things: First, that no decision has to be final. If he starts writing the broken-generator story and it just doesn’t work, he can go back and write the diplomatic-mission story. Or he can write a perfectly fine broken-generator story and then write a diplomatic-mission story in addition. Same for the starting point – if having the character in mid-conversation (or mid-fight, or mid-contemplation) doesn’t work out, the writer can go back and change things, adding more so that the story starts earlier or cutting paragraphs or scenes so that it starts later.

One can’t keep the story plastic forever, true; eventually, one has to commit to a final draft and send it out. But by that time, there’s usually enough material that one can tell what hangs together and what doesn’t; one isn’t stuck trying to predict whether this technique, scene, character, etc. will fit with an as-yet-unwritten mass of material that’s probably going to change significantly from whatever vague ideas one has in one’s head at the beginning.

The second thing to remember is that all those possible stories that one is pruning away with each additional word and phrase are not necessarily better than whatever one actually produces. They’re just different. A brilliantly written broken-generator story is not better or worse than a brilliantly written diplomatic-mission story. They’ll likely appeal to different readers, but that’s not an indication of quality. And if you want to write both, there’s nothing stopping you.

Once the initial panic has subsided, the next step is to make some decisions. They can be arbitrary; in fact, they probably will be at this stage. The point is to cut down on the number of choices the writer is facing. If you make a cold-blooded decision to write a fantasy, then when that voice starts whispering in your head that maybe a science fiction story would be better, you can tell yourself firmly that you are not writing that story today. You’ve already decided on a fantasy, and you’re sticking to it.

What those decisions are doesn’t really matter. I tend to begin by deciding a lot of the worldbuilding and backstory – knowing where my characters are and what they’ve done up to now gives me a handle on where they can go and what they can do next. Other writers find worldbuilding dull and dry, or dislike being tied down too tightly in that area, so they start by making decisions about their plot or their characters. It really doesn’t matter, as long as you get to the point where you’ve decided enough things that any remaining decisions don’t stall you dead in your tracks before you’ve written the third or fourth word of your first sentence.