Getting started: Plant ass in chair, then play "What if?"

>People ask me, what does it take to get started writing a novel?  Well, for me my writers block broke, and the ideas just came flooding into my head.  It was so overwhelming I had to leap out of my shower, where I was when it happened, and run for paper and pencil.  Then I spent the next couple of hours wrapped in a towel, scribbling the ideas down on ten sheets of paper stolen from my printer.

When I finally stopped, my hair and towel were dry, and I had ten sheets of tightly cramped writing using both sides of each sheet. The ideas that rushed forth that day were the basis for the manuscript I am working on now, and I guess I should count myself lucky I had such an experience.  But many writers just can’t seem to get started.  I am not really an exception.  There were things I was doing that got those floodgates to burst. 

So how do you go about getting to the beginning of writing, pushing those ideas you have banging around in your head to the page?  I don’t remember where I heard it, but it is some of what I had been attempting to do before my writers block broke.  The answer is “ass in chair time”.

You must sit yourself down in the chair either with paper and pen, or an open blank page on your computer screen before you, and not allow yourself to leave from that spot until you have written something on the page.  Even if it is only, “Dear G*#, I have no idea what to write!”  Then play the “What if” game. (See earlier post)

That is what I was doing several weeks before the big flood of ideas in March of 2010.  See, I even remember the month in which it all started, because it was that momentous an occasion in my life from ideas for a great story, to actually getting them on paper.

Remember this:  “Ass in chair time” is where it starts.  So go plant your ass in a chair, and get writing!