The books say (and there are lots of books now, many more than when I started writing, not to mention blogs) every story needs a beginning, middle, end. They teach you how to write a perfect beginning, perfect middle, perfect end. Then you write the beginning, and there isn’t any life. The books didn’t talk about that. The beginning is inert, like those writing exercises you did in high school, compare and contrast. You know in your bones that the audience you hope for will be bored, demoralized, unable read. Eventually you abandon the beginning, declare a busman’s holiday. You write anything, a thousand-word monologue from the point of view of a character you barely know, and for the first time in weeks you feel life. Where does that fit, in the instruction manual? The part where you sense something wrong, like a diviner, and turn away, because you know there’s no water?