The first word

"The first step in a journey is often one of the hardest," the old lady prof said, walking between our desks toward the front of the room. She paced. A lot. "So it's understandable that the first page in your short-story is going to be hard to start. However, unlike that first step that leads the bastard to that fake-titted tramp in Saginaw, you can rewrite your first page as much as you need. Who knows, it might fill out the last few pages that you're aching to get." She wrote something down in the notebook she kept open on the desk at the front of the room. She looked up at us, folded her hands in front of her faded and patterned green blouse, and smiled. "So, five to seven pages, fiction, due in two weeks, and remember: your audience can tell if you did the whole thing the night before. Go home and just start writing, don't worry about page count or grammar. Then go over it, rewrite it, whatever you have to do." She looked at her watch. "We can leave fifteen minutes early today. That should encourage you all to get started early."

So I did, I went home and started writing. I did three pages about a guy who gets hit by a car and then falls in love with his nurse. Later that night, I read it, highlighted all the text and deleted it. I decided to write instead about a man who has a one night stand, gets hit by a car and then finds out his doctor is married to the woman he slept with.

Eight full deletes later I decided on a story about a man who hits a nurse with his car and fears taking her into the hospital because someone will recognize her and he'll get arrested, or so he thinks.

The story never works. As I write, the dialogue starts to suck more and more. I can't finish it. The whole thing becomes a constant stream about how this guy is impotent in his life.

Before I know it, it's been two weeks. I'm sitting in class with the printed out versions of my story, doing last minute edits, scratching, scribbling, throwing in commas, trying to salvage two weeks work.

Time's up. We distribute our stories to each other. Soon I have a stack of eight stories to read for our next class period. I start going through them as the old lady prof goes on about sentence structure. She acts as if we don't know how to use proper punctuation; who does she think we are.

The first story is an erotic tale about two Japanese girls who have to stay with a big, fat, hairy man and decide that, for fun, they're going to fuck him. It's five pages of poorly described impossible sex acts climaxing in, well, a climax. The second is a non-fiction story about a woman's first hunting trip. the third consists mainly of run on sentences with no capitalization and obviously no thought given to weather or not the authour splld ne of the word rite. It goes on like this.

I realize something. The biggest challenge I'll ever face as a writer is getting a good story out. Something that makes people think. The rest of these suckers? They're lucky to be coherent. There is one truly amazing tale given to me about a woman who falls in love with her dog. It's strangely compelling. Still, her dog?

A week later we get back a graded version of our paper. Mine is an A-.