Intros are hard

Never start a new project by trying to write your intro — that's advice I've given a bunch of times to new writers, and you know what? It's solid fucking gold.

"Start at the beginning" is necessary for retelling a finished story, but it's not necessary for writing that story from scratch.  

And, in fact, it's a great way to ensure your story never gets told at all.

Think about it: The intro is basically a sales pitch. If the intro isn't good, people won't buy the book. Or if they do buy it, they won't read it — and an unread book is an unloved book, and unloved books don't spread. If your intro isn't good, your book is doomed.

No biggie, just an entire future's worth of pressure crashing down on you as you stare at the blank page.

The natural urge is to cram it all in, write the perfect opening sentence, perfectly set the stage for all that's to come.

Which is hilarious, because of course that's impossible at the beginning. You, the creator, don't know all of what's to come. I don't care how detailed your outline is!

Books emerge out of chaos and action, refined.

Real bookwriting works like this:

• you create your plan
• you start writing
• you discover a lot of your ideas don't work at all when put to page…
• and new ideas emerge from the motive power of writing itself

And that's fine! As long as you know it. It sucks hard if you believe you've set down every step in a golden path from which you cannot deviate.

I've learned all this from long experience.

I didn't write the JFS v1 intro first; I started on chapters where I really knew what I wanted to say. The intro I left for close to the end. I knew better.

But now I find myself in a different situation and it calls for a different approach.

Producing the second edition of JFS isn't a matter of editing a little here and there. It's more like major surgery.

What got me here won't get me where I want to be.

One of the big things I want to add to JFS v2 is thematic consistency. It's not that v1 is very inconsistent, but its lack of intentional consistency undermines its power.

There's real magic in hearing the subtle beats of the same ideas carefully reflected, page after page. And that magic doesn't happen by accident.

I've got to set up those powerful themes up front.

I know what those themes are, in a meaningful sense… but I don't know their crispy final form — the exact words, the turns of phrase — until I've actually written them.

And I can't go editing the rest of the book — I can't make it consistent — until I've got them in hand.

Rewriting the intro first has to happen.

Because the intro is where that thematic consistency will be set up.

And it has not been easy.

I've stewed awhile. I've re-read my notes. I've stewed some more.

One day I felt a glimmer of a framework coalescing in my mind, so I sat down and banged out a new version. I framed the crispy new idea of an invisible wall between you and your goals. I set us up to talk about the way our society prepares us to fail at our own projects. Those are two key ideas lurking underneath every chapter in v1, but which I never explicitly surfaced.

I thought it was pretty good, if in need of editing!

Then Alex came along and poked a bunch of holes in it. And he was right! That didn't mean I was sure how to fix them, though. I had a few thoughts but they were too snarly so I let it drop to the back of my mind and stew some more.

Only now, weeks later, have I figured out exactly what I'm going to do. Pretty sure.

I'm going to have to write it again to find out.

Sometimes that's the process!

But if it's this hard when I'm working from an entire book's worth of content, and tons of notes, and long experience… it sure as hell won't work if you're starting from scratch.