Because I’m a nerd at heart.
Also because humans are made of chemicals so this intrinsically makes sense to me.
Translation for the non-nerds: There’s a thing called “activation energy” in chemistry (also applies to any couch you’re trying to move to find the remote)—it’s a lot harder to get the thing (say a reaction) going than to keep it going. In another form, it’s Newton’s First Law: that object at rest? It really wants to stay at rest. Inertia is a real thing, for macro objects in the real world and for writer brains. This means STARTING the story is way freaking harder than continuing the story.
I’ve written lots of stories (30+ and that’s just the novels). It’s still like this. Every. Single. Time.
That’s a force of the universe if I’ve ever known one.
How to get over your personal Activation Energy Hump? There are lots of strategies. Meditation is the only one I’ve found that works every single time… so I tend to go immediately to that. But there are lots of ways. Open up The War of Art and read any random page. Talk a walk. Sing Frozen’s “Let it Go!” with enough power to scare the neighbors. (Hint: I’ve done all these things.) Whatever it takes to lower your Resistance, which is what that small mountain on the graph is made of. Everyone has their own way of getting over the hump, but don’t believe anyone who says they don’t experience it. We all do.
