Just where do you start?

[EdwardCullenCanHaveMySoul]

Hi all,
I'm dying to start writing, have some good original (I think!) ideas but have no idea where or how to start.
I literally haven't written since i was at school. I have these 'mental movies' as I call them, flying round my head but they're so bitty I can't even begin to think about how to get them down.
Did anyone else start this way? What do you do to fix your ideas down?
Any advice for a newbie would be gratefully appreciated
TIA

i think like pan says you have to write the initial stuff wont be useable but it will build into better stuff

unles if course you are not imginative or talented

maybe we should lure tony parsons to a cottage on bodmuin moor during the livechat

That is my fear Zippi, that I'll start to write things down and discover that I'm absolutely dreadful! Fingers crossed....

Bodmin Moor would be a great place to write! Any moor for that matter...we could lay a trail of pulitzers for him to follow!

one technique that I have used to write my trite rubbish is the use of lots of spider diagrams - have a small circle in the middle of a page, with lines leading off, at the end of which are the associated notions/quotes etc that emanate from that central thought/concept. Have lots of them for each - even further lines leading off each spiders leg, but all relating to the intial central theme. It reflects more how our creative minds work than having a continuous prose, or even bullet points as triggers. IM tortured E.

pan

do you havr an english degree

or anyonhe on this thread i always think people who have english degrees ate frustrated writetrs

sedward cullen who were you before

no - I DID get an A at A Level for Eng Lit, but then got all intersted in social policy, and life took a different turn. I DO write stuff, in bursts when time permits...

et toi??

oh i have english degree from marxists

and have been back to creativity since art wise

i know i have novels in me

i ahd an interview for a creative writing ma at sheffield but it was poetry

i didnt get a plcae but that was ages ago

some good ideas for me too - I quite like the freewriting idea. I think you just have to start writing and take it from there. My trouble is that I think whole passages in my head but never get around to writing them down and forget them. I WILL write something down tommorow too.

Sorry, went off to bed!
Yes Zippi, I have an English degree and yes I'm definitely a frustrated writer!
Please excuse me for being all cloak and dagger about who I was before -it's just that I'm enjoying the anonimity as know quite a few people on here in RL (not that I was incredibly well known before though)

I too have millions of ideas swirling around my head.
In my experience to get anywhere you have to settle on one at a time and plan meticulously.
This will show you if the idea has legs or if it is just what I call a 'sparkle'.
I literally plot out, scene by scene, and it is soon obvious which ideas will develop and which will stall.

Have written poem thing (yesterday).
Am insanely pleased with it.
Think possibly have at last (aged 46) found a voice.

Psycho - do you not worry that courses like that are just putting off the ineviatble? IE just getting on with the business of writing?

Count is now three respectable poem efforts (two better than the other one, but hey, it's all about practice), plus on the way another one about ds being stopped in Venice by an ancient nearly incomprehensible prophet who insisted he (ie, ds) was the astronaut of the future and would in due course be sending him (ie, the prophet) a postcard from the Moon.

We decided, pro tem, this was about time travel, but we will see what the writing effort ends up saying. As they tend to decide their own point, I find.

Just start. Pen and paper is best at first, scribble madly and see how it pans out.
Good luck.

Oh, and if anyone's going to lure Tony Parsons to an isolated cottage, bags I be the one to booby-trap it from top to bottom