What I usually have is a strong sense of at least one of the central characters and a strong sense of the beginning, and a vague sense of where the narrative is going, and more than anything else a psychic head of steam, a compulsion to tell the story. If I don’t feel so compelled, I’m better off waiting. Beginning too soon only prolongs the writing more than anything.
“Anyone who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it: yet this incommensurability, between the particular and the universal, between the vecu and language itself, is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge.”
Fredric Jameson | “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan”