What are you going to write about on Day One?

It is almost upon us. Bet you didn't think it would roll round so quickly. bet you can't wait to get started. Bet you'd do anything for another day. Welcome to nanoland. It's a confusing place.

Day One is hugely important. It is, in fact, the most important day of the lot - apart from Day Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and so on, right up to Day Thirty.

But Day One is special. It isn't like any other day in Nanowrimo, because if you screw up on Day One, while the impact on your daily word count might not be that great (assuming you wrote nothing at all, your daily target for the rest of the month would be 1725 - 60 words extra a night), but the psychological impact is huge.

Missing the target on any day is bad, because it immediately increases the volume of all those little voices of doubt. Suddenly the "You're going to fail ... why bother ... it's too much," muttered sotto voce, but a bellowing howl of "FAILURE! I TOLD YOU SO! YOU ... CAN'T DO IT! YOU SCREWED UP! ON THE VERY FIRST DAY!"

And they won't go away, even if you catch up. And that is a very heavy weight to carry about all month long.

So, best not to stuff up on the first day, eh?

As mentioned previously, I'm not a big planner. What plans I make, I tend to put aside at the last moment, in favour of some madcap scheme. Even so, I like to think things out before I start writing. So while I might not know what is going to happen in my novel, I usually come up with the bones of what I'll be writing about in the first scene, which should get me through the first couple of days. It isn't much more than a bunch of bullet points, but it will be enough for me to build on. I'll also know what my first line is going to be. I'll repeat it over to myself, savouring it, looking forward to getting the damn thing out of my head and onto the page. the scene around it can visualise, even if I don't know precisely how I'm going to describe it.

Whether or not you've got a clear plan, it is time to start visualizing that first scene. Explore it in your head, Give your narrator a voice and let him describe it. Play it in your mind like the perfect film that the greatest director of all time would make of your book.

Rehearse your opening lines - nothing is more satisfying than sitting down to write on day one, tapping away at the keyboard and (in your head) crying out, "Fifty words in a minute! Take that, Nanobeast! At this rate, I'll be finished in 5,000 minutes, which is only 83.33 hours! Which is less than three and a half days!" Of course, it doesn't work like that, because after those first fifty words everything becomes more difficult, but it is satisfying to get some little black marks marching across the deadly whiteness of the screen ...