Time for my deep, dark confession people: I suck at beginnings.

Every blessed one of my first drafts has the same damn problem: Sloooooow. Draggy. Too much exposition and not enough action.

One key writer thing you should always do is drop your reader into a story in progress and introduce the backstory in bits and important pieces.

I manage to sort of do that most of the time (but not enough of the time) but I have a bad habit of letting stuff simmer and percolate for far too long before stuff starts really happening. Every single time I rewrite I battle this, and something tells me it’s not going away anytime soon.

My personal cross to bear, I suppose, but at least I’m aware of it, thanks to some great beta readers (I cannot stress how important they are) and my own weathered eye.

And off I go, to liven things up. What’s your personal writing issue?