Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out where your story starts, the style that fits it, the way it wants to be told. When I was starting the Codename Omega series, I had the pieces of the story. I had fragments of plot and beginnings of characters, but whenever I sat down to start writing, the story faltered. The flame of inspiration sputtered out within a couple of pages. Something just didn’t feel right, just didn’t grab me and make me want to sit down and tell the story. Except that’s not quite true. I definitely wanted to tell the story – but I didn’t want to tell the story this way.

When I started writing the first book in the series, I thought it was going to be like the other books I’d written up to that point, Child of the Hive and the book I was at the time trying to find a publisher for, Shadows of Tomorrow. I thought it would be an ensemble story told through a group of characters with a range of different viewpoints. I thought the main characters of the story were going to be Navy, Knight, Princess, and the others of Nuke’s team. But there was a character lingering in the back of my mind. I wanted one of Mrs Grey’s team to switch sides. I knew I had to make sure that the change of allegiances felt genuine, that the character’s justification made sense, and the more I thought about it, the more this character seemed like the interesting one, the one with a story to tell.

So I tried again. I sat myself down at the keyboard certain that this time the story would work. I had my new protagonist and it was time for her to get to work.

Except the story petered out in the first couple of pages. Again. Something still wasn’t right.

I’m not sure how many times I started and stopped that story before it started working for me, but it must have been at least half a dozen, probably more than ten. It was OK though, because I kept trying new angles until I found the one that worked. Something clicked and the story started to flow and before I knew it, I had a first draft.

The reason this springs to mind now is that I have another story that’s behaving in the same way. I’ve tried starting this story three times now and it doesn’t feel right. I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my head but they won’t cooperate and get on the page in any way that seems to work, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on this story. It just means I have to try and find a new angle. I’m going to try starting in a new place or with a different character, looking at the story from a new perspective. I have all the pieces of a good story as long as I keep trying to find the place to begin.

That’s the piece of advice I want to give you: find a different angle. If you’re struggling to know where to start, pick a different character and explain how they got involved in the story, try changing it from first person to third person or vice versa, start it earlier, start it later. It’s OK to get frustrated sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that the story isn’t worth writing.