I don't know any creators of fictions who start writing with nothing but a blank page. (They may exist. I just haven't met any.) Mostly you have something. An image, or a character. And mostly you also have either a beginning, a middle or an end. Middles are good to have, because by the time you reach the middle you have a pretty good head of steam up; and ends are great. If you know how it ends, you can just start somewhere, aim, and begin to write (and, if you're lucky, it may even end where you were hoping to go)...

So there I was, four years ago, with only a beginning. And you need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go...

And one day I looked up, and it was January 2001, and I was sitting in an ancient and empty house in Ireland with a peat fire making no impression at all on the stark cold of the room. I saved the document on the computer, and I realized I'd finished writing a book.

I wondered what I'd learned, and found myself remembering something Gene Wolfe had told me, six months earlier. "You never learn how to write a novel," he said. "You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing."

Source

"Books are literary atom bombs capable of destroying stupidity, cant, insularity, and prejudice – if they are read." (The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts)