I joined up just to ask this question, even though I guess I know in my heart what the answer is. My question is, how do you learn to consistently “fall in” to what you’re writing, the answer being, I assume, practice. I started writing fiction in high school, then majored in Creative Writing in college. I’ve have been out of college for eight years now, but I’ve only just had my first experience of really “falling in” to a story I was writing. I think non-writers would just label it a period of inspiration, but whatever it was, it was profound. The story wrote itself, and I don’t just mean that writing it came easily or that good ideas were popping into my head. The ideas were jumping onto the page before I was hardly aware of them. They came from nowhere. I would start lines of dialog with no idea what a character was going to say, without the slightest clue what a character was even thinking, and the words would end up being perfect. I’m not usually able to distract my conscious mind enough to prevent a lot of unwanted plot suggestions from popping into my head, various directions to “take” a story. It has been my goal, lately, to not “take” the story anywhere and to let the story go where it will. It’s a goal I often can’t meet at all. I’ll wait and wait for the story to speak by itself, I’ll scrape out a few pages, then realize that they have no life, that they didn’t come from the story but from what some part of me wants the story to be. Erase, erase, erase. Go back and find the place where the story still has a soul. Try again. But then this… thing. It was an entirely new story, no plot outline, no character sketches, and I had no idea what it would be about when I started writing. Being “in it” lasted two hours, and I got sixteen pages out of it. Maybe that’s not a lot to some of you but it’s a lot to me. And now I’m haunted by it. All I want is to get back “in it,” somehow. It was sixteen pages but the story had only begun. I want the feeling of writing like that again. If writing was always like that, I would never stop. So now I’m here to ask those who have written a lot more than me, have you experienced this? Does it ever become a regular thing?
I'll give you one of my favorite quotes: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” ~ Stephen King You just gotta keep the ball rolling. Unplug the tv, close the shutters and commit yourself to writing. Anything. Just write. Even if you just open up the TV guide and read the synopsis of a random show and write that.
Hi, Yes, the muse hits you from time to time, and it's great. The last time one visited me it was after I'd seen a 70's telly show again, and I wrote a full length novel based on the concept in a month. That was awesome. But mostly there's no way to force it. You simply have to stump up and write. Often though, if you invest yourself in your characters, if you want them to do well or fail or whatever, that helps. So write a main character that you like. Other then that look for inspiration elsewhere. Watch shows on similar themes, read books with similar plots, talk to your friends and family about what you're writing. All of that may help spark something. Cheers, Greg.
You have to learn - and ALL of us have to learn, me included - to write when we don't feel like writing. To write when it seems to us that the story isn't there. I think that's the strength of the writers who get published versus those of us who haven't been, yet. You gotta work.
This. I would reccomend King's 'On Writing'. I quote from it a lot but it's full of such great insights into someone who cranks out bestsellers like everyone else pays a light bill. It's hard. It aint easy. Sometimes I sit at my computer and dread writing anything. Sometimes I will actually start insulting my computer and the fact that I have to write. Try it sometime, it works. Something like: I stared at my computer. What a worthless peice of bollocks, I thought. No, I am not going to give this mechanical menace any of my writing. I will play solitaire endlessly, purposefully clicking the bombs just to piss it off. I have literally written thousands of words of useless garbage. But I wrote them, through grit-teeth, through tantrums, and through depression. I know how hard it is. But it can change your life. ~ J. J.
