Has anyone on here had that spark of inspiration, that idea that just pops in to your head that screams "I need to be written!"? So far, I've done well with character motives, settings, novel progression, grammar, punctuation... The list could go on. But every time ideas float through my mind in my daydreaming at work, in bed, or wherever it may strike, I'm never left with anything overly compelling to write about. I haven't had 'that idea' that has made me want to fill a notebook from the front page to the back. No plot that has basically written itself. It is quite frustrating. Has anyone had that moment when they've stumbled across something that they just knew they had to write? At the moment it feels like I'm forcing my writing too much... Trying too hard to get something from a story that doesn't really even entertain me. Sure, if written well, the story could be great! But without the inspiration, that feeling that this is something I just have to share, my attempts at writing often come up short Let me know about your own experiences! Thanks guys!
All the time man, all the time. I know how you feel. There's been times where I'm just listening to some good ol' rock and roll, and then I just start to image an amazing scene in my novel where it would just be perfect, BUT then I go to write, and I have a hard time putting the words down to explain it. I think it's one of those things that you just have to force yourself to write it even though you hate what your writing and just want to burn the pages. I think you'd do this because you just revise it later, duh! (If only I had thought of that before)
Only once, really. I can be impatient and lose interest in things, so that kind of spark had to be there for me to write 80,000 words about it...
that's a common and frequent occurrence among 'seasoned' writers... and having trouble getting it down 'just right' is common enough among beginners, that you shouldn't worry about it... do what cerrus wisely advises and write it anyway... often the inspiration will hit as you're doing it... and if it's still a slogging job, at least you'll have something down on paper/computer to work over later...
Thanks guys, it's surprising how far a little encouragement from peers can take you! Currently typing words like a madman (with the intent of course to revise later ) I think I try to perfect a paragraph, if not a sentence, too much on my first go. I really need to allow myself the lenience to just write!
The need to write is the itch, not the inspiration. The inspiration is the news item, or the song lyric in your head, or the shadow you half-imagined in your peripheral vision that germinates into a story idea. But some inspirations fizzle. You start toying with that flash of an idea, and realize it really doesn't take you anywhere you can get excited about. No matter. There are always more inspirations than there is time to develop each one into a story.
This was a big problem for me, though I worked out a good system to deal with it. Hopefully my idea can help someone else in a similar situation! Whenever an idea comes to me during writing, I add to a 'thoughts and ideas' document. Much like the writing itself, at the end of a session I will review my ideas and separate them in to two categories: 1) Ideas that are relevant to my current work 2) Ideas that might be useful for starting, or continuing, future works. Hope someone else can successfully implement a similar system, if it's not already common practice
Actually, I wrote a Writing Prompts program. It enter those stray ideas into it, and each day, I am presented with one of them at random.
This must be very common. I have an "Ideas" document. Every time I get an idea for a story, I type it into that document. I have to remember to back it up every once in a while, because my old computer crashed and burned back in March and I lost a lot of ideas. But that probably doesn't matter. I find that, when I read over my Ideas document a long time later, that most of the ideas are garbage. Does anybody else do that? Do you come up with an idea you're excited about, but three weeks later it looks like crap?
That happens to me all the time. I want to write a novel so badly, but every time I come up with something I only like the idea for a couple of days. It's annoying.
