"If you're only going to write when you're inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist – because you're going to have to make your word count today, and those words aren't going to wait for you, whether you're inspired or not. So you have to write when you're not "inspired." ... And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year later, you're going to look back and you're not going to remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to be written."
"The process of writing can be magical – there times when you step out of an upper-floor window and you just walk across thin air, and it's absolute and utter happiness. Mostly, it's a process of putting one word after another."
Credit: Brain Pickings Weekly 9/15/13
Credit: Brain Pickings Weekly 9/15/13
Both of these points are so true and for reasons not hard to fathom they struck a cord with me. I've recently been working on the last few developmental edits of my current WIP - A Thriller. This weekend I awoke on Saturday morning wanting to dig in and be productive. I instead spent an hour and a half reading posts on Facebook, and looking at video from the recent flooding along the Colorado Front Range. The two tasks were somewhat related since many of my friends were affected by the flooding.
After a tall glass of water I clicked Safari closed and started reading through my working outline for the novel. Before long, well actually it took about 2 hours, I had jotted down a list of new scenes that I wanted to write to add to a sub-plot I'd been noodling all week. An hour or two later I had the words on the paper and the scenes seemed to make sense.
This morning I woke up wanting to dig into what I'd written yesterday and edit it. Instead I sat at my computer early this morning feeling tired and unmotivated. I decided a shower was worth having and headed upstairs from my basement writing office to our master bedroom.
It was there under the constant stream of warm water that my mind drifted off to a place within my plot I'd been struggling to visit all morning. An idea came to me. Then I thought back to something I wrote in a novel I constructed back in 2010 and the excitement came. I could use this same idea for hiding money one wants to smuggle out of a country on a corporate jet the same way I'd hidden weapons in the unpublished 2010 novel.
I emerged from the shower excited and ready to write.
After a tall glass of water I clicked Safari closed and started reading through my working outline for the novel. Before long, well actually it took about 2 hours, I had jotted down a list of new scenes that I wanted to write to add to a sub-plot I'd been noodling all week. An hour or two later I had the words on the paper and the scenes seemed to make sense.
This morning I woke up wanting to dig into what I'd written yesterday and edit it. Instead I sat at my computer early this morning feeling tired and unmotivated. I decided a shower was worth having and headed upstairs from my basement writing office to our master bedroom.
It was there under the constant stream of warm water that my mind drifted off to a place within my plot I'd been struggling to visit all morning. An idea came to me. Then I thought back to something I wrote in a novel I constructed back in 2010 and the excitement came. I could use this same idea for hiding money one wants to smuggle out of a country on a corporate jet the same way I'd hidden weapons in the unpublished 2010 novel.
I emerged from the shower excited and ready to write.
Interesting stuff. Glad to see that in the end you got yourself motivated and worked on your book.
ReplyDeleteThanks Charles.
ReplyDelete