inspiration – Words: I love them

I’m writing like a fiend.

Despite all odds, I have managed to write every single day this month. Even when I ended up in the ER, through the death of a pet and the adoption of a new one, and the last minute frantic planning of WordCamp Austin, I have found time to put words down on virtual paper, and to stay at or above “par” almost every day.

For proof, here’s today’s stats:

The diagonal line represented “par”, or the total number of words I needed to log in order to stay on track to reach 50K by April 30. Each bar is the total wordcount to date, and whether I was above or below par by that day.

As you can see, I’ve cut it close. When I did NaNoWriMo last November, even with traveling out of the country for a week I made much better progress:

I attribute the differences to a few things. Of course it goes without saying that the chaotic life I’ve led this month has hurt me. Beyond that, though, I think it was easier to write the first time because it was my first time doing NaNo; it was a brand new concept and I was discovering things and inventing characters constantly, which kept me excited; and perhaps most of all, there was an active community of fellow writers who had write-ins, and chatted a lot on forums and on Facebook, and we received almost daily writing encouragement from novelists. This time it was much more of a solo effort and much of my writing has focused on solving plot holes or character development, which is both more challenging and less thrilling than the original spurt of creative energy.

Even so, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, as my characters continue to surprise and delight me, and most days I don’t know what I’ll be writing until it’s already completed.

One thing I have discovered, though, is seeing that graph and the objective total I need to reach every day has caused me on many occasions to push a little harder. What, only 1200 words today? Come on, you can make it to 1500. You’re below par, keep writing until you reach it. And even though the numbers are ultimately meaningless, challenging myself in this way has brought about some fantastic bits of writing. “Just 200 more words” has sometimes generated a gem.

For now, the biggest question is, can I make it to 50K with a very long, exhausting 4 day weekend ahead?

Stay tuned, and we’ll all find out together! 🙂

You have to grab good ideas when they find you, or they’ll pass you by and someone else will get them.

Someone, I think a musician, said something along these lines, and the idea stuck with me. You never know when you’ll be struck with inspiration, and you need to be able to capture it or it will fly away.

For several months, since December or January, I’ve been struggling with a major plot point in the novel I began for NaNoWriMo. As I edited the novel, the hole became more and more glaring, and no matter how I tried to fix it, nothing felt right. Night after night I tried to come up with a solution, writing lots of bits I later cut, and redoing the previous chapters to try to make something work. All these attempts, however, were failures. Nothing clicked.

It got so discouraging that I had a hard time staying motivated to finish the project, and caught myself dragging my feet when it was supposed to be writing time.

This week, I gave myself permission to set that struggle aside for a month. With Camp NaNoWriMo beginning on Tuesday, I decided to write backstory about my characters, inventing scenes with them that happen before the main story of the novel itself. It’s been an interesting and somewhat fruitful exercise in general, but over the past few days, I haven’t produced anything particularly noteworthy.

Today was opening day for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and I was lucky enough to get to see it this afternoon. As I was watching the pre-show, my mind wandered, in that idle meandering way of a writer. Because I had written about him last night, my thoughts turned to my protagonist, about whom I had learned some intriguing tidbits. Thinking I might want to keep writing about him tonight, I asked myself, would he like going to see movies? How would he feel if he found himself sitting next to a perfect stranger, as I was doing?

All of a sudden, my synapses started firing. And then… there it was. The epiphany I had sought for all these months, the golden lightbulb moment. I suddenly knew exactly how to fill in this missing section and get my character from point A to point B, all while tying together other important plot elements.

The amazing thing about it was, none of this happened during the movie itself. It all took place in a matter of seconds as the previews ended, during the brief warnings to turn off your cell phone and not talk during the movie.

So it just goes to show… you never know where or when inspiration will happen, and never really productive to try to force it.

Postscript: Captain America:TWS was a fun movie. Lots of action and good looking men and women, but remarkably, there was actually a decent, logical (well, mostly) plot, which is becoming a rarity for action movies in the 21st century.

50K and the light at the end of the tunnel

Unexpected inspiration