I haven't gotten very much writing done in the past couple days. Honestly, I haven't done any. With the end of school things are becoming busier and I'm starting to understand how difficult writing every day will be. But from today onward I will force myself to do some writing even if it's only for ten or fifteen minutes. Who needs to study for school when you are writing stories? Am I right?
I've finished, for the most part, the first part of my story. There are a few extra scenes I wanted to add when I looked at it in retrospect but now that it's done I really want to concentrate on perfecting that before going on to write more. So my word count might not be rising very quickly in the next month because I am going to be editing, not writing.
The first part is around 80000 words but I'm sure that will only go up as I edit it because there are many sections where I neglected to write description. This only makes it harder to decide if I should split it up into two or three books but I have decided that I won't make the decision until I have finished the entire thing so I have a while still.
Since I would be concentrating on editing for a while I decided to download the free trial of Scrivener so that all my chapters would be separated and I could organize them better. While I am not entirely a visual person, it can be daunting for me to edit a huge word document because I can barely remember the order everything happened in and which sections need the most work.
I haven't been very successful with Scrivener yet. Since I haven't been able to spend much time writing, there hasn't been much time to learn the program either. I am impatient with these sorts of things so I doubt I'll ever get to learning more than what I already know which is split the document into chapters. I don't want to waste time learning a program when I could be doing more writing or editing. I've procrastinated enough in the past and now it's time to get to work.
Since I get thirty days of free trial, not consecutive, I will try to get as much editing done within the next month. I want to fill all the gaps like finishing description, and making sure that the actions of the characters make sense and then I'm going to import it into a word document and go through the entire draft for the smaller edits like word changes and the like.
While I know that I won't be getting to much writing in the next few days I am hoping to be at 110000 by Monday which is four days away. I can write a thousand words a day.
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Other than piggybacking on other people's enthusiasm for inspiration, I find ideas and concepts for stories in movies, books, nature, and life. A few years ago I found it very difficult to think of ideas that felt original. It was as though all my creativity was gone. I was taking a creative writing course at the time, and you can imagine how difficult it is to have to write story after story with no ideas for what to write about. Thankfully (or maybe unthankfully?) many people have this problem.
What eventually got me through this time was writing in a notebook. You can jot down ideas for stories, a line of dialogue, a description, a quote that you like, essentially anything. It was arduously slow at first because if I couldn't think of one story idea, how was I supposed to fill a notebook with them? But even when my thoughts were cliche and boring I still wrote them down. I found that eventually, like any muscle in your body, it needs to be used daily. If you are making an effort to think of ideas (and coming up with them no matter how horrible they may seem) eventually they will be flooding in.
Now I am constantly coming up with new ideas for plots and characters that I am tempted to stop the story I am currently writing to pursue them. But I manage to hold myself back because I have been down the road of never finishing anything, and it is not a good path to follow.
A lot of people say that writing prompts are the best solution. I have never found them particularly useful. They always remind me of movies or books that I have seen and never lead to anything original. Which defeats the purpose. But they might work for you. There are plenty of sites out there that provide them.
When I said that I get inspiration from books and movies, I don't mean that I see a plot line and I immediately want to write my own version. It is more that I see a type of conflict between two friends and I imagine it under different circumstances and boom, I have an idea for a story. I love watching Planet Earth episodes because the landscape is so beautiful and it makes me want to write a description that can capture how magnificent it is. I can never achieve it but it's fun nonetheless.
The best place to find inspiration is from history. (I put it last because last is always most important.) In history books there are so many unique conflicts and situations that can be adapted for a fantasy book, a hisotrical book (obviously), or even science fiction. George RR Martin wrote an entire fantasy series based on the War of the Roses.
What sources do you use for inspiration? It doesn't necessarily have to be for writing. It can be the desire to pursue a sport or a job. Everyone needs inspiration in their lives.
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