I think this makes a pretty good next post for my blog. I had written this for my Orble account, but have not posted to that account for a while. This piece is still pretty accurate.
This month is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and while I signed up last year to do this I didn’t write one word due to not having the courage or the push to start. This year I began, got to 8K words and accidentally deleted my entire thing. I have not had the will power to start it back up again, but am wishing to do some sort of writing each day to keep myself going.
When I was in school I used to write to ignore my studies. I would be writing a paper or reading a section in a book and have an epiphany for a story. I would jot down notes and then never get back to them. I have so many notebooks that are not completely filled, but have so many random notes and one or two pages of stories in them, that if I could get them all to work together I would probably have the 50K words that the NaNoWriMo group normally wants for that month. I have wanted to pull out all of my notes and put them into one notebook so I could reference them more easily, but I fear that will probably not happen until I have a house in which I can actually find all my writings.
However, what I wished to talk about in this posting was the reason that I write. It seems to be a common question for most authors to receive is either “what got you into writing” or “where do you get the ideas for what you write?” While, I have not been published, I am still a writer as I do write. And where I get most of my ideas are from those epiphanies that I have which now-a-day come to me in between wake and sleep. While they do not come nearly as often now, now I have more time to sit down and actually do that thing that I love oh so much… WRITING. The only draw back that I seem to have is the stories that unfold for me in my head never seem to do so well when I try to put them down onto paper. I never can seem to get the same sway of a character or same demeanor of the bad guy that I had in my dream. Or I will have ideas in which it is just scenes, but how do I get there? That is when those are the one or two pages written.
The other thing that I love is when I have a very vivid scene unfold for me in my mind and I follow it all the way through, but when I go to write it down the vividness doesn’t seem to be as transparent on the paper or I forget details as I am writing. I really wish they would invent a machine in which you can just think and it puts it down on paper. I think quicker than I can type or write and because of this I loose some of the awesomeness of what I am trying to portray. Which is quite upsetting.
Do you write? What are some of the things that you have difficulties with and what gives you your ideas?
First published on Orble.com on November 20, 2010
Chelsea Haller 