Groping Around In The Dark

"How do I work? I grope." Albert Einstein

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This is exactly how I feel at the minute. I am trying to work through a beat sheet for my current wip in preparation fro NaNo next month and it is going excruciatingly slow. I have a lot of the basic scenes worked out and quite a few in between but there are some pretty big gaps that I need to fill and I do feel like I am groping around in the dark, trying to make my way out to the other side.

I am taking comfort in the fact that if this is the way Einstein worked, it can't be all bad!

How about you? Do you ever feel like you are groping around in the dark? Let me know in the comments below, I'd love to hear from you.

Weekly Inspirations #27

Image from dailyhaha.com

Here are my favourite links from the past week. Have a great weekend.

RT @loriabloomfield: Draft: Time to Write? Go Outside http://nyti.ms/19Z08DH  #writing #amwriting #writetip

"Fact: You will always feel like your work isn't good enough." #writingtips http://www.timeout.com/newyork/things-to-do/fifteen-successful-authors-share-their-best-writing-tips …

Multi-Dimensional Character Building http://buff.ly/19TpSR4  via @mooderino

Creative Mind Mapping for Novelists http://buff.ly/17mW80l  via @LoveWriteThrive

Insecure Writer's Support Group: "Write it for Them" http://goo.gl/ldokNu  via @LissaBryan

Attention all authors: all genres accepted for Cover Wars Extravaganza http://goo.gl/PXA8mO  via @PromoMasq

Author Watch – Special Tribute to Amelie Diamant Holstrom- Yes I Can http://goo.gl/xR33jT  via @LindaLeontweets

This Is What Blocks Your Writing (And How To Bust Through) | Write to Done http://writetodone.com/this-blocks-writing-how-to-bust-through/ … via @ThinkDevGrow

Inside Inner Conflict http://buff.ly/1hmV7XC  via @mooderino

One of the Best Ways to Find Writing Ideas http://buff.ly/1hmWplp  via @JodyHedlund

And some quotes ...

If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good. ~ Dr. Seuss via @paul_steele

When all else fails, there's always delusion. -- Conan O'Brien via @EdwardJCoburn

Why I Can't Take a Break From Being A Writer

"You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer..." Stephen Leigh

Image courtesy of chokphoto / freedigitalphotos.net 

If there is one thing that I have learnt over the past couple of months, it is the truth of the quote above. Taking a break from blogging (and my other writing to an extent) certainly reinforced to me that I am indeed a writer. Even when not actively engaged in the process, I could not stop my brain from thinking about my writing if I tried. In those rare quiet moments when I let my mind drift, I would always start thinking through the plot of my WIP, or ideas for new stories or blog posts. Even something as simple as watching the tv would get me thinking up new plot twists.

I have also discovered that I can no longer read a book in quite the same way. I am probably more critical now because I notice any slip ups a lot sooner, but I am also more appreciative of the good stuff. I know first hand how hard it is, so when a piece of writing comes off as effortless I have to slow down and admire it it and work out how they did it.

How about you? Are you ever able to take a break from being a writer? Let me know in the comments below, I'd love to hear from you.

A Thousand Story Ideas: Challenge Accepted

"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any." Orson Scott Card

Image via deviantart.net

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I am aiming to write 20 pieces of flash fiction this month as part of Camp NaNo and ROW80. That being the case, I need to start opening my eyes and my mind a lot more and picking up the ideas that are already around me.

Reading the above quote gave me a Barney Stinson moment. (If you have no idea what I'm on about, see image then go watch How I Met Your Mother, you can thank me later.)

So this week I am going to try my hardest to notice as many story ideas as I possibly can and capture them in a notebook or on my phone. I'll update you all on Sunday with how I got on.

Anyone want to join in? Go on, you know you want to. You can update your progress in the comments on this post or wait till Sunday's post, I'd love to hear how you get on.

When the Writing Spirit Falters

"The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters." Alan Bennett

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / freedigitalphotos.net

This quote seems to sum me up pretty well. I have always performed so much better when I am under pressure and when there is a deadline to work to. Without that pressure it is all too easy to let things slide.

I have tried imposing my own deadlines but they never seem to work, it is too easy to keep moving the boundaries. I have also tried setting a joint deadline with my brother (also a writer), our own little version of NaNoWriMo with spreadsheets and daily reporting and pep talks. We lasted about two weeks before things began to slide again as we let life get in the way.

I tried keeping my word count displayed in the side bar of this blog but I kept forgetting to update it and then when my computer died I lost the spreadsheet with all the data on it, so now I have had to remove the widgets. (Thankfully I always save my writing in dropbox so that was saved.)

When it comes down to it though, I don't think there is any magic formula that you can follow that will give you more self-discipline. I think it is more like a muscle and the more we use/exercise it, the stronger it becomes.

How about you? What methods have you used to get yourself writing when the 'spirit falters'? Have any of them worked? Let me know in the comments section below, I'd love to hear from you.

Showing A Character's True Nature

"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." James D. Miles

Image courtesy of Dave Robinette / flickr.com

This is a great quote to bear in mind when you are trying to show the the true nature of one of your characters, whether it's your protagonist selflessly helping other's, or your antagonist killing someone he no longer has need of.

That being said, be careful not to make it cliched. How about switching it around? No-one is truly bad all the way through, or good and selfless all the time. Give your characters more depth by having you antagonist save a child or help the homeless. Maybe your protagonist bumped into someone and knocked coffee all over them but didn't even stop to say sorry, that someone could have been the antagonist and is the spark that sets him on a path of revenge. Ok, a revenge story based on a spilt coffee may be stretching credibility a little but you get what I mean; everyone has their flaws and their saving graces, it's your job to find them in your characters and then exploit them.

Now over to you - how do you show the different facets of your characters personalities? Let me know in the comments below, I'd love to hear from you.

Get Writing: A Timely Reminder

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"Inspiration usually comes during work, not before it." Madeleine L'Engle

These are wise words, and ones I sorely needed to hear/read this week. Last month was so busy with the A-Z Challenge and everything else I had going on in my life that my fiction writing didn't so much take a back burner as get put in cold storage, and it's taking some time to thaw out.

As I mentioned in A to Z Reflections post last, my macbook decided to give up the ghost and I am having to make do with an old windows laptop from the stone ages. Although all my writing is saved in the cloud (thank god!) it is all in Scrivener files and I don't have that on this laptop. I'm waiting until I get a new macbook next month and then I can install it on there. Anyway, I have been kind of using this as a way of justifying why I haven't been doing any writing this month, that and the fact that I am totally lacking in inspiration at the minute.

Reading this quote though made me realise that the inspiration is never going to come back until I start putting in the work. It's one of those things that we all know as writer's but conveniently forget every now and then. I don't need access to my old writing to be able to produce new writing, and even if this computer is slow and takes forever to boot up, there is always good old fashioned pen and paper.

So, this week I am making a concerted effort to get back to my writing so that I am in the right place when my inspiration does finally come back.

How about you? Do you find yourself making excuses when inspiration is lacking? How do you snap yourself back out it? Let me know in the comments below, I'd love to hear from you.

W is for Wonder

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Many people have said that to be truly creative we need to maintain a childlike wonder for everything around us. I've been raiding the Goodreads quotes again and here are a few of my favourites listed under 'wonder'.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand 
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.” 
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” 
― Albert Einstein

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” 
― W.B. Yeats

“You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down” 
― Charles Chaplin

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” 
― Socrates

“Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.” 
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, Joy in the Morning

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.”
― Diane Ackerman

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.” 

― Gerry Spence, How to Argue & Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Everyday

And to finish it off, a poem:

“A Second Childhood.”

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think that I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber’s dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And I find that I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky;
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton

Do you maintain a childlike sense of wonder when you are writing? Or do you have any more quotes to add? Share in the comments section below, I'd love to hear from you.

V is for Villains

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We all love a good villain in our fiction. The following quotes all contain things that should be kept in mind when crafting the villain in your story:

"Evil, when we are in it's power, is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty." Simone Weil

"All Cruelty springs from weakness." Seneca

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." Stephen King

"I like villains because there's something so attractive about a committed person - they have a plan, an ideology, not matter how twisted. They're motivated." Russell Crowe

"Life is not that simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains." Jessica Hagedorn

"You can figure out what the villain fears by his choice of weapons." Connie Brockway, The Bridal Season

"A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development." Agnes Repplier

"An excellent man, like precious metal, is in every way invariable; A villain, like the beams of a balance, is always varying, upwards and downwards." John Locke

"The villain of any story is often the most compelling character." John Hodgman

"Evil is a point of view." Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence." Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

"No one becomes depraved all at once." Juvenal, Satires

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Blaise Pascal

Do you have any good villain quotes to share? Let me know in the comments section below, I'd love to hear from you.

T is for Talent

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Here are a few of my favourite quotes about talent:

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." Albert Einstein

"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads." Erica Jong

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What seperates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work." Stephen King

"No one respects a talent that is concealed." Desiderius Erasmus

"Genius is talent set on fire by courage." Henry Van Dyke

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." Calvin Coolidge

"There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower." Honore de Balzac

"I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire." Gordon Lish

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." Thomas Jefferson

"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage." Sidney Smith

"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." Robert Benchley

Do you have any favourite quotes about talent? Please share in the comments section below, I'd love to hear from you.

R is for Reading

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This post was originally meant to be about the way reading can improve your writing, but, while looking for the exact wording of the famous Stephen King quote ("If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time [or the tools] to write.") I came across so many others about the act of reading that I have had to make a slight change. Reading as it relates to writing will be saved for a future date, today I want to share with you just some of the brilliant quotes I found.

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." Dr Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading." William Styron

"Books are a uniquely portable magic." Stephen King

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? Mo had said ... "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells ... and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower ... both strange and familiar." Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." Joyce Carol Oates

"Books are like mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you." Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die." Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

"Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book." Jane Smiley

"It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book." Maureen Corrigan

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." W Somerset Maugham

All of these quotes were on the Goodreads page Quotes about Reading. There are over 2,000 on there and I had to stop at 90 before I lost an entire day, view it at your own peril.

Do you have favourite quotes about reading? Share in the comments below, I'd love to hear from you.

M is for Motivational Quotes

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We all need a little motivating every now and then, so to help you through the middle part of the month,
here are ten of my favourite motivational quotes to get you writing.

"Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the centre of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write, just write, just write." Natalie Goldburg

"Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style." P.D. James

"Resistance knows that the longer we noodle around 'getting ready' the more time and opportunity we'll have to sabotage ourselves. Resistance loves it when we hesitate, when we over-prepare.The answer: plunge in." Steven Pressfield

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." Henry David Thoreau

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." William Wordsworth

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take." Wayne Gretzky

"Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl

"Those who wish to sing always find a song." Swedish Proverb

"The secret of it all is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood of the moment - to put things down without deliberation - without worrying about their style - without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and write - wrote, wrote ... By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught." Walt Whitman

"The only thing that stands between you and your dreams is the will to try and the belief that it is actually possible." Joel Brown

Do you have any favourite quotes to get you motivated? Let me know in the comments below, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm going to be away on holiday until 17th April, but I have scheduled all the posts for while I'm away. I will try and log in once a day to check everything is running smoothly and reply to as many comments as I can. If you leave a comment I will visit your blog when I return and reciprocate. Happy A to Z'ing.

A is for Advice (from the greats)

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To kick of the A-Z Blogging Challenge here are a few of my favourite pieces of writing advice from the greats.

"Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style." P.D. James

"Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable." Francis Bacon

 "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." William Wordsmith

"Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident." William Zinsser

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things." Ray Bradbury 

 "The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it note on the wall in front of my desk saying 'Faire et se taire' (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as 'Shut up and get on with it'." Helen Simpson

"Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing." Heather Armstrong

"You can fix anything but a blank page." Nora Roberts

"The first draft of anything is shit." Ernest Hemingway

"It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing." Truman Capote

Do you have any favourite snippets of writing advice? If so, please share them in the comments below.

As his name fits with today's letter I would also like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to Arlee Bird for creating such a fantastic challenge and helping to connect so many fellow bloggers.