Well, it’s another Wednesday, the hump that represents mid-week. By this point in the week I like to be knee deep in my weekly goals and challenges to myself. I have been reading and writing like a fool, so good going so far.  I’m hitting a bit of a hurdle in my current story but I am making an effort to overcome it. I’m also doing a lot of reading for research on the topic of Schizophrenia. The stories are just… larger than life, you know?

I’ve also been keeping up on the blogs. The theme among the blogosphere lately seems to be inspiration. How do you get it? What sort of thing brings you the most inspiration? What person/place/thing/idea sends you flying to your writing corner and makes you bang on your WIP or scribble in your notebook? I like talking about things that inspire me, so I’ll list some of mine here.

GOOD WRITING

The number one, numero uno, primero point of inspiration for me is excellent writing. I love getting lost in another writer’s words, whether it be a published book or an online story or a great blog post. Writers who share their craft with others help me feel like I, TOO, CAN BE A WRITER!

LIFE

Life imitates art and art imitates life and it’s all such a never ending cycle.  When people I know talk about situations they’ve dealt with, some of those stories stick with me. I tuck them away in my mental list of plot points and twists that I might want to use later. A witty conversation overheard in the elevator, or the way someone says something might get written down or emailed to myself as soon as I get to my desk. I take pieces of people and places and things and jobs and attitudes and store it all away in my head where an ever-growing monster builds and eventually must claw its way out, onto paper. Or computer screen.

ART

Of course art, because you know… LIFE! I rarely get inspiration from paintings, but photos can spawn a nice 3,000 word story about a rain storm. Or 1500 words about peppermints or a chapter in which my characters discuss Degas and whether or not he was perverted.

Music is probably my biggest inspiration, ever. Lyrics are like art, drawing such emotional scenes. So many songs are like soap operas set to rythm. I’ve written so many stories based off of song lyrics. I love an amazing lyricist, how they twist words and meaning and in 3.5 minutes, tell what can be a heartbreaking story. I love siphoning that emotion, that mood, the meaning behind the words and turning it into something that takes the reader on a journey. I’m writing a story right now based off of Alanis Morrisette’s Hands Clean. Her lyrics are amazng.

Your turn… tell me what inspires you? What makes you sit down and write?

I’m having a rough day today and tomorrow is likely to be more of the same, but I feel very… encouraged and emboldened by this post from Jessica Corra today. I just started following her (I stalk your blogroll and twitter links people… you should just know that… ). I like everything she has to say but today, especially her words today are speaking to me. Read the entire post but this part? This part right here? YES.

You only have one life. Don’t flinch from it. Don’t be afraid to live the life you want – need – can have. It’s not easy – nothing worthwhile is. The fight to get there will make the arrival that much more meaningful.  

Just do. It you fuck it up, do it over.  Turn your life upside down. On purpose. I can’t even begin to pontificate on what that means to me or what I am going to do with it, but it definitely hit me where I’m living right now.

Don’t flinch. Just do it.

“It’s a lovely piece of writing”, he said, somewhat wistfully. “It’s beautiful”, he said, and handed back the poem. “But what’s the point of me writing when I’ll never be able to write something as good as that?”

I went on to read the 9 Reasons to not stop yourself from starting (which I have been muy mucho guilty of lately, and I don’t even speak spanish). I encourage you to check out the entire post, because it is rather encouraging on a very basic, simple, easy-for-this-writer-to-understand level:

1. Writing has a ripple effect –  How many times have I opened a WIP and got to work on something because  I read something that inspired something in me? In effect, writing makes others write. It happened to me and can happen to someone else. 

2. Your writing can only improve through practice - I know for a fact, by reading things I wrote years ago, months ago, weeks ago, that this is true. 

3.  No-one else has your perspective, experience, or voice - This is something I struggle with. I really feel like I am not saying anything new or revealing. Maybe there are no new ideas just different ways to present them?

4. You never know the difference your words will make - I don’t talk about my fanfiction must here but I was voted an “Inspiring Writer” by the community where I post my stories. That actually means a lot to me. It also adds PRESSURE.

5. Writing changes you-  That it does. I really feel like it forces us to look past the surface to a deeper meaning, a better understanding. It also pulls us toward the road less traveled. I am always seeking a transformation through words, a change via imagery.  Who wants to be the same old person after you’ve read the last word?  BRINGING that experience to someone is harder than it sounds. 

6. Writing changes your relationship with what you’re writing about- Definitely experienced this in some of my longer pieces. All I Wanna Do became a part of me. It was my baby for a long, long time. Same with Same Time Next Week and Nowhere Man. 

7. The focus on ‘the point’ is only one way of looking at the world-  Sometimes the fuzzy stuff in the background is the most important part of a photo. 

8. Words want to be free-- Instead of banging around inside my head all haphazard?

9. It’s not just about writing - It is a journey. But it’s one that is walked. Barefoot. Uphill, both ways, in the snow. 

I have been saying it for awhile but I do believe I’ll be back to writing soon. I’m really frustrated and daunted by this new project, mostly because I don’t know where it’s going quite yet. I don’t think I am the pantser that I claim to be. I might have to *gasp* plot and outline! [Insert JAWS theme here].

I did grab some Novel Planning worksheets and I (swear) am printing them out right now. Got to think through this project and then get to writing it. I have to have some kind of progress by the 23rd, which is when Brunch group meets again and people will ask…. so how’s that book coming? 

GUH.

I did my usual Sunday entry over at the Diary and I spoke a little about my lack of motivation when it comes to writing.  I thought I might glance back at my blog to see if I was feeling the same way around this time last year, and I think that I might have been. Maybe it’s a seasonal thing or a cyclical thing, but I just don’t feel like writing. Sometimes things come to me, additions to my WIP, conversations, ideas. I write them down… it goes nowhere, really. I sit down to add to one of the WIPs I have going and I just feel like it’s lame. So surface and not at all deep or character revealing and just… lame. I think I may have story fatigue, but I do WANT to finish both projects I have going. I just..have zero motivation.

I don’t know what else to do when I feel like this, but to wait it out. Making myself write when I don’t feel like writing results in hours of lame prose that I’ll just delete anyway. I hate everything I have written lately and when I read other people’s work, I am so jealous of the level of skill. When I read blogs and see people that are getting book deals from their writing, I’m not so much jealous as…as… I don’t know. I feel like I should be further along than I am and perhaps I am not because I give into these times when I don’t feel like writing.

I wrote a new scene for the Flirtfest and liked it at first. A few weeks later I looked at it when I went to post it and absolutely hated it. Bland, unemotional, lame, dull. So I went back to something I wrote when I was doing well.

Sometimes I wonder if I am not really a writer, if I struggle so much with writing. It should not be this hard.

So I am asking anyone who writes and reads this blog: what do you do when you’re uninspired? When ideas don’t come and everything seems lame and the writing is lackluster at best? Do you put it away for a bit? Push through? Find some inspiration somewhere, somehow, some way?

I’m sure I have asked this question before… I feel like I have. In fact, this is a rehash of the same post I seem to make every month.

I guess I should read back and see what people have said. I just hate feeling like I suck.

Looking for inspiration,

So, I’m having a problem. My problem is two fold– too much and not enough. How is that possible, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.

As I was explaining to a friend earlier, I keep pretty busy. I may not seem busy and I may even tell you that I am boring and I do nothing but in reality I run two moderately trafficked message boards. I read and I write and and I try to keep up with twitter and blogs and facebook. I try to stay abreast important events, just in case I am asked to be on Jeopardy. I try to get out of the house every now and again, leave the county, see friends, go to brunch. I travel when I can, and recently I’ve been decorating my apartment.  That’s a lot of stuff, even if it doesn’t seem like it. Staying on top of everything and keeping a finger in each pot seems to keep me going.

But then I have so much going on that I’m overwhelmed and I feel like dropping everything and going back to being a bump on a log, picking lint out of my belly button and wishing for something to do. I get tired of staying on top of everything and being the focal point of everything. I have this blog I’d like to stay current with, and I am not. I have reading that I am SO BEHIND on, haven’t made time to dig into any books. I have two WIP’s that are, literally, going nowhere.

Every weekend I intend to recharge and get caught up on these mini tasks that grow into lots of mini tasks and become a mega task. And every weekend I end up doing…….something…..and the weekend is over and it’s Sunday night and I look at my task list and *shrug* .

Tired. I’m too tired to even dictate to myself what I am going to do and by when I am going to do it. At this point I am just hoping that when the mood strikes I will be awake enough to romance either one of myWIP’s and make me fall in love with it again because uh…………baby, the thrill is gone.

(Temporarily) Lost that lovin’ feelin’,

I don’t drive an extravagant model of car. I mean, I drive a KIA. It’s worth $6.99.

I don’t have a lot of clothes. The clothes I do have aren’t anywhere near designer or anything.

I don’t particularly like really fancy food. In fact, the fancier the food, the less I probably like it.

A great night out, for me, is hanging with some friends, having a slice or two from Fellini’s Pizza, and then watching a bad movie on cable.

So why, when it comes to writing, I try to get all fancified, I don’t know. But it isn’t working. So I need to get back to what worked. and what worked was being simple.

Simple meant one, singular goal: To improve my craft and skill at the art of telling a story. I have done that, by mere consequence of writing more and reading more, but it used to be that I would pick out a trait that I didn’t like about my writing, or read an instructional book on writing and put those skills to work. That was why I was writing such things as fanfiction and drabbles and snippets and such and such. It wasn’t so much the story– though it was, some, the story– it was the skill.  I was inspired to improve on certain things, one skill at a time.

Was I writing effective dialogue? Showing, not telling? Eliminating adverbs? Using descriptive imagery? Creating more effective transitions between people, or events, or gaps of time?

Simple meant enjoyment:  writing to enjoy the process, to enjoy reading it back, to enjoy hearing how others liked reading it or how it impacted them and in what ways they could relate. Lately, it’s like dragging myself to the computer, and I avoid writing because  I just no longer enjoy doing it. It’s now more pressure on myself to ‘finish the project’ and not enjoy writing and learning and changing and growing.

So, what happened? Twitter. Yeah, it seems harmless… but it’s sort of made writing not fun.

What happens when I  get on Twitter, and find all these fellow writers and authors and god-bless-it, really talented people, is that I start to look inward. And I compare my work to theirs. And I start picking things apart that they do better than I do. Or worse, at the risk of sounding conceited– but they’re the ones with a book deal, not me. Or I see people I truly adore and admire just pushing forward and making dreams come true, and I can’t even find a more useful term to use than ‘nod’ or ‘wink’ or ‘shrug’… I’m so tired of my characters shrugging and sighing. It bothers me that I can’t be more descriptive in that way.

So, I read and try to soak in what other authors are doing and try to divine some skill.  I write and I write and I edit and I write and I edit and I write. And I follow all these people and read all these blogs and join all these forums and attend all these chats and follow all these @people and……….yet I am not improving and not getting anywhere but frustrated. My writing life is so complicated, now. So stressful, now. I’ve become aware that I’m subconsciously competing to be in the ‘me too’ crowd of cool kids.

Who am I kidding? I was NEVER cool! Why, in my 30′s, would I think I could or should be?  Why, when what I really am is quiet and solemn. I have always kept to myself. Been very quiet. I have always read a lot and wrote a little. I have always acted out scenes in my head. I have always talked out chapters out loud in the car while people around me thought I was nuts for talking to myself. And I have always not cared how crazy I look because what are the odds I am going to see them again and secondly– it was working.

So I… UNfollowed some folks– some great folks, don’t get me wrong but…. I had to simplify.

Some I unfollowed for personal reasons– irreconcilable differences, we’ll call them. But some I unfollowed because the focus of their journey was not encouraging to me, it was frightening and distracting and I thought I was a failure because I wasn’t there, where they are, in their journey.  Or it was because the focus of information and advice were toward a genre or subject matter that I just couldn’t relate to.

I kept a few people because where they are is where I am or where I’m aiming to be. Their focus is on the craft and the skill, on expecting more from yourself and not accepting failure or a half assed lackadaisical effort. Their tweets weren’t about information I can’t do anything with, right now. Their tweets are about relevant, useful information, inspiration, direction, motivation and personal experience– right now.

I recently moved into a new apartment. It’s bright and beautiful, and it has a second bedroom– I’ve never had a two bedroom before.  This bedroom will become my writing space. I’ll be unpacking and then doing a little traveling but when I come back, I’ll be very excited to set up my space– a space  where I will sit down at the computer with my character board before me,  my story line/ plot notes at my right hand and a cup of coffee at my left, and finally  get back to what was working for me– writing simply. Simply writing.

That? Is exciting to me.

Kind of makes me want to write something!

Cue dramatic music…………and scene!

YAY, I got another award! I might just have to keep up this blogging thing. It’s awesome on the ego!

KM Weiland over at Wordplay has passed on the “Lova Ya” award to The Sweet Escape!

The “Love Ya” Award states: These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to other bloggers who must choose to pass it on and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award!

I am flattered and pleased to accept this award and *air kisses* to KM for having such a worthy blog. I LOVE it over at WordPlay. If you’re not following her on twitter (@KMWeiland) you’re missing some of the best, most inspirational tweets, EVER. I often feel like I’m all alone, ’til I see one of her great quotes and then I am encouraged and inspired. Thanks KM!

So I need to pass this award on… and while I love all of the blogs I read, I have to choose a few that stand out, to me:

• Jennette Fulda, Pasta Queen: You’ll laugh your ass off. She did. Also author of  Half Assed- A Weight Loss Memoir
• Emily Sandford, Skinnyemmie : Becoming Skinnyemmie is about becoming happy and healthy. And having a really cute blog.
• Allison Duckworth, How Much Is A Duck Worth? :Boy Meets Girl, Boy and Girl get married, Boy and Girl have the most adorably charming baby on earth. (Allison is also a talented photographer for pregnancy shots, baby photos, newborn pics, family portraits done in an innovative and gorgeous way. Check out her site at ElevenThirtySix Images)

Thanks, KM, and the lovelies who keep me truckin’ along everyday via the written word. BLOG ON!

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I wanted to ask you about your writing process, because your writing comes across as fluid and effortless, and it seems as though you’re “channeling the muse.” Is this really the case? What is your writing and revision process like?

Nora Roberts: Well, first: There ain’t no muse. If you sit around and wait to channel the muse, you can sit around and wait a long time. It’s not effortless. If only. Well, if it was, then everyone would do it, and where would we be then? So I work really hard to make it as fluid as possible, as readable and entertaining as possible.

I’ll vomit out the first draft: bare-bones, get-the-story-down. I don’t edit and fiddle as I go, because I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Once I get the discovery draft down, then I’ll go back to page one, chapter one, and then I start worrying about how it sounds, where I’ve made mistakes, where I’ve gone right, what else I have to add, where’s the texture, where’s the emotion. I start fixing. And then, after I’ve done that all the way through again, I’ll go back one more time, and that’s when I’m really going to worry about the language. And the rhythm, and making sure that I haven’t made a mistake, that I’ve tied up all the loose ends reasonably. It doesn’t necessarily mean everything ties up for every reader, because some want it one way and some want it another, and you just have to be true to the story, so it’s all plausible at the end of the day.

You seem to have a very good ear for language and sounds and rhythm. Do you write any poetry or read poetry?

NR: I don’t write it, that’s for sure. There’s certainly some I like to read. It’s probably not the first thing I’m going to pull off the shelf if I just want a story, but I like language. There’s a lot of poetry in fiction, if it’s written well. Sometimes it’s staccato, and sometimes it flows. It all depends.

Do you have the time to actually sit down and read books very often?

NR: I think if you don’t read, you’d never have the chops to write, and why would you, if you didn’t love stories and want to lose yourself in what someone else has sweated over? I love to read, and I really think books are the most important tool in a writer’s toolbox.

When you talk about novels with poetic language, which authors come to mind?

NR: One of the most musical is the opening to Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” And then the way she goes on from there. Mary Stewart is one of my all-time favorites. Look at Robert Parker, who is very distinct. He really knows that good writing is brief. His poetry is very urban, and very slick, and very smart. You look at Elizabeth Berg and hers is so detailed and visual. Look at Stephen King: You see all the color. He’s the great American colorist. When you read one of his stories, or course you’re terrified, as you should be, but you also see everything. His poetry is visual for me.

Are you an omnivorous reader?

NR: Oh yeah. There may be times when, after a really long day at the keyboard, my brain is too tired to read. And that’s when I get my stories on TV. Once I start a book I’m a gobbler, so it’s very rare that I’ll read a couple chapters and put it down.

Is it primarily fiction that you read?

NR: Yeah. I like popular fiction. I write commercial fiction because that’s what I like best to sit down and read.

May’s tip is on research– something I do, love to do, and get caught up in a lot. If I had a quarter for every time I almost got bit in the butt over research, I’d have………well probably around a dollar or so. I think this tip is great, and Joe’s word speaks for itself, so I’ll let him say it, after the jump– click on ‘read full article’ and have a ball!

May Writing Tip – Research: A Writer’s Best Friend and A Writer’s Worst Enemy
The text of my May Writing Tips newsletter — if you’d like to subscribe, you can sign up here.

My name is Joe, and I’m a research-aholic.

This should surprise no one who reads my books. In fact, I’ve taken some teasing about the length of the “acknowledgments” sections of my books, because so many people have been so generous about sharing their expertise with me.

I have always considered “Write what you know” one of the most useless pieces of advice a beginning author gets. Write what I know? If I’d started out writing what I knew, I’d have come up with 10 or 12 pages about a kid in upstate New York who wanted to be a cartoonist (I did, actually; see my monthly newsletter for more about this). Granted, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, among others, did very well in turning their life experiences into literature – but I wanted to write thrillers, and my life was not thrilling.

No, for me, writing was all about having my characters do things I could only dream of, whether that was taking the Concorde to Paris, escaping assassins on the streets of Moscow, or wining and dining beautiful women in Boston’s finest restaurants (which I am now able to do, thanks to my wife and daughter, but you know what I mean).

And let’s face it: research is the fun part. Who wouldn’t want to ride along with cops, learn to shoot guns (lots of guns!), and talk to interesting people about the cool things they do? It’s much more fun than sitting alone in front of a blank computer screen, trying to figure out what happens next.

Research has also given me some of my best plot points and material. A weapons expert once showed me how to smuggle a gun through airport security and on to a plane. Believe me, I could not have thought that one up by myself.

But every hour you spend doing the fun stuff of research is time you’re not writing. And I’m here to tell you that research, while fun and often necessary, is addictive and dangerous.

It’s also a great crutch. All novelists feel like impostors at times; it’s only natural to feel unqualified and insecure in what you’re writing about. You don’t really know it – what do we know, we’re writers, right? — so you want to find out as much as you can. But in the age of the Internet, you’re always one hyperlink away from the next website or article, and it can go on ad infinitum. The easiest thing in the world is to put off writing while you find out exactly how many gallons the New York City reservoirs hold, or how long it takes to fly from Washington to Timbuktu, or whether Brazilians drive on the right or the left-hand side of the road.

So stop. Put the story first. Write your story first, and fact-check later. It doesn’t have to be 100% accurate; it just has to be plausible.

John Grisham was 100 pages into his latest book, The Associate, which was set at the Princeton Law School – when he found out that Princeton doesn’t have a law school. It didn’t derail him; he just moved the story to Yale, which does have a law school. The key is that the setting wasn’t the important part, the story was – and he’d already written 100 pages, so he was able to go back and make the necessary changes.

In Hollywood they call this “fixing it in post.” Dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces need to come together just so in order to get a scene right on film. If 99 things are right and one thing is wrong, it’s not worth shooting an entire scene again; they can fix it in post-production, by overdubbing sound or correcting color or editing something out. The key is to keep going, so the production can “make its day,” and stay on schedule.

That’s what John Grisham knows: the key is to keep going. “When I write fiction, it takes a lot to get me out of the seat to check anything,” he said in a recent interview. “I hate to stop writing to go check a fact, to go find a city, to go to a hotel – I’ll just make stuff up.”

And you know what? Readers hate it, too. Nothing is worse than stopping a story to give your readers all the great research you did about how and when some government agency happened to be based in West Virginia instead of in Washington, DC, or why that particular vintage of Burgundy is considered the best, or who manufactures a particular kind of pistol in the United States. Research should be like an iceberg – only a fraction should be visible. (Ten percent of the iceberg, to be exact. I just Googled it.) Or to continue the show-business metaphor, it should be the lights that illuminate the stage, not a spotlight pointed at the audience’s faces.

Oh, but the research demon says: you want facts. Your male readers, particularly, want facts. If you get it wrong, you’ll get emails, and you’ll have to apologize and ask your publishers to correct things in future editions, and you – and they – HATE that.

This is true, actually, especially when it comes to weapons. If I make even a small error about something gun-related, I’ll get at least a dozen emails from aficionados who are sometimes downright outraged about my carelessness. (Which is why I take gun classes … or at least, that’s my excuse.)

It may even be one reason men read fewer novels than women, as Gore Vidal once noted in an essay: “It has been observed that American men do not read novels because they feel guilty when they read books which do not have facts in them. Made-up stories are for women and children; facts are for men. There is something in this…” As a man, this doesn’t make me proud … but Vidal probably has a point here.

But then I defer to that king of all research, James Michener, whose Herculean efforts filled whole bookshelves (Hawaii, Caravans, The Source, Centennial, etc., etc…). Even he admitted that research can only get you so far: “The greatest novels are written without any recourse to research other than that writer’s solitary inspection of the human experience. Flaubert, Dostoevski, Jane Austen, Turgenev, and Henry James exemplify this truth … To praise a writer for having done research is like praising a bus driver for knowing how to shift gears; if he can’t perform that function, he has no right to climb into the bus.” Because the story, like the bus, has to go somewhere.

I wrestle with this constantly. I’ve had to set time limits on my research. If questions come up while I’m writing, I might make a call or fire off an email, but I don’t stop writing while I wait for an answer; I keep writing, and fill in details later.

Take the word of a research-aholic: don’t let this happen to you. Don’t overdo the research, because the story is what’s important. Without a story, your pile of facts is worthless.

We can always fix it in post.