chronicled & illustrated

[edit: just found out these “tips” weren’t showing up properly on Internet Explorer. It didn’t matter previously because I had no visitors but now, suddenly, I do. Must spruce up the place. (wonder where THAT expression originated!) Anyway, this is unreadable I realize, but I had to reduce its size to keep the blog from looking so weird on IE. If you want to know what it says, first of all, Thank You for your interest! and secondly, clicking it will take you to flickr to see the original version. Cheers!]

I don’t know what’s going to happen today. Yesterday was a bust. I have excuses, but as it says above: don’t look back. I have the ability to write a LOT when I get going so I’m not worried—yet.

Today’s tip is an important one: begin where you feel a glimmer of inspiration (or at least, interest).

I seem to be hung up on one part of my story that isn’t feeling interesting to me. I realized this morning that I’ve been making certain assumptions about what is going to happen. But when I’ve started to write that plot line, I have internal resistance. Perhaps, I thought this morning on waking, that’s something I should trust rather than try to obliterate. Perhaps my assumptions are wrong. Perhaps if I write what seems interesting to me, I will work my way back to those plot threads that aren’t of interest at the moment or—more likely, I think—I’ll find a way to tell it that isn’t in my head yet.

Trusting oneself is an important aspect of writing. Otherwise you’re constantly in doubt and that makes it impossible to get the story down. If there’s a barrier to getting it done, you must work around it, dig under it, jump over it, ignore it, transport through it, but do not let it stop you from writing the rest of the story.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 10:34 am and is filed under NaNoWriMo, fiction, writing, reminders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.