This year is teaching me how much my emotions are tied to my writing. When my energy levels are low, in walks writer's block. When I feel a fit of giggles sneaking up on me, that's when I'll write the funny parts. And when I'm just peacefully content, that's when I come up with the inventive adventuresome part.
In a note of encouragement, a friend told me that "you have to write a lot of crap before you get to be good", and in a strangely negative way it makes me feel better. I might be in the stage where I'm writing 'a lot of crap' right now, and that's okay. What matters is that I am writing.
In a slightly related note, my friend Sean (who falls into the friends-that-write-way-better-than-me category) posted a facebook note about a fiction contest over at BoingBoing.net It sounds like the prizes are essentially awarded at random, but I entered more as a chance to take on the challenge of writing a story in just 100 words. It made a nice contrast to NaNoWriMo in which I'm often fluffing up ideas to boost word count. The theme was "Found in Space" and here's what I composed (in about 12 minutes on my lunch break):
They would not have landed if the computer read ‘Uninhabitable', but the weary travelers needed a reprieve from decades floating in space. The natives looked and spoke like them - an amazing coincidence considering the multitude of tongues spoken in the galaxy – which made easy the procurement of food and fuel.
Six years later, they still lived in solitude. No aliens welcomed them, learned who they were or where they came from, so eventually they left. Their stop gave new meaning to the word ‘alienation’ - the only memory they would take with them from their brief time on Earth.
Okay back to my novel.
1 comment:
I may have shared this with you already, and I cannot remember the source, but "writing is the hardest work that doesn't require heavy lifting..."
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