Write why now?

I am not a great writer. So why do I write? This thought haunts me sometimes; usually when I'm having trouble figuring things out, connecting the dots, or even just committing anything to paper. These doubts tend to mount for a while, smothering my thought process until I just feel like walking away and giving up. (Ok, actually I feel like slamming my laptop to the floor, but I've managed to resist the temptation so far.)

Then it happens. A flash of insight, usually when I have finally stopped thinking about all my frustrations with the writing process. This happened to me just this last Friday night, as I was lying in bed.

One of the most encouraging feelings a writer can experience is the sudden realization of growth and maturation as a writer. If you've been writing for any length of time, you have likely experienced this. So awesome. Jump around squealing like a girl awesome.

Where was I? Ah yes, this past Friday. A story I had been working on had hit a dead end about a week previous and stayed stuck there. I began to obsess about it. I tried to go directly at it, to kind of force my way through it and hope that it would all work out in the end (which sometimes does happen, and is another thrilling moment in writing). Nothing worked out this time though, and I ended up just writing and deleting, writing and deleting. That and watching a lot of US Open tennis.

I then decided to try to go at it from the periphery, which sometimes works out very well. I usually try to write a short story or two, maybe the back story of a character, or maybe a random scene from the big story. In the middle of one of these short stories, I was running into the same wall that I had hit in the larger story. Double frustration. At a loss for what else to do, I went to bed. Drifting off, I began imagining how one of my characters might have arrived at the location of my story, something that wasn't in my original outline. And that's where it hit me.

I needed a character to be duplicitous (or to seem to be duplicitous, to be more precise), but I hadn't really worked through what her motivation might have been. That's the answer that came to be as I drifted off to sleep on Friday. I was so excited I got up, re-did my entire outline (as well as spent more time on my character's back stories), and wrote for nearly 3 hours straight. I got a fresh burst of inspiration, confidence, and a better developed, more three-dimensional character to boot.

I think I'm going to get all my notes together on this one and use it for NaNoWriMo!


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Listening to: Peter Bjorn and John - Young Folks
via FoxyTunes