Tag Archives: Writing inspiration

Writing a Novel is Scarier Than a Bull Moose in Rut

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Bull moose

Writing a novel is one of the scariest things I’ve ever attempted.

And I’ve done some scary things in my life:

  • I’ve moved to two different provinces on my own, both times having no prior friends or family present when I arrived.
  • I’ve come face-to-face with a bull moose during rutting season.
  • I’ve spend 24 straight hours in the woods on a fasting solo sit. (The fear in this isn’t possible animal encounters at night, but rather the act of sitting silently for hours with nothing to distract you but your own thoughts.)
  • I’ve risked – and received – rejection asking guys way out of my league out on dates.

Just to name a few.  As my father is fond of paraphrasing from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The brave will only die once.”

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How Does the Music Move You?

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One of the iconic ads for the first generation of Apple iPods.

One of the iconic ads for the first generation of Apple iPods.

I am of the opinion that music makes the world go ‘round.

Whether you like to belt out radio hits in the shower, hum to yourself while concentrating, assemble the coolest party playlists, or sing along at church, I believe that everyone is a music lover in one way or another.

And music truly does seem to motivate the world, right up there with coffee.  Every day – particularly on public transit, when I take it – I see people sporting the ubiquitous white (or red or black or what have you) headphones, piping sweet songs and strains into their grey matter.

My own days are no less musical, although, in tending to disfavour headphones, my method of delivery tends to differ.

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Character Study: Raleigh Becket from Pacific Rim

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So, I finally saw Pacific Rim a couple weekends ago.

I opted to give this movie a pass when it came out in July, believing it to be just another dumb summer blockbuster involving robots, a la Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise.

(I loved the original 80s Transformers cartoon, yet there’s so much to hate about those movies.)

As a reader at heart, I tend not to like most movies I watch, especially those that come out in the summer.  If I watch a summer flick at all, it’s usually on video, and for the benefit of some mindless entertainment after a tough week at work.

But Pacific Rim surprisingly gave me a lot to think about, particularly with regards to its characters.

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On the Anniversary of the Day of My Birth

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Today is my birthday.

At around 2:00am this morning, I turned officially 35 years old, thus entering, as someone at work (helpfully!) pointed out, whole new age demographic on surveys.

In my mind, though, it actually happened about six months ago, back in June.

I always make the point of pre-aging myself.  This is both to smooth the transition from one year to the next and to prevent subsequently mis-aging my myself, similar to how people often continue to write the old year for months after New Year’s.

Today is also the day I’m supposed to have the draft of my novel-in-progress completed.

That, on the other hand, didn’t happen.

I’ve already decided to forgive myself for that.  It was a self-imposed deadline in any case, so the only person I’m really letting down is myself.  But I refuse to feel let down.

In writing, as in all aspects of life, one only gets out of it what s/he’s put in.  I can honestly say I’ve put a lot of effort and heart into my WIP, and have worked away on it, if not speedily, than with dogged consistency. I’ve been no slouch, so if it’s going to take me longer than I thought to get ‘er done, well, such is life.

The only truly downside is that I’d originally planned to share my novel’s opening on my birthday.

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Why Writers Should Spend Time With Other Types of Artists

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Sun by Dawn Banning

We writers – when we discuss our work and our process at all – tend to restrict said discussion to other writers.

After all, who else could possibly understand our unique brand of crazy?  How can anyone genuinely comprehend, for example, the compulsion to sit up in the dead of the night and scribble down a story idea unless s/he too has endured the utter frustration of greeting the morning with forgotten inspiration?

Artists of other disciplines (e.g. painters, musicians, actors, etc.), while themselves not fully cognizant of what it means to be a narrative writer, might come pretty darn close to understanding us.

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Looking Forward Over Your Shoulder: Keeping sight of your progress

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Long Beach, California

Long Beach, California

There’s a question I’m often asked that I despise above all others:

I hate it more than being asked, “Are you still single?”  (The answer to which, for the record, is yes.  And when phrased that way, it almost makes me want to stay single out of spite.)

More than, “Did you ride your bike in the rain?”

(Answer: I live in Vancouver, BC.  It rains about 300 days a year here.  I love biking.  I hate public transit.  I own a good rain coat and shoe covers.  And you see me do this every single day; this should no longer come as a shock.)

Even more than, “What’s your novel about?”

(Answer: Err, well, it’s a historical fiction…)

This question for which I hold so much disdain is none other than,

“What have you been up to?”

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A Little Fall of Rain: The ebb and flow of my writing ideas

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A/N: To my fellow Canadians, wishing you all a very Happy Canada Day!

How does an idea in one’s head go about becoming a fully-fledged plan – whether outlined or not – for an upcoming piece of writing?

This is something I’ve been pondering quite a bit lately as I continue to move forward in my novel-in-progress: this question of how it is that my writing actually comes to fruition.

Especially given that the ideas I come up with tend to rather small, vague, and decidedly non-earth-shattering in their physical and psychological impact upon me.

Case in point – the idea for this very blog post: I should blog about how my writing ideas evolve.

That was it: the brilliant brainwave in all its unexplained, undeveloped glory.

Or the idea I have for the next chapter in my novel-in-progress: I need to show the protagonist and her enemy starting to see eye-to-eye.  Okay – there’s a little more to it than that, but not much.  Heaven forbid the Muse offer me something with which I could hit the ground running.

My ideas are like – to borrow from the liberetto of Les Misérables – a little fall of rain: sufficient to get your attention when it speckles the side of your face, but not substantial enough to convince you that anything more will come of it.

For all you know, maybe you were standing too close to a conversation and just got spat on.

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The Changing Shape of Dreams

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A lot has changed in publishing in the last six years.

Six years ago, when I was busy working away on my novel (the same novel I’m still working on to this day, no thanks to a six-year writing hiatus), I dreamed of someday being a published author.

This dream had a distinguishing look and feel and smell, as the most vivid dreams often do:

It looked like a hardcover book on a bookstore shelf.

It felt like thick, fibrous paper with ragged-cut edges.

It had that new-book smell; it sounded like my mother bragging to all her friends that her daughter’s book new book was destined to be a bestseller.

It tasted of sweet success.

The steps I had to follow to realize this dream constantly knocked around in my head like the chorus of a song: query, agent, revision, submission, contract, revision, revision, revision, release.

This, of course, was assuming I’d actually made it past steps one and four.  It was an assumption I was all too happy to make, for if I didn’t, the dream would be dead before it even fully began.  This was the only path to publication.

Then, everything changed….

A new road opened up.

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Anyone Can Write a Novel (but not everyone will)

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“I want to write a novel someday.”

This statement recently arose from a co-worker in response to my having just updated her on my novel-writing progress whilst we performed a menial task at the office.

It’s a common sort of remark, I’m sure, for writers to be told.

“What’s the toughest part about writing a novel?” my co-worker went on to ask me.

I gave my answer without missing a beat: “The hardest part about writing a novel is writing it.”

I wasn’t trying to be facetious, but rather to impress upon her that writing isn’t something anyone successfully just does “someday” without at least a little forethought and without being prepared to change one’s normal way of life.

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On Truth in Storytelling

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I have one more piece of favourite writing advice I was unable to fit into my previous post on that subject.

It’s a writing tip whose source I unfortunately can no longer recall.  I’ve searched through all my writing how-to books, photocopied pages, and notes I’ve taken in various journals over the years, but I’ve been unable to find it again:

The job of a story isn’t to tell what’s true; it’s to tell what people believe.

It’s a rather bald statement, to say the least – one that’s stuck with me for years.  It’s yet another touchstone I’ve tried to apply to all my writing, ironically, without even knowing how it’s writer meant for it to be interpreted, for I can’t remember that either.

What does it mean?  I’ve spent the last year and a half since I started writing again searching for an answer to that question.

I believe I’ve found two.

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