The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
– Douglas Adams
It’s true. Sometimes the ideas are just there.
Sometimes you see someone on the street and inspiration strikes. If this happens to you, just make sure that you’re properly using the crosswalk so that it’s only inspiration doing the striking.
Somes I get a brilliant sentence in my head and build something around it.
At the same time, I have files and notebooks, and Evernote posts full of brilliant sentences that have, as of yet, gone nowhere.
Then there are posts like this where, after not having successfully found either a birthday of someone inspirational or an appropriately significant historic event, that I go to my other files of “inspirational quotes” on Pinterest.
This post comes to you, of course, with all due apologies to Richard Nixon, who resigned from the office of the President on this day in 1974. I’ve written about that before.
I watched. I cried.
And also apologies and birthday greetings to Dustin Hoffman and Connie Stevens. Love your work, but I couldn’t find a blog post there.
Some days you just write and there’s no inspiration. No brilliance. No driving thought helping you to put one word after the other.
Some days you just put the words down and hope that when you come back to do your revision (because we’ve established that first drafts are crap), you see something worth revising.
And then some days I can’t wait to get back to the keyboard because there’s an idea that needs to be written about, a story that needs to be told.
Either way, writing can’t be a someday thing. It has to be every day.
Even when it’s crap.
In other news, I need to read the Hitchhiker Guide series again…
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