Hi, I thought today I’d write a slightly different blog. Which should be good for me because I’m having a writer’s block with writing my essays. Truthfully, I’m not sure why, but I’ve some different theories; 1. the fact I’ve a loan laptop and the keyboard is strange and I don’t have any of my stuff on here, (Also just found out that nothing could be saved on my hard drive, so I’ve lost everything on that. Have new hard drive and getting laptop back tomorrow though.) 2. I’ve lots of other thoughts in my head right now and I can’t rid of them. 3. the idea of leaving Uni is scary! 4. I want my final essays to be really good. 5. I’m stressing about other things too now. So, yeah that’s about it, so I’m hoping to snap out of it soon!
So I might have writer’s block on my essays, but I’ve not on my novels. I’ve been writing one I started last yearish and the idea was that the reader was on the outside looking in, so they were always at a distance from the world and characters. Thus means that I and the characters are in the same boat, on the outside, not sure what’s going on or who to trust. It’s working out really well tho in a strange way and it’s not really about vampires!
Doing a creative writing course has taught me all about the craft of writing, but not really ‘how to write’ that comes from practice, experience and your own talent and imagination. Reading and writing every day is an important part of it too! Plus you have to love doing it and writing for yourself. That’s how I got into it really, writing as a hobby and often in reply to books I had just finished reading. I strongly believe as well that having a really good or over active imagination helps too. I’ve always had one, mostly because I was a bit of loner for most of my childhood and thus creating worlds and make believe friends was a great comfit for me. I also believe if you want it badly enough you should go after it and for me being a novelist would be my dream come true. I already know, from my course, that getting something published and making it popular in the world is hard to do and seriously not as easy as most people believe it to be. This is due to the fact that publishing is like any other business and they always want to make money.
Moving on and focusing on me for a min, I started writing stories when I was 6, but because I was dyslexic (I didn’t know officially till I was 16) no one knew what I was going on about, but I got a taste for writing, though it was so tough for me! But I loved reading and books, thanks to my parents. Then when I was 12 I found inspiration from R .L. Steins’ Goosebumps stories and wrote my first novel part in high school, part at home. The only evidence I have of that novel is a single paper copy. From there though and without any guidance or anything, I took that novel and redraft it. From there was born the first in a series of novels about a group of teenagers who went to a summer camp every year and I wrote like 10 novels. Then I got writer’s block and wrote nothing for a year.
Sorry, I’m so going off on something here, but it’ll explain things in a minute. Sometime whilst I was in college during my second year a character suddenly popped into my head and so was born my first official vampire. I then spent the next two years of my college life writing 3 novels about this vampire and his friends.
So, and I only discovered this by reading J .R. Ward’s The Black Dagger Brotherhood; The Insider’s guide, which is a great great book! That my characters would come into my head and start mapping out their own stories. Thus all my novels are driven by the character not the plot. Like Ward, I also see the images of my characters, their actions and their worlds in my head and that really helps when you’re writing a story. Being able to see images so that the words become more like pictures in your mind is a great skill to have.
I’d tell anyone to give writing in any form a shot and see how you feel about. I’m still surprised when my friends talk about something I’ve wrote and tell me that they couldn’t have written something like that or where did my idea come from. Just because for awhile I believed that I didn’t have a talent for writing, but now of course I do. So I think that giving some thing new a try and seeing if you have a knack for it is really good.
So, where do you now begin if you want to write a story? Well, the blank page bugs me, so I always try and fill it really fast. Often I’ll start with the weather- either outside or a make it up. Like ‘it was a bright sunny morning’ and then make the setting or add a character, ‘the street was quiet and the gentle breeze was blowing through the cherry blossom trees.’ then it’s character/setting, ‘Laura walked down the street, glancing up at each house as she past. What was the number again? she thought.’ so I’ve got my character’s thoughts now, but you can have speech too and now to hook the reader into the story (This is highly important to grab the reader so they’ll read on for sure!) ‘she paused before garden gate and bit her lip, how am I going to tell him? she thought and dropped a hand to her stomach, that I’m pregnant?’
See? you’re drawn into that now ’cause you want to know more about both characters and what they are going to do about the situation. I made that up on the spot too, as an example but also to do away with the white space on the page! And of course there are lots of different ways to get started and lots of guide books on writing out there. So give it a try!
PS. I might think about making my idea into a short story and posting it on here if I get enough people commenting with their interest, so get in touch, cause I do read them all- even tho right now I’ve over 5,000 to read! So bear with me but thanks for the support everyone!
More coming soon!
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