I’ve no doubt mentioned writing a few times on this blog but I feel like talking about it again, ok? I love to write, I always have in a way. I wasn’t one of those kids who sat in her room during her youth writing stories; I’m more of a dreamer. I just lived out imaginary plots in my head until I realised (about 5-6 years ago) that writing out these dreams was actually a job you could make a career of. Being ‘A Writer’ was always something I wanted to be, despite not really writing. It’s only when you get older and you want to step away from the life you’ve been told you should have that you realise these things!
Writing is just a lot of fun for me; there’s no great trick to it. I’m not a planner of any kind and maybe that will be my downfall when I come to try to get published and jump on the writing train full time, but I just don’t like to go in with a full blow-by-blow when I’m writing. I have been blessed with the ability to let a story naturally unfold and that’s purely because when I write the story I’ve come up with has probably been living inside my head for a while already.
That being said a few years ago I wrote a story and got 70% through it and realised I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was a story I wanted to write but the natural progression of it was stale. I loved the characters and got stuck in the lingering moments rather than finding the action. Happily, last week, I had an epiphany whilst watching a film that blew the story wide open for me; the inspiration for the conflict finally hit me… years later. The action I couldn’t find in the small town setting I’d come up with was suddenly just THERE. It was such a eureka moment I really look forward to editing the damn thing (which, for me, is pretty great because I HATE edits!).
Similarly I had a story knocking around in my head for a few years, way back when, but I never wrote it. There was always something similar out there in the world and I couldn’t find the niche. I couldn’t see what made my story any better. Again; just this week I had the eureka moment! My brain, curiously working out kinks in plots without me even realising, handed me the key element that makes the story so much more interesting I can’t wait to write it.
I think my process of relying on ‘fate’ (if you want to call it that) is odd to others. I don’t write the plot down before I start, I just GO. I have the first scene in my head and I follow it through to the end. Sometimes it doesn’t work but sometimes I’m left amazed by the way my brain has managed to connect little things that make the bigger things even better.
I’m approaching the end of the edits of my very first novel and so I just wanted to write this little post so that I could reassure myself I AM CAPABLE. (But please can we just NOT have to edit things?!)
Sam
Pretty Thoughtful Blog 
I really relate to the dreaming up plot line things. When I was a kid I would listen to music for hours, and relive these “sort of” stories in my head. They were more like story pieces. At night I would do the same thing without music. And when my dad made up stories to tell us as kids I quickly started telling him the stories to tell me. I would give a quick outline, like the sinpit on the back of a book and he would tell the story and I would stop him sometimes at certain points to make adjustments as they came to me or as I had imagined them in the beginning. This really makes me believe that storytellers are born.
Also, most of my ideas seem to come to me as I am already typing. Well, most of my strongest ideas.
Obviously some mysterious part of the brain is at work with stories. It must be always working. I imagine in the future we might have a better scientific explanation. But it does seem to be miraculous. It feels like the ideas are just given to you on a silver platter out of the blue.
Over planning can be stifling, and that’s probably what I’m doing wrong at the moment. I always know the solution is just to sit down and write and to trust that ideas will come, but I don’t always live like this is true. This usually happens when I’m stuck in some sort of rut and I want to try and control everything–but mostly when I’m upset about something else in my life. Bad emotions are really draining on creativity.
But in the end I think as a storyteller you have to realize on some level your ego (for lack of a better word) is not in control. I don’t know what part of us is. Or maybe fate is real. I don’t know for sure. Not anymore. But I do know it’s better not to question it. The best thing to do is just live in the magic of it all, and to pretend on some level that it’s actually magic.
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