Monday, January 18, 2010

The Muse

Today I was reading through my blogs and something struck me as interesting. It was brought on by the blog of Suzette Saxton and Bethany Wiggins. http://suzettesaxton.blogspot.com/2010/01/epiphany.html.

It got me thinking about what strikes me as a writable idea? Where do I get my muse to write a new story? What makes me decide what is a good format for the story? (e.g. Screenplay, Short Story, or novel.) So I decided that this would be a good place to write how I come up with my ideas.

It got me thinking about it and my answers to the above questions are:
A writable idea is something that I think would be fun to read, something that I can really get into writing and enjoying the story.

I get my muse from my family and friends honestly. Poker is a big part of my life as you saw from the last two posts, so a recent story that is bouncing around in my head starts off in home poker game. Granted it goes sort of fantasy after that, and might not ever get completed, but that's not the point. I draw from things in my life which lead to ideas, and it has a sort of snowball effect.

The format of the story is something that I still struggle with. Currently most of my ideas are novels. Currently 5 WiP, 2 in first draft format. One 90 pages in, another 30 pages in, and 2 others that are in outline format only. (That's actually 6, but I thought of the sequel to my current novel as sort of in limbo until the first one gets picked.) Before these pieces I wrote many short stores, granted my short stories have a difficult time being under 8,000 words, which makes them hard to place in magazines. Then before that, I have written 3 screenplays, tried to sell two of them with no luck, but I still enjoy the format, most recently entering a short script contest, which I didn't place in, but it was fun to write in the format again.

I think that I struggle with this last question most, which might be a bad thing as how can you finish a project if it's in the wrong format. I can answer that question with my current novel that I'm querying, it first started out as a 4-part series of novella's. (Still have them somewhere.) Then I turned the first part into a screenplay, and it was good times, got good reviews, yet something just didn't sit right with it. The way that the telekinesis of the main character wasn't coming across well in that format. So I decided to try my hand at a novel and the hardest thing about it was switching from present tense to past tense.

So after all this rambling, hope you don't mind, but I thought it was interesting to think about the process writing in relation to myself.

Do you find yourself going through the same thoughts, or am I just crazy and making things harder for myself?


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