Photos: Inspiration in Color in Washington DC

I’ve discovered I’m a visual spatial learner

It means I need pictures to understand information.  So when Rabia Gale posted this writing prompt:

A favorite or inspiring piece of art (could be a statue, a painting, a musical composition, even performance art)

The first thing I thought was color

And during spring and summer in Washington, DC, color is everywhere!

Jefferson Monument

Jefferson Monument

The sharp white lines of the Jefferson Monument against the bright blue sky was magnificent.

Ahoy! Ducks away!

Mason District Park

I liked this picture because of the brilliant blue of the water mixed with the reflections of the green trees.  Then there’s that lone duck sailing across the middle of the pond.

Green, green everywhere

After sitting through the dull browns of winter, I still look at the green our trees and go “Wow!”

Flowers Galore

And, of course, the flowers that are everywhere.  I love the striking purple of these.

Other blogs writing about art and inspiration:

1. Large Blue Horses – Rabia Gale
2. Christ and St. Michael - Liv Rancourt
3. The Music that I Love – Siri Paulson
4. Botticelli’s Venus – Ellen Gregory
5. Through the Lens – Tami Clayton
6. How do you decide a favourite – Margaret Miller

 

Rule P: make writing a Priority

Linda’s Rules of Writing

Inspiration can come from anywhere, and we don’t have to wait for it.

We’re onto the letter P in Linda’s Rules of Writing for the A to Z Challenge, and on the importance of priorities.

I used to wait for inspiration to come, and then I’d write.  What invariably happened was I didn’t do much writing.

In fact, it wasn’t until I had a fight with my former cowriter that I understood that I needed to make it a priority.  We were in submission to agents of our cowritten novel, and I was a little concerned about us learning how to make the tight deadlines publishers have.  I’d been seeing deadlines of a year to write an entire book, and it had taken us a lot longer to do that.

He dismissed it, saying, “Everything is negotiable.”  I had this immediate horrifying vision that I would be the one crashing on the deadline and doing all the work while he blew it off and got half the money and credit.

It made me realize I couldn’t wait for inspiration. I had to make inspiration.

It’s easy to find other things do, so writing has to be at the top of the priority list.

What do you make time for writing?

–

 

Rule I – Ideas shouldn’t be intimidating

Linda’s Rules of Writing

An idea is the launching point of the story, but it’s only the start.

We’re onto the letter I in Linda’s Rules of Writing of A to Z Challenge, with Ideas shouldn’t be Intimidating.

When I was new to thinking about writing professionally, ideas and inspiration were intimidating to me.  It felt like the entire success of the book was bearing down on the weight of this idea, and if the idea wasn’t right, the book would crash and burn.

Maybe that’s why people say, “I’ve got this great idea.  You write it and I’ll give you 50-50.”

Over time, I’ve learned that an idea really is just the starting point, or launch point for the story.  The idea doesn’t mean much unless there’s a good writer to execute it.

My ideas now pretty much come from everywhere, and I think a story is made up of not one — but hundreds.  Some of the ideas emerge of the story, and others are random drive by ideas.  I might be reading a newspaper article and something catches my eye.  Even a placard at a museum can create a possibility that I might use.

So, now I get to ask where do you get your ideas from?

–

Caption: A to Z Challenge Logo

 

Tracking Ideas and Inspirations for the Chaos Writer

I’m playing catch up this week — I was at Capclave, a sci fi con in Maryland this weekend.  Now I get all the stuff I didn’t do over the weekend.  I swear, I think Saturday and Sunday is when I run all my errands.  I’ll write a post about Capclave later on.  Meanwhile, back at the Capitol …

One of my writing goals for the quarter is structure.  Not structure like story structure, but outside structure, like organizing papers.  I grew up in a very disorganized house where things were stacked and we only cleaned up when we lost something.  The army was the opposite of that, but their organization never made much sense to me, so when I got out, it was like I exploded back in the other direction again.

But my writing is chaos, but when I let it spread to outside mundane things, it creates disorganization and more chaos that ultimately makes more work for me — and makes it harder to write.  So my goal is focused on finding things that work for me.

The first of these structure things is what to do with ideas.  When I started writing, I kept everything in a pocket notebook that I could carry around me.  Sometimes they ended up on scraps of paper.  Soon they began to breed …

Then they got lost.

Eventually, I turned the notebooks up and was amazed at how many notebooks I had with only a handful of ideas that I had never used stored inside.  Some were more than 20 years old!  So I evolved out of not recording anything because I figured I’d remember it if it was a good idea.

But it’s left me scrambling sometimes when it comes to short story ideas.

So right now, I’m experimenting with using a three-ring binder.  One idea per page, and date it to give it an expiration.  If I’m inspired by a newspaper article, I write the inspiration, not save the whole article.  We’ll see how this works out.

How do you store/track your ideas?

–

Linda Adams, Soldier Storyteller

WRITING STUFF

Starting November 5, I will doing a month-long session on Forward Motion on “Basic Training of Military Culture.”  The lesson plan for the course is posted here.

Check out my article Balancing Writing and Blogging on Vision: A Resource for Writers.  It deals with the pesky issue of time management so that blogging doesn’t interfere with writing.

And for a little Halloween fun, a very short story about the House of Green Cats on IO9.

VISIT

Natalie Markey talks about her first day in Saudi Arabia as a non-Saudi Arabian.  I remember when I saw my first Saudi Arabian women.  They reacted as if I were a strange alien creature.

 

Finding Inspiration in the Past

When I was in the army, the single soldier always seemed to be an after thought.  There wasn’t much for us beyond the gym, the library, and the rec center.  I used to go to the rec center a lot.  It had a big TV, games, and a place to hang out.  There was always this one guy there, a regular.  He was older than most of the other soldiers there, and I later learned he was a Specialist, retired.  To retire at a pay grade of E-4, which is one level above private, meant something bad had happened. 

Everyone stayed away from him, usually far away.  Because he was lost in his own world, a world of the past, a world of Vietnam.  Things happened in this world, and he talked to people in this world, and he made the sounds of battle in this world.

I thought about him as I started to write a story for an anthology themed “The Darkness Within.”  Soldiers see things and experience things, and sometimes those things are too much.  Twenty years later, I wonder what happened to him.

I never knew his name.

Visit my flash fiction story  Sand Dollar Wishes on Writer Unboxed!

 

Ideas From Interesting Places

“Where do you get your ideas?” is a pretty common question for writers.  There seems to be an awe surrounding ideas, as if that were the hardest thing about the story (newsflash:  It’s the writing part that’s hard).   Here’s how I got the idea for a short story I just finished, called “Junk for Sale, Stories Free.”

At one point I spotted a couple of articles that interested me in The Washington Times.  Since I was at work, I tore out the articles, folded them up, and stuck them in a notebook.  I meant to take out the articles and toss them into my idea box, but I forgot.  About a month later, I happened to have the notebook with me as I was pondering the next project.  I decided the project needed to be fiction because I’m trying to get recent fiction credits for my next round of queries.  Anyway, I’m trying to think of ideas, and I see the folded up articles.  I pull both of them out and read through them.  The first one didn’t do much for me.  The second one was Hyenas Not a Laughing Matter in Ethiopia.  As I reading it,  I misread a single sentence.  That misread sentence led to the story.  A very simple place to find an idea.

The story weighs in at 753 words.  I just got it into the email to a paying publication, so I’ll see what happens.

 

Deciding What to Write

When I was doing short stories years back, I’d get an idea and pounce on it immediately to try to write it.   Really no thought went into whether the idea was something that I ought to write or if I should write it now.  Then, I quite literally started with the idea, and it decided what I was going to write.

Now, with novels, I do it differently.  For me, it starts with the story, not the characters.  I might have two or three ideas that seem like possibilities, and then I have to figure out what’s going to take the lead.  I start with a couple of ideas and play around with them for a while. I do various summaries for them, trying to get a feel for what direction a story might go.  At this point, the characters aren’t all that important; most will have placeholder names like AUNT or MC (main character).  Eventually one of the ideas starts to gel into something more, and maybe I name the main character.  All of the other characters will still have placeholder names until the story settles in more.  I’ve been looking over my notes for SAND DOLLAR MAGIC (which is going to get a new name), and I can see how the story started out and where it began to break out of the original idea.

How do you decide what to write?

 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Ideas

When I was writing short stories, I kept an idea notebook–one of those pocket-sized things that would get all bent from being in my pocket.  Invariably, it would get lost, and I’d have to buy a new one.

Once I’d get the idea, I’d scramble like mad to get it written down RIGHT NOW.  Because if I didn’t get it down RIGHT NOW, I’d forget it.

Never occurred to me that if I forgot it then maybe it was worth forgetting.

When it came to the writing, the same thing happened.  I had to jump on the story RIGHT NOW to not lose the momentum of the idea.  A paragraph, a page, two pages, five pages later, story is dead.  And I’d be jumping on another idea and repeating the same process.

When I cleaned out my files a couple of years ago, I found quite a few unfinished projects.  And then I found my idea notebooks.  About four or five of them, all full of these ideas.  Even reading them many years afterwards, I felt the spark of all these ideas.  I could see why they excited me, but I could also see why didn’t go anywhere.

They were what I call “flash in the pan” ideas.  They’re ideas that, on first thought, sound absolutely like the greatest thing in the world.  They demand to be written right now.  And they burn out, sometimes pretty fast.  I had a lot of stories where I had only one paragraph, and then the idea fizzled.

But the ideas for stories that I wrote and finished were always ones that stayed with me.  They stuck in my mind and fermented until they were ready.  The idea for MAGIC STUD is, in fact, more than twenty years old.  And what I have today is also nothing like the original idea.

What’s interesting to note is that those flash in the pan ideas I found in the notebooks–I thought they might have merit so I typed them up in a Word document and tossed the notebooks.  But I didn’t back it up, and I lost them when my hard drive failed. 

I don’t remember a single one from the list.

Perhaps it’s better than way.

 

Getting Ideas

Continuing from the interview with M.J. Fredrick on the I Do Not Want to Wait, I Want the Book Now blog.  It’s a series of questions not just about the book, but about how she writes and where she gets ideas.

She had this to say on ideas:

Everywhere! I’ve gotten a couple from dreams, from stories we read in class, articles I see on the internet….everywhere. I wish I had all the time to write all the ideas in my head!

This is a pretty standard response. When I first started a book many years ago, this particuar piece of advice drove me crazy.  Ideas weren’t everywhere!  In fact, it seemed like they were hiding.  The ideas were few and far between.

But what I also didn’t do was brainstorm them out; I waited for them to come.  I did keep an “idea notebook” that I carried around (ended up with about five of them because they invariably got lost for a while) to record “inspiration.”  Many years later, I looked through those and saw how they excited me, but also that they weren’t enough to generate a story.

Now I think of ideas as something different.  I might have one or several that inspires the story, then there are various other ones that pop up throughout that inspire a scene or a bit of characterization.  There was an article in the Washington Post a few days ago on how celebrities pose for pictures.  That lends itself to an idea for something in a scene.  I guess maybe when I was having so much trouble coming up with them, I was thinking that the whole story was resting on the idea–not that a book might be made up of many different ideas.

 

An Idea is Not an Invention

The publishing industry is a strange animal.  There’s aspects of that are in the rest of the business industry, but don’t work the same way in publishing.

For example, take The Idea.

In the business world …

Let’s suppose you have an idea for a new invention.  The Idea is worth money in the business world.  It can be worth so much money that it’s often important to go out and get it patented right away before someone steals it. 

Plus, with so many new inventions, coming up with something that hasn’t been done before is hard.

In the publishing world …

The Idea isn’t worth much.  You can wave a flag and say “This is a great idea!  It’ll be a best selling novel!”  But until that novel gets on a paper in a well-written story that people want to buy, a agent isn’t going to be interested.  And even then, if the agent likes the story, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a publisher–or the readers will.

And anyone can come up with the idea.  It’s pretty easy to do.  Easier than coming up with an idea for an invention.  But again, it doesn’t mean anything without the actual writing.