Hey Everyone! How’s life?
“Going good,” reply the incognito readers.
Wonderful! Let’s get started!
I’ve been trying to get something up for a few weeks now. I was doing some work yesterday as well, and I had written about a full page before my brain just went HALTTTTT!! THOU SHALT NOT WRITE ANYMORE!
It’s called Writer’s Block and it’s where you have no idea what to write next, at which point you start stringing together random words to try to form a random side interference that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic!
For example: I’ve been trying out this new story. It’s in the point of view of a flight attendant, yes, a flight attendant.
Anyways, I was about four pages into it, and I had no idea what to write next. So what I did was write about a page about how this protagonist is terrified of spiders. It has little to nothing to do with anything at all. But, it was a page and it was a page.
Another thing I do when starting up things is never, ever, ever form plots. I never make any outlines whatsoever, and then I have to face the consequences. Here’s what happens.
- Random inspirational idea for a story pops up into head at nocturnal hours.
- Quickly opens up a document and write that idea down.
- Loses it somewhere in files. Or, it gets pushed down by all the other random things written.
- Go file cleaning one day. Discover that piece.
- It no longer makes sense.
You see what that does?!? You may have the most inspiration prompt for a novel! But you have no outline! So that amazing idea goes absolutely nowhere at all! Not only that, but whatever you were thinking when you wrote that idea down, is now poof! You have no idea what was going on in your mind at that time!
I’m going to be an example today. It’s the EXACT, WORD-FOR WORD, OF WHAT I WROTE A COUPLE OF MONTHS BACK. IT IS VERY TERRIFYING TO READ AGAIN, AND I ONLY RARELY GO BACK TO THIS DOCUMENT TO RE-LIVE THE HORROR OF WHAT THIS WAS. Here we go:
“There was once a woman. She wasn’t your typical story. She didn’t live in a deserted alley with twenty-five cats. No,no. Ms. Elida Noble was quite in fact, the opposite. She lived in an apartment in the Big Apple, and she absolutely despised it there. There were so many dangers lurking on every corner, and Ms. Elida Noble was what you might call (if you were still in your childhood years,) a downright scaredy-cat. She’d wake up in the morning to the sound of bustling cars and it forced her to remember her home back in (Sweden?) where you could wake up and not have to wonder about how many different ways you could be swallowed up by the city itself. It was a horror to get on the subway, a horror to get off the subway, a horror to think about being cramped up in a car as if they were all tuna cans, waiting to be sorted out from the salmon ones. It wasn’t only the subway though. No, no. As if being scared of the beginning of the day, she still had to worry about all the cars that might not see her as they zipped off to some place, with no care to the human beings they might have made to almost just disappear. She still had to worry about all the crazy (in her mind, they were all just crazy in their right minds) people who decided to juggle fire balls as amusement to weird old New Yorkers. She’d do her best to avoid those routes that the performers took, but this was just a horrible city, full of horrible surprises, in her opinion. They’d just pop up from nowhere and Ms. Elida Noble had to run away from there as fast as she could. She’s get weird looks, but she didn’t care whatever anyone thought of her, at least her life wasn’t in danger from something silly like that. Then there were those people who stood in front of you and and asked for you to sign something, or they wanted to question you. She wasn’t a heartless person, but that sleep loss during the night would just make her late to work, and she had absolutely no time. She often thought about just strolling around on a Sunday, and signing and answering every question that might come her way, except her work never stopped. So that was just a task on her bucket list of things that seemed literally impossible.”
I have not edited this at all to post this here. (That is a very strong statement.) (It needs lots of grammar editing.) I feel like I’m sharing such an important artifact. I think everyone should feel special right now. Anyways, that was only the first paragraph of that horror story.
I did not have a plan for this story. I made it up as I went along.
You know what I came up with after more writing?!? Ms. Elida Noble (This name, send help, please.) was a SPY. She wrote for the “Spy Telegraphy.” That was her secret occupation. And this was so UTTERLY RIDICULOUS because it was embedded in my head to always imagine her as an elderly lady. An elderly lady. As a spy.
It depends on how you look at it. This could have been an epic story. A woman in her eighties running around with lasers.
Or, it could have just been a fail. Which it is, I mean. I don’t know what that is at all. I don’t even open it up much.
WHAT I ALSO DID:
I just wanted my character to hate the city and be an undercover spy. There was no mystery. This document ended up around approximately...two pages long. Despite that, I started the ending before I had barely started the beginning and not even begin to think of the middle.
Yes.
I get excited about the ENDING before I do anything else.
...
It’s four AM in the office. A person types slow and steadily on their typewriter. Clickety-Clack. Clickety-Clack. “I have the perfect idea for a novel!” They yell to nobody. The silence speaks back to them.
They eagerly begin typing. They’re writing consistently for about thirty minutes, until their idea is out on paper.
“I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I’M GOING TO DO WITH THE ENDING NOW THAT I HAVE THE INTRODUCTION!” They exclaim. They quickly type it out.
...
They finish typing the ending.
They then realize that their middle part has no content whatsoever. They have no plot.
“I HAVE WRITER’S BLOCK!!” They shriek, their voice alerting all the neighbors.
“That house. Always going clickety-clack on their typewriter,” A neighbor says after waking up to a scream. They go back to sleep.
……………...
