Writer’s block.

This is something every writer has to contend with at some point.  It’s not a lack of ideas, but struggling at how to put them on a page.

It’s like when you imagine the awesome cake you are going to bake, and then find out you have no icing sugar and the shop is closed.  Now what are you going to do?

Well you could give up on the cake.  Or you could look up how to make icing sugar on the net, throw caster sugar and cornflour into a food processor and walla! Improvised icing sugar. 

Ok so it turned out a bit floury and gritty, but hey, at least I tried.

Oh yeah, this post was about writing wasn’t it?

Well, I find one of the best ways to get over writer’s block is to just write.  Grab a pad and stream of consciousness write down anything and everything.  Eventually something will click.

Another exercise I read about was to go away and describe something.  Anything.  Like eating a nut.  What does it smell like?  What is it like as you bite into it?  How does it feel on your tongue?  What about when you chew it?

Sometimes it gets those words flowing again.  Sometimes you just get to eat a nut, which is a nice anyway.  (Unless you have a nut allergy, in which case, don’t do that.)

So this week I got another story for the sci fi collection first drafted.  I am both looking forward to, and dreading reading them back.  Sometimes things that made perfect sense when you were typing them become complete gibberish when you read them a week later.  Fingers crossed there won’t be too much of that!  I guess we’ll see how that goes next week!  

In the meantime, I’ve added a new link to the resources page, from those masters of storytelling, Pixar.  Enjoy!  

There’s a moral to this story somewhere.

When I was at school, I had some keyboard lessons.  You know the kind – where you are excused from class to sit in a tiny room for ten minutes trying to speed learn how to play a tune from an “easy” book. 

It was in one of these lessons I got into a discussion (argument) with my teacher about how “Rock Around the Clock” should be played. 

You see, I wasn’t playing what was written on the page. 

“Those notes are all crotchets!”  She would point out with exasperation.  “They are all the same length.”

“But the song doesn’t sound like that!”  I thought that if I was going to play Rock around the Clock, it should sound like the record did.  But this was a simplified version for doing keyboard grades – and the teacher pointed out that if I played it like it sounded instead of how it was written in the book, I wouldn’t pass the exam.

Who made up that rule?  To me, it seemed the ultimate silliness that you should fail at playing music by playing it to sound better. 

As it was, I never took the exam.  But whenever I played Rock Around the Clock, people didn’t seem to mind that not all those notes were crotchets.

Inspiration

Some days it’s good to just get out and see stuff.  If you sit indoors at a computer all day, eventually your imagination will get a bit worn out.  Even going for a walk will help, to refresh you memory on the texture of stone, the feel of the wind and the colour of the sky.

I got out to visit a local wildlife park this week; here are some of the words I brought back in the form of pictures!

All images copyright Sarah Cosgrove © 2012

Counting on it...

How many words is enough?

It’s a question that comes up a lot when people are writing.  The simple answer is, there are enough words when your story is finished. 

Take Fahrenheit 451, for example.  A well-known classic, it comes in at a word count of 46,118.  Compare that with The Fellowship of the Ring at around 187,000, and consider that is only the first part of that story. 

There are rumours that a publisher or agent won’t look at a first time novel unless it falls around 90,000 words – you can only go higher if you are established. 

That may be the average word count for a first time novel, and maybe I have a misplaced faith here, but surely it depends on what you’ve written?

If an agent or publisher likes your book, I don’t think they would dismiss it because it’s “too long”.  Perhaps it would need tightening up, and can shed a few words here and there.  Perhaps if it’s huge, it could be split into two books.  (The opposite happened to The Fellowship of the Ring – originally two books it is now thought of as one.)

I’m not too worried about word count so far as my novels go – I’ll tell the story and see where I end up.  I have a feeling I’ll hit around the average.

What has got me thinking about word count is my short story collection.  The stories in it vary from 620 at the shortest, to 10,020 at the longest.  The shortest one there may only be a page, but that is all that was needed to tell that story.

However I want the collection in itself to provide a decent amount of entertainment.  There isn’t an answer to how many stories should be in a short story collection, because as demonstrated above, you could say ten, and I could write ten 620-word stories, which wouldn’t be a very long read at all. 

So I’m adding up all the words in my stories to see how they totally compare to novels.  By comparing this count to books I’ve read, I can confidently say – yes, this is going to be a decent length read. 

By my calculations, I could use another three to four stories of around 6000 words.  Coincidentally, I have three to four more stories I wanted to tell for this collection.

Isn’t it nice when things work out like that?

    

A Crazy Idea

Today I officially announce my new career.  Being an author. 

“What?  That’s crazy!”

Yeah I know.  But the thing is, this is something I want to do.  I love to create, to tell stories, and make art.   

After being made redundant, I had a good think about what I wanted to do.  There was also a significant amount of thinking about what I didn’t want to do.  The most important lesson I learned from my old job was the value of using your time wisely – and enjoying yourself.  Life is too short to have an eleven-hour shift in a boring job just to get some money.  After all, what is the money for? 

Besides which, other people make their living creatively, why not me?  Most of the time, in reality, the only thing stopping us from chasing our dreams is ourselves.

So I had a choice.  I could look for another nine till five (or in my previous case, three-thirty till two-thirty) job, with the hope that one-day I’d get to be an author.  Or I could, you know, be an author.  When it’s put like that, it seems less crazy, right?

This should be the point where I produce my “here’s one I made earlier” novel.  Every aspiring writer seems to have one in the bag already.  Well, unfortunately I don’t.  I have the start of at least three – all stories I want to tell, but none of them anywhere near first draft complete.  I also have a collection of short stories, which are nearer completion, and will hopefully be on a Kindle near you soon™!   

It’s a scary thing to announce that I’m going to be doing this.  I wonder who will be looking forward to reading my stories, and who will be wondering how long it will last before I get a “proper” job.  I’m hoping most will fall into the first category! 

This blog will be a document of my progress towards my goal – story updates, inspirations and bouts of wisdom.  For now, I’ll let others do the profound talking.