Day 14
30 mins planning + 1 hr planned writing
What to do when you’re feeling uninspired, flat, empty?
Get away from the desk. Go to the things which you know – or guess – will inspire you. Books, music, places, people . . . Get some outside stimulus.
This is Jacqui’s advice, and I think it works. She suggests making it a conscious weekly ritual. I do like this, because I think we can expect a lot of our imaginations, while forgetting what gets them going in the first place.
When I was less committed to writing, I was inspired a lot; almost too much. I didn’t have the writing practice to make use of the ideas I was generating. I have since realised that ideas are sugar highs; they can fuel you for a few hundred words, but it’s not long before the story needs some more substantial nutrition.
But I used to think that there was no point writing unless I was inspired. So as you can imagine, I wrote sporadically and my writing time was disorganised.
This year I decided to be more organised; to not wait for inspiration. So far, I have struggled with the feeling of sitting down to write but not wanting to. However, if it’s my allotted time, I just plod on. Because it guarantees me an outcome:
At worst, I come out of it with a clearer idea of what I want a scene not to be.
At best, I catch a thread, and follow it to something interesting after all.
But either way — and I think most importantly — I teach my mind to get used to patient repetition. I condition myself to sit down at a set time for a set activity, however I feel. Although there is initial resistance to that, soon enough, the mind accepts.
And I think it’s that expectation which then encourages my mind to look for inspiration during non-writing time. It knows that I will be at my desk at the end of the week, and so it wants to find things I can play with.
It really is like any other habit-forming practice: our minds have to be taught to expect a new normal before they are fully on board.
So I will consider my regular source of inspiration from now on. My writing challenge is getting the functional balance between organic inspiration and structured application. For those of us to whom balance doesn’t come naturally, perhaps inspiration is something best scheduled.
Exercise
- 1,000 words (I added the usual 30 mins planning): follow a creative instinct: unravel a recurrent image which keeps coming to you, even if you are not sure of its relevance to the book
My response
- As my draft novel is a first-person narrative so far, I’ve not known whether to write scenes where my main character is absent, even if they are important to the world. One of these is an illegal archaeological dig; I have an image of a stone eye being discovered, and staring out at the digger; however my p.o.v. character won’t be there. I decided to write it without her, because it gives me and the reader access to the reality of the world she’s navigating. And as it keeps appearing to me, Jacqui’s advice is to see where it leads.
- I took the prompt to search for inspiration by starting a free online course in the area I’m writing about (black market antiquities), and I used some of my planning time to get an idea of how an illegal excavation would look.
- When I came to write my 1,000 words, I found that I was less judgmental of their quality than habitually. I felt I just needed to get ideas down, and wasn’t that concerned about being accurate or well-expressed. This goes back to the “write it shit” mantra from Day 6, which I’m pleased to have internalised. I think there is something hopeless about staring at a blank page, knowing the mountain of work there is to do, but feeling unqualified to do it. My approach this year seems to be more about climbing the mountain while discovering strength and skills on the way.
all course content copyright Jacqui Lofthouse thewritingcoach.co.uk