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17 Sep 09 – Bird By Bird
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The toughest part of writing is to keep writing.
It's easy to type merrily away when inspiration strikes. Ideas flow! Characters pop out of one's forehead, full-formed!
The question is, will you write the next bit tomorrow? And more the day after? And again next week?
An 80,000-word novel is a Frankenstein's monster of tiny parts added every day. Another five hundred words one day, maybe two thousand words the next. But this is accompanied by horrific surgery, as large sections are gutted and replaced with another few hundred words pulled from this bin over here, then carefully massaged and sewn into place.
So, a real writer writes. Every day.
I've heard of some writers who only write, say, once a week. I don't quite believe it. There's too great a chance you'll miss a day. Besides, this is like saying that, instead of running for an hour a day, you'll just run for seven hours every Saturday. The muscles atrophy, whether they're physical or mental.
How to find time to write? You make time. I set aside 9:00pm every day to write. If I'm laying in bed at eleven o'clock or midnight and realize that I forgot about it, I get up, go into my studio, and write.
I wish there were shortcuts. I wish it was easier.
But every day, I write. And I'm now several thousand words into this novel, and I have a grip on it. I can move forward.
8 Sep 09 – The New Thing
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The idea leapt into my brain and grew rapidly.
I've no idea, even now, where it came from. I do remember tweeting about it on 27 August.
As is usual with ideas, it was a synthesis of several things I'd seen recently and several things I like. I imagined a character like Max in The Road Warrior--serious, driven, quiet, living in a harsh world. I crossed that with Vampire Hunter D, which I'd read the first few issues of a couple months ago—a serious, incredibly skilled man thrown together with a fiery girl.
Which gave me the idea for a story.
I did what I've learned to do as soon as I have an idea: I write it down. In this case, in a text file on my laptop. I have probably two dozen ideas in there now, collected over the course of the past two years (a small number, really, by most writers' standards...but then, I've written little new in the past two years).
As I wrote down the idea, I fleshed out a few of the ideas that begged for detail. The man is a vampire, living in a post-apocalyptic world. The girl is a vampire hunter, initially, though she quickly passes the limits of her abilities, and the vampire protects her.
In other words, it's a manga. But written. It's a cross between Mad Max, Vampire Hunter D, and Twilight.
That makes me gag a bit, even just writing it out.
But it's the best idea I've got at the moment, and it's tugging at me to be written. So I'm writing it.
More to follow, God willing.