Sunday, August 14, 2005

Writing blahs

I'm feeling so incredibly unmotivated to write anything at all. It's been months since I've written anything not bloggy in nature and I have no idea how to account for the lack of motivation. I freely admit I'm one of those people who doesn't force herself to write; I always feel when I force it, the reader can tell. Plus, I have no ideas and now that I know more about writing than I did five or six years ago, I'm find it way harder. Now when I look at a story idea, I think okay, what's the plot? What's the crisis? What is the climax, and what's the resolution? If I can't fit all of those pieces in, I don't start at all. Currently, I have what I think is a great opening for a story, but I'm completely at a loss as to what happens in the story. It's not enough to know how a story begins; gotta know how it ends too. These days, I'm just not willing to wing it and go plotless.

Recommendations: Sue Grafton, who writes the Kinsey Milhone series, does a great job with description and bringing the reader vividly into a setting. Even if mystery isn't your thing, I recommend picking up one or two of the Grafton books just to see how it's done. Also, Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" -- whatever else you might think of it -- does a terrific job in creating and building suspense. It's not so much great writing as he has figured out the mystery of pacing and how to keep a reader's attention from chapter to chapter. He also does some good work with description, but Grafton's descriptive work is a little less esoteric.

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