The Process of Becoming Inspired

I must admit that there has been a serious lull in my output of late. Between my sons, my pets, running a household, and even doing a bit of teaching here and there, my writing time seems scant to say the least. And it can be frustrating. Added to this now is the task of attempting to reach a new audience, which means Facebooking, WordPressing, and so on – not my strong suit.

So I find myself in familiar territory. How do I find the time to write?

Honestly, if you are an aspiring writer, I would like to pay homage to the Nike brand here and tell you, “just do it“.

Yesterday, for example, I simply forced myself to sit down with my laptop. I only wrote a page. But it is further along than I was the previous day. And it got me thinking about how to embellish the bare-bones scene I had created. If I keep doing this then eventually, I tell myself, I’ll have a story.

In the meantime, I keep inspired by researching little-known aspects of medieval village life. For example, I recently discovered that when a brew house had a brew ready, they would hang a green branch over their door. From this cool little bit of information, I have created a major theme in the sequel to “The Ravens’ Augury”. I also discovered that women were the ones to do this work. Yet I had already created a major character who is a brewer, and male. What to do? I had to get creative to work my way around this.

This leads me to another part of my story. How do I invent and create characters? Now that is another blog post all of its own! So stay tuned.