About Inspiration
For once I give writing advice from experience.
Most of the time the content here is reposted articles written by others that I find around the internet. Blog posts that I like. Blog posts that I think have some value and could be of use to the people who read my website. A highly personalised and biased news aggregator, you could say.
But today… today I write from my own experience.
See, I'm a beginning writer. I have three projects on the go now and I should be published in short form by the end of the year, but I don't actually have much experience writing yet. So that's why I'm hesitant to give you any advice on it.
Yesterday was different. I did something I've never done before. I wrote a haiku.
The Secret Lair (a wonderful blog populated by wonderful people. Go read it) is hosting the Angry Robot Haiku contest. I've been Angry Robot obsessed lately, so I was all over the haiku idea. Have you met Angry Robot? Have you met their authors, Chuck Wendig and Adam Chistopher? More importantly, have you heard about the Empire State Worldbuilder project Angry Robot are launching in January? Anyway, The Secret Lair Angry Robot Haiku contest. The challenge is to write the best haiku about an angry robot. Simple, right?
Before yesterday I had been pondering a good haiku. I pondered for a few days off and on. And what happened? Nothing. Then I decided, let me sit down and write one. First I read the Wikipedia entry on haiku, just to make sure I knew what I was doing. Then I thought of a few topics. Nothing special. Then I took one of these topics and tried to write a haiku with it. I didn't finish it; it sucked balls. Then I took another idea off my topic list and wrote another haiku. A shitty one. It didn't suck balls, but it was still shitty. Then I took the last topic and wrote another haiku. A passable one. Then I ran out of topics.
So what did I do? Give up? Convince myself I can't write haiku and why did I ever think I could? No. I read a few tweets in my feed, while mostly thinking about my angry robot. Then out of nowhere the new idea drops into my head. Five minutes later the haiku was written. The best I'd done. One I thought was pretty good for someone who's never written a haiku before in her life. Well, apart for the three preceding failures. So three minutes later the haiku was submitted.
Is it the best haiku in the world? No. But that's not the point. The point is you can't go walking around and wait for inspiration to hit you. Sometimes it does and it's awesome. Sometimes it does and it's not so awesome because you have no way of writing your inspiration down and by the time you can you've forgotten what you were going to do. It happens to us all. But mostly, inspiration is work. It means starting off with a few ideas that don't work out. It means owning up to sucking balls. But keeping at it means you'll get better and your idea will get better. Your work won't be as shitty anymore. Inspiration is work.
Okay, now, this story is a microexample and my haiku won't win any prizes, but that's okay. Because I wanted to do it and I did it and I'm happy with the result. Giving up: 0–Victoria: 1
What did you write this week?
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Victoria is a scientist by day--reluctant writer by night, Clarion Write-a-Thon survivor, slush reader for Dark Fiction Magazine, and founder and editor of the 'of Altered States' anthology series.
Victoria has short fiction published in the upcoming City of Hell Chronicles and 100 Horrors anthologies. She's also writing her first novel; a tale of magical realism.
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