Carpe Annum!

Seth Godin wrote recently in his blog about the perils of waiting until everything's perfect to take risks and put yourself out there. I've written about this kind of thing myself. Waiting for the Muse doesn't work very well. It does work, but very slowly for many of us. You'll get better results if you go to your Muse and ask her to come round for a cup of tea or the like. Take her out for a walk. Do something different. And observe. Be there, in the moment, during whatever activity you choose. Notice things. Write them down if you like. Sketch them. Or just hold them in your memory until you get back to your creative space to commit them to your chosen form.

Your creative space doesn't have to be perfect either. As long as you have a space where you have room to comfortably work without distraction, you have what you need. Sure, we'd all like an extravagant art studio with all the finest supplies, or a spacious corner office with a glorious view and the most expensive furniture money can buy. But that doesn't make creativity happen. In fact, you might even feel stifled in such an environment. "I spent all this time and money to prepare this space... how can I justify that? I'll have to create a masterpiece/write the best-selling novel of the decade in a place like this!" Carve out a nice space where you can, even if it's mobile or temporary. And then call in the Muse for a little chat.

The most important thing is to seize the moment. The time is now. If you wait until you 'feel inspired', you'll probably be waiting a very long time. And in the meantime, others who've chosen to go ahead and create anyway will be ahead of you, building characters, discovering techniques, making mistakes that they'll learn from.

Don't wait. It's a brand new year, just waiting for you to reach out and grab it.

No Topic: Move Along

I wish I had a topic today. But my mind is empty so I'm just going to plink away in my text editor until either something happens or I get bored.

I haven't been doing much writing, aside from in here, in recent weeks. I'm also quite well aware of the disappearing act August has pulled. It's taking after June, that bad influence. Not doing writing is bad for several reasons, one of which is that I can't really write about my writing experiences in here. However, I really don't have a viable excuse: writers write. It's a topic I've written about several times here. You can't sit around waiting for the Muse to land on your brain and inject awesome ideas into your head. That might happen very rarely, but it's certainly no way for a writer to expect to get anything written on a regular basis.

Last week I was experimenting with Interactive Fiction, and I've let that slide as well. I have an outline for my story, though I don't know how several of the obstacles that prevent the player from reaching the goal are to be overcome just yet. I also don't have the end sketched out, which is kind of necessary.

I'll be out and about today, so perhaps the travel and getting me out of my normal place, mentally and physically, will help jar something loose.

Who's In Charge Here? On Demanding Characters

On Thursday I had the awesome but very odd experience of being yanked to my writing place ... by one of my characters. I've been manipulated by characters before; I've long since learned that, in a similar way to the fact you can't steer a train, I can't force my characters to do something they don't want to do. This was a bit more than I'd bargained for.

The character in question is called Katherine. She's a red-headed Irish Australian living in America, and her son has been taken by the (very corrupt) government and has been held by INS for the past eighteen months. Her husband, normally a quiet sort who bows to her force of personality, has recently stepped up and broken their son out of custody. A peace-loving organisation is keeping the whole family in a safehouse in a nearby city, and the circumstance of living together under one roof again is putting a strain on everyone.

Katherine was painted in a poor light in a previous piece I did, and so when the Muse declared Writing Season open, she descended like a Valkyrie from, er, heaven, I suppose, and demanded to be written.

I sometimes get the sense when I write a character I'm intimately familiar with that I 'step into' them to experience their personas. In this case, I distinctly felt Katherine step into me as I sat at the desk. Very odd, yet very awesome.

So in addition to the thousand or so words I wrote in the morning, I also put down another three thousand or so in the afternoon. Yikes. I am writer, hear me ...er, write!