Earlier this year I bookmarked a great guest post on The Urban Muse with the title Reignite Your Passion For Words. At the time, my passion for words and writing as a little below par, but the ideas in the post still seemed to ring true.
Now that my writing fingers seem to be flying over the keyboard a bit more regularly, this post is even more useful. And in fact I’ve been unwittingly following most of the strategies mentioned anyway, including:
- Read more: Lately I’ve been absolutely swallowing books whole. Partly it’s a summer thing – all these daylight hours seem to give me enough energy to read later into the evening, and make me want to sit around outside in the beautiful weather reading during the day. And it’s definitely true for me that reading makes me want to write – either to try to write as well as the author I’ve been reading, or if it’s not a great book, because I think I can write even better.
- Watch TV or DVDs: I’m usually not a huge fan of watching too much TV, but much to my surprise I’ve recently got hooked on watching The West Wing on DVD – I was living abroad when it first screened here, but now that I’m catching up, I find it really well-written and with interesting plots, and some interesting and wide-ranging ideas.
- Exercise: or in the original post, Shovel the Driveway (not too useful in a non-snowy country like mine!) – okay, I haven’t used this strategy too much recently. But I agree that it helps inspire you to write – it gives you mental energy and time and space to come up with great ideas.
- Begin a new project: Well, funny you should say that. The ABNA 2010 contest was recently – ABNA is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award where last year my novel, Kanako’s Foreigner, made it to the semi-finals – with a submission date of January 25, 2010. Wow, that’s a lot sooner than I expected. But seeing the announcement has definitely got me fired up to, well, not exactly begin a new project, but get back to an old one – I want to try to finish off my “Bratislava novel” (which doesn’t have a cool working title yet, but does have quite a few chapters written) in time for this contest. Go me!
- Write just for you: Hey, I’ve even been doing this – writing semi-journal entries more often that I don’t expect anyone else to ever read.
So, now that I’m hoping my writing career is a little more on track again, and I’m feeling inspired, then I’m off to try and get some semblance of order into my plot ideas for my Bratislava story, and to get back into some serious writing. January 25 is not much more than a month away. Eeek!!
Tags: ABNA, inspiration techniques
Hi Amanda,
I found you on Suiete 101. I’ve been thinking about writing for them (or atleast trying to)for over a year now. I looked things up again the other day and I actually searched Croatia because it was on my list of topics to write about last year and I saw that someone (you) had beaten me to it. So I smacked myself and said “see you should have done it when you said you were going to Kelly!” Here comes in the procrastiation and also perfectionism. Trying to get my list done so I can sit my butt in the chair and write, write, write. But of course the list never gets smaller just bigger and the mind never clears. Then I had a baby, now 6 months old. Time flies and there’s never enough time to do anything let alone brush my teeth. I’ve been writing my whole life, even went to college to be a writer. Most of 2009 and some of 2008 I started my novel and almost finished it before baby Lyla got here, but it’s not done still. It’s YA fiction and I saw your blog on Amazons contest and thought maybe I could finish it, revise it and have it good to go in less than a month, with one week away in the Carribean, not likely. But I decided to 2010 has no room for procrastination. I’ve started researching to start a blog (by the way my mom and I own a Pilates studio) so that’s what I plan to blog about and write my butt off hoping I’ll get a break in there somewhere and glimmer of success. Just wanted to say thank you for allowing me to find you out there. We seem to think a lot alike and I’ve already learned a bunch from you in a couple hours. If you get your novel to Amazon in time good luck! Maybe I’ll get mine there too. Keep writing. I look forward to reading more.
Thank you,
Kelly
[...] it on and off for a while, mainly because I keep starting and stopping. But with my chance for a second attempt at the ABNA contest drawing near, I’m really keen to get it finished as soon as possible, and hopefully have [...]