Anything from Two steps from Hell is top of my inspirational music list. I can’t write with music playing as I find it distracting, so I listen every time I take a break. A little burst of inspiration every now and then. Hope you enjoy it.
I’d be interested to know where you find your writer’s block cure.
A friend on facebook asked me not long ago, “where do you get all your ideas from?” A simple question indeed but one that is almost impossible to answer in a way people who aren’t ‘like me’ will understand.
By ‘like me’ I mean, well like me. Let me try to explain. I’m autistic, which means I don’t do the social thing at all well. I don’t mix with folks effectively and I tend to quickly piss people off and if I do make a friend, I tend to lose it pretty quickly. This means I’m alone for most of the time, both physically and inside my head. You know when you have friends but they’re not actually ‘here’ at this moment but you know inside your head that they exist and they’re your friends? You have an innate knowledge that you’re not emotionally alone don’t you? Well I don’t have that. I’m physically alone and alone inside my head too. Now that’s freaking alone man..!
I also have major emotional baggage left over from an abusive childhood which means I have a trust issue. Not something you want when you’re trying to make friends. This also tends to add to my isolation. I’m also physically unattractive so even if men did happen to overlook my other failings, the sight of me puts them off anway. This also means I’m destined to remain just as alone as I am now.
All of this isolation takes its toll and not all of the effects are negative, for me as a writer anyhow. I’ve developed an immense imagination. Every moment I’m alone I’m living one of my internal fantasies. People who see me may think I’m just shopping or taking out the trash but really I’m exploring the outer regions of some far flung planet, searching for the ancient truth stone that will save the people and show me my one true love who just happens to be mixed race, hugely muscular, clean shaven and hung like a horse. I may appear to be driving to the store, or to my day job but really I’m on my way from my Los Angeles mansion to meet with my agent to discuss my latest appearance on the Ellen show and whether we could fit in a spot on Jimmy Kimmel the same day or whether we need to put that one back a week. I may appear to be doing housework but really I’m searching the cargo bay of the intergalactic freight liner for clues as to the whereabouts of the hand written notes that would prove that hugely muscular, mixed race, well hung hunk of a prisoner is completely innocent of those murders on Taxos 4.
You see what I’m driving at? This is me every minute of every day and several hours into each night too as I toss and turn and struggle to switch it all off so I can sleep. The moment I wake it all starts again. This is the stuff that fills my mind 24/7 and all of the locations, the conversations and the people are as real to me as anyone I may physically meet. Being completely alone both physically and emotionally too, allows me to indulge in this fantasy reality to a high degree and I’ve been doing it for so long that I doubt I could stop for long and I couldn’t imagine being able to survive without it.
It’s the easiest thing in the world for me to just write this stuff down. I’m so tapped in to my creative flow that I can just sit down and switch it on and let the words come tumbling out. I see it all happening as I write it. I actually live it as I write it and I feel all of the emotions each time I re read it. All I have to do is sit down, switch on and step out of the way. My higher self does the rest, my creativity, my muse, call it what you want. I always say that I don’t actually write my books; my characters write them and I just take dictation.
Last night I was bored so I sat down and opened a blank word document and then opened my mind. An hour later I had a full plot synopsis for brand new epic space adventure novel. No pain, no tears, no agonies of writers block (what the fuck is that anyway?) and no prob laymo.
So in answer to my friend who wanted to know where I get my ideas from. The answer is, from me.
Just letting you all know that page 2 of the Intergalactic Guidebook is now up and available for your perusal.
Hope you like it.
I haven’t been able to write for the past 3 weeks. This wasn’t because of writers block. It wasn’t because my imaginative flow decided to flow away. It wasn’t even because my characters went on holiday without me. The reason is Mother. My mother visited me for 3 weeks and that means that all writing stops while she is ensconced within my living room. Oh she likes books and is proud as punch that I’m writing them, it’s not that. I read her the draft of my upcoming fourth novel, Changing Faces and she loved it. I read her the 5 chapters of my fifth novel and she loved them too. I even read her my two flash fiction stories and she positively gushed.
I just feel self conscious when she’s around and I don’t seem to be able to sink myself low enough into the creative flow when I know she’s lurking 5 feet away doing her cross stitch or soduko. She also has the annoying habit of peering over my shoulder at the computer when she shuffles past on her way to the kitchen to make a cuppa. That annoys me and makes me self conscious about what I’m writing and gives me a childish urge to wrap my arms around the pc monitor like a kid in school trying to stop the big ginger kid at the next desk from copying my answers on the math test.
I’m one of those writers who needs silence. I can’t write to music. I have tried but I find myself concentrating on the music instead of writing. My mother is great and she would happily sit and do her cross stitch or puzzles for hours (she does anyway) while I write but she can’t stop nattering. She can’t seem to go for more than a couple of minutes without making some sort of comment or conversation, about anything at all and the interruptions really take me off my stroke. From the regular “oh there’s another emergency vehicle siren, you get a lot of them here don’t you?” to the occasional “must pop to the loo, my pills are working,” and everything conceivable in between. Then there’s the coughing, sneezing and farting..!
No, I need silence to write. I need to be able to focus my entire mind on maintaining that intuitive link with my characters so that I can hear their voices and take dictation from them accurately (yes that’s right, I don’t write my stories, I just take dictation from my characters. I’m one of ‘those’ writers). Once I get going, hours can go by without me noticing and I ‘awake’ to find myself sitting in complete darkness at 2am, desperate for a pee and horrified that I have to be up at 6am to go to work. I sometimes think that the ease with which I switch into my alternative fantasy-reality is what enables me to focus so entirely when I’m writing. I don’t just invent the people, their lives and the situations, I actually know them and experience them with them. It’s a total and real connection and if time and my bladder allowed, I’d write for days on end without stopping.
So now mother has gone home and I can get back to it. Book 4 needs another proof read/edit and book 5 needs more chapters. My characters have had a well deserved holiday; I just hope they’re back and ready to work..!
I see a lot of posts from authors about writers block. Some of these posts are funny but some are anguished screams of despair from writers who don’t know why they can’t write. I have to admit here to never experiencing writers block; it’s just something I never suffer from and I often wonder what it feels like and why people get it or even if they really do get it or whether it’s just a state of mind they get stuck in.
It must be horrible to just not be able to write anything at all no matter how hard you try. I can’t imagine anything worse to be honest but is it actually something tangible that one can suffer from? Can we ‘catch it’ like the flu and if so what is the cure? Is there a cure? Or is it just a state of mind where the writer just believes he/she can’t write and so doesn’t trust his/her own creative flow?
For me, writing is an intuitive thing. I sit down and just begin to write and within a few sentences I feel ‘something’ beside me and it just flows. Call it my muse, my characters, a spirit inspirer from beyond, I don’t know but there is definitely something that steps close when I begin to write and the words come from outside of me and flow through me and onto the page. I can actually feel it happening this way and I know the words aren’t mine; they don’t originate from within me but flow through me from somewhere else. I believe that so long as I know it happens this way and so long as I trust the process, it will continue.
Perhaps that’s the problem with folks who claim to encounter writers block. Perhaps because they believe the creativity originates from themselves exclusively; when they have a problem or stress in their lives they can’t access that place inside anymore. Perhaps if they begin to embrace the concept of the creativity coming from somewhere outside of themselves and simply flowing through them, they would be able to move away from this concept of writers block.
Merita King 