David at Ripples got stirred up by my whining–well at least someone listens to me–and started a great series on creativity. Vikk at Down the Writers Path picked up on it and has some great posts as well, and brought up the point with which I strongly agree–write daily and as much as you can.
Well, I do. But the idea has to come to me and cannot be coaxed by prompts obviously. In creative writing classes, or at the last writers group meeting, being given a scenario and set free to explore, I have always come up with the dopiest stories–no, not even stories, no narrative structure, no drama, just dumb. And, the worst writing style in the room. Maybe that’s why I have so many story starters but unfinished stories. They come, they buzz in my ear, they’re whisked away without warning, and I never know the full tale.
A couple months ago I returned to a paragraph that sounded like a fascinating idea of a literature-loving garbage heap. In the semester I dug him up and slowly, painfully, a story emerged. It was one of the most difficult stories to write and was forced from me by me on a sentence by sentence basis.
But then again, it was structured, made sense and was logical. In daily Spinning, more than likely it’s not.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology