This week we have indeed received our first reader-submitted Spark Note, from M. x at Fantasy Novel Project. She emailed us last week to ask if she could submit, and we said, "Of course!"
We'll put it behind a break because it's a bit longer than our usual, but do give it a read and send your thanks to M. x
What
Am I - As A Writer - Influenced By?
How
do I Deal With Writer’s Block?
Hi there!
Here are the ways in which I become
influenced to create and write (for anyone who is genuinely interested) and here
are 7 top tips I’ve come up with for anyone struggling with writer’s block. (If
you’ve read my A-Z posts, you’ll understand my fascination with the number 7,
expressed in my ‘S’ post!)
1)
If you’re stuck when writing or
have lost the spark in a story you are desperate to finish, get a prompt and
just write anything that comes into your mind! Recently, I had the worst writer’s
block! Okay, I’m very busy with A Levels and the rest of my life so I could say
that I’ve had other things on my mind, my, truthfully, whenever I went to look
at the story I’m writing, (a fantasy story, created by my little brother and
I), I felt physically ill. The amount of work that would have to go into it
didn’t really faze me when I started it, but it all suddenly rushed out of
nowhere and gave me a harsh whack in the stomach!
So to free myself of my
predicament, I went to look for inspiration and prompts.
Firstly, I searched up things on Google Images. For example, ‘fantasy’, ‘incredible’ or ‘fascination’: things that would come up with abstract or random images, rather than a specific thing like ‘rainbow’ etc.
Here are some examples of what I found:
2)
Another way in which I freed
myself was by reading through blogs and picking an interesting sounding word
and developing an idea from it. I didn’t even need to write it, I just planned
it out in my head and it would start to influence the rest of my writing. (Such
as the name ‘Dawnie’ from thedawnieproject.com http://www.thedawnieproject.com/)
3)
A really useful thing for me is
to listen to music, especially classical music, and let myself imagine a
situation in a film in which that music would be used. I would then come up
with some crazy story that probably made no sense, but, nevertheless, helped to
undo my writer’s block. My Mum is a singing teacher, choir master (of many
choirs) and also attends choirs herself. One evening, she asked me to go to a
concert of hers that was really important to her. Now, I usually like classical
music, but I really don’t like
operatic music where four singers, the Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Base, just sing,
sing, sing and never seem to stop. I had to sit through a whole two hours of
this! My Mum only sang (along with the rest of the choir) once or twice!
Anyway, the point of this story is that I ended up listening to the violins
playing in the background of these top yodellers and created images in my mind
that would fit the music.
-
Happy, sunny day, along with
happy, bouncy music like that in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker
-
Suddenly drastic music!
Something has happened, someone died. We must escape!
And so on. I can even create
characters using this technique!
Here are some
links to good classical songs on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvUepMa31o
– Claude Debussy with Clair De Lune (A personal favourite)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg1dMpu4v7M
–Tchaikovsky’s Waltz Of The Flowers from The Nutcracker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRxofEmo3HA&feature=related
– Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
You could also
look up some Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert and loads more! (They’re also
great for A Level revision!)
It’s actually
quite fun when you’re that bored!
4)
Here is a trick that many must use: go and look at some art! Last Tuesday, I went to Tate Modern in London and saw Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull:
Here is a trick that many must use: go and look at some art! Last Tuesday, I went to Tate Modern in London and saw Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull:
He’s known to be a
serious atheist and called the piece For
The Love Of God.
Since then, I’ve
become really interested in his work and how his mind works and I want to use
his themes – beautifying death, questioning God, etc.
Seriously! Just
take a day out of your busy schedules and go to the closest art museum! Even if some art angers you, irritates or bores
you (I get very het up about the argument
around ‘What Is Art?’), it will influence you in some way!
5)
When I’m really stuck for
ideas, or am tired of being cooped up inside trying to thinkthinkthink, I take
my dogs on a walk in the countryside. (You obviously don’t have to have dogs to
do this) Woods are incredible places. They are silent (apart from the birds)
but team – even overflow – with wildlife! Animals, insects, plants, trees etc.
What I love to do is take an unknown path through the heart of the woods and
try to get lost. I remember the paths I’ve been on and the directions I decided
to take but I do genuinely become lost sometimes because everything looks
practically identical in the woods! But this experience gets your mind racing,
with either excitement or genuine fear of being lost. Both of these are very
healthy for your brain in my opinion! These days, our brains don’t get enough
stimulation! We learn, we read, we watch, we create, but we never test our
instincts! We never have to use our natural survival instincts, so simply getting
lost and having to work it out using your senses and memory is a really good
mind exercise. So get out there! (Bring a phone with you in case you truly are
lost!)
6)
Now, a typical writer would
tell you to just read, read, read. But I’m not very typical. I’m odd and quirky
and I do things my own way. Of course it’s very good to read a lot, but
whatever you do, try not to be too influenced by the books you discover! I
guess, what lead me to my writer’s block recently was the realisation that The Hunger Games had blew me away, so
much so that I started copying everything in it! For example, I’d write short
stories about a girl who had to hunt in the woods! The same thing happened a
few years ago when I read Hardy’s Tess of
the D’Urbervilles. I wrote a short story about a dairy-maid that was set in
Tess’ times, almost parallel to her life and resulted in execution after
murdering her husband. Ring a bell? So that is my main advice. By all means, use
other’s writing techniques etc. but try as hard as possible not to get strung
up in their plot instead of making your own!
7)
And very lastly (and most
obviously): do things, go places, and meet people! People are fascinating, and
the more people you get to know, the more personalities you can successfully
develop! Characters seem to be the hardest thing to create when planning a
novel if you want them all to be diverse, developed and deep (Excuse my alliterated
sentence!)
In the long run, experiences
are really important because it means that you will be able to write better
about those moments you know well or have experiences/witnessed at least once.
I hope this
helped!
M. x
P.S. Feel free to
ask me for advice on anything (to do with writing – or anything else if you
really want) by commenting on something on my blog or by emailing me (my email
is on my blog on the page titled A
Strange Rant In Which I Tried To Introduce Myself). I try to answer every
comment I get but that, inevitably, cannot always be accomplished. (I also may
not be able to answer every question you have and will tell you when I
truthfully don’t know the answer!)
