What do you do when your idea machine just. breaks. down? How do you get it moving again? Today I share the 3 tools that are my “go to” when it happens to me so I can get unstuck and get back to creating.
Archive - September, 2009
If David Baldacci can do it–
It’s 11:11p and I’m taking a break from working on my novel’s synopsis (yes, I’m writing one this week, too.) to write this. You see, I need a moment of honest, cathartic release. So I turn to you, my friends who will undoubtedly understand where I’m coming from. Maybe. I hope.
Confession: I had one of those weekends when the gravity that we all wrestle against just anchored me down. You know, the gravity of reality that rips the wings off butterfly dreams and crushes our paper thin conviction that we can do it. Yeah, that gravity.
Maybe it was because I was sick and my wife was, too. I’m grumpy when I’m sick. Maybe it was because I hadn’t slept much, or that I was stressing about my lack of progress on my writing last week. I get grumpy about those things, too. Whatever it was, I bought into the Voice’s smooth talking ways and began to believe that I just can’t do it. I can’t do it. What am I thinking? I have a full-time job, a wife, a daughter…I’m, I’m just a busy guy and maybe writing is just too hard. I mean, who does this to themselves on purpose?
I’ll tell you who: David Baldacci. Continue Reading…
Chosen, Take 2 by David Pentecost
I recently met David Pentecost, an artist from Mulberry, Florida, and asked him if he’d be interested in doing some test pieces for me. He graciously said yes and drew the first few pages of the Chosen graphic novel as he would have done them (he wasn’t part of the original production team). I thought I’d share these drawings with you. If you want to check out David’s other work you can catch him HERE at his blog. Be sure to click “Read More” to see all of the images.
Chosen Graphic Novel, Pgs 4 & 5
The Art of the Synopsis
World building. It’s what creators are about. So much of the creative process is about ordering chaos, organizing a universe of outlaw ideas and imaginations that naturally want to drift off into space. That’s what ideas do, they drift. It’s all they know how to do. They’re ideas after all. But, as artists, our job is to capture, organize, and anchor them in substance so they can speak to us. So they can speak to others.
As writers, a starting place for this exercise in organization should usually be the synopsis. Now, I know there’s an ongoing discussion out there about whether writers should outline their stories or simply let the characters write the story for them as the action unfolds. I’m not interested in that discussion right now, though we’ll probably talk about that in another post. I’m talking about the broad brush ideas and progression of your story, a sort of Google maps for your fiction that lays out the story dots on the page and attempts to connect them.
There are lots of ways to write a synopsis. I mean, Google “how to write a book synopsis” and you’ll get 28 million results. I doubt there are that many ways to write a synopsis, but there are a lot. But the truth is there is no right way, though really good synopses have a few key elements that you do not want to leave out. Here’s what I think makes a good synopsis: Continue Reading…