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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Creativity Burst

While I was home for Christmas, I had this incredible burst of creativity. It was rather unexpected, but I was able to sit down and do overviews for six stories (two trilogies). For me, overviews are usually like back cover copy on a book. This time, however, they were much longer than that. Still not synopsis length, but probably about 2.5 pages apiece.

It was intense. For five or six days, all I did was work on these things. I got characters, I got the big picture on the story, and I couldn't stop working on it.

Until I got stuck.

The sixth story, the second set of trilogies, had a heroine without a job/career. Nothing I came up with worked for her.

It was frustrating and yet I was obsessed. I had to finish this overview. I tried it with her not knowing what she wanted to do. Maybe that was why I couldn't find anything for her, but that didn't work and I continued to spin my wheels.

Then on the afternoon of the third day, it all came together. She was a spy! And suddenly everything fell into place.

I knew what the conflict was between my hero and heroine. I knew what the storyline was and I really hadn't had much of anything up until then. I even had a vague idea of the ending and that's rare. Heck, sometimes I don't know the endings of my books until I'm almost there.

Of course, the overview is probably the easiest part of the whole process. Writing the stories is the hard part.

It also kind of messed me up. The week of intense writing/kind of plotting left me exhausted and feeling used up. It also kept my attention on this world and not on the story I'm supposed to be working on. I'm still messed up on the writing. And despite this, I still think of that week as the best, most exciting thing that's happened to me in a long while.