Record your fleeting thoughts. There are thoughts that cross our minds every day--whether through the normal course of events or during brief moments of reflection, that writers latch on to and think briefly, "That would be a great scene/argument/adage/description for my book." Sher's simple advice: write these down. This is by no means a new concept (you can even get shirts with this theme), but her emphasis on the writer's need to experience the world/society/humanity and take from it rather than sit behind a keyboard all day is astute.
I currently have over 300 of these little 1-3 sentence gems tapped into my phone. These are themes, character/setting descriptions, opinions, emotions, philosophies, arguments, etc. that I will later elaborate on and incorporate into one of my narratives.
One thing to remember: You want as little time as possible to elapse from the moment of inspiration to the moment of elaboration. Revisiting the theme three months later will frequently leave you confused about the when and why of your note. If you were a landscape painter, you would set up your easel at this very spot and articulate the scene on your canvas. As writers, while we can't always drop what we're doing, we do need to make sure to fan the spark of inspiration as quickly as possible.
1 comments:
Good point. Write down those inspirations. Now! (Or at least as soon as you can after the fact/thought/experience. Last Saturday I went sailing on a rather large craft with 5 other gals off Oahu, Hawaii. We saw humpback whales, a few, and spinner dolphins, scads! I'd never seen spinner dolphins before. Amazing creatures, smaller than the dolphins seen in the movies, they leap into the air several feet, revolve around like an egg beater, then splash back into the ocean. One woman pondered, why do they do that? The sailboat owner said, "No one knows." Hmm,
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