Music: the Language of Inspiration

Today is the start of a new week, a week that I hope to be expanding my progress into. I’ve wanted to talk about music since the very start of this blog, as it is a major influence on my writing and my ideas, yet it hasn’t felt like the right time to broach the subject. I’ve felt like I didn’t have the right to speak of my music, like I didn’t know it well enough, until today.

Today, I started constructing a playlist for my main project. It’s a dangerous task for productivity. It’s like I’m testing how fast the water is flowing by throwing myself into the deepest part. I’m in danger of finding a song that perfectly describes a scene that’s been pestering me for ages and getting washed away in it’s imagery. Two hours will pass and not a word will be written.

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

I like music that tells a story. As I grew up, I tended towards progressive rock, progressive metal and power metal genres and these have been an unexpected benefit in the creative process. Bands like Rush and Dream Theater that aren’t afraid to venture into the realm of fantasy in their songs, to Finnish power metal band Stratovarius whose music is almost entirely fantasy and sci-fi themed.

Another of my muses are soundtracks from some of my favourite films and games. I took my iPod with me to bed a few nights ago and had a good hour of relaxing with some of my favourite music.
Could I sleep afterwards? No. I can tell you exactly which song was the culprit.
It was ‘The White Tree’ from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Give it a listen. Go on, I’ll wait. 🙂
I had to get out of bed at 3am and start typing up ideas. Only then could I sleep. Music like this is a possessive, driving sort of force.

I wish I could talk more on the subject of music, I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do for the creative process. I’d love to hear whether anyone likes the same sort of thing as me, or would like to introduce me to their own favourite inspirational music.
Either way, drop a comment!
I shall leave you with a Tolkien poem, since listening to The White Tree no less than 4 times whilst writing this has put me in a Lord of the Rings mood.
Toby

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Progress Thus Far

Things have been developing for me almost as fast as they started. I want to put this development into perspective for you, dear reader, as an update to see how things are coming along…

Just 10 or so days ago, I started this blog because I had all this motivation bursting out of me that I felt I had to direct towards some goal, else I’d explode.
About 7 days ago, I started writing dedicatedly on my first story. 200 words a day minimum (although a lot of that is sketchy planning and off-topic shenanigans) is still quite a tough goal to stick to with all my other projects and my job.
I currently have 20 followers! You guys are awesome! 🙂

“Never discourage anyone…who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”
― Plato

As of today, I’m going to stick to a schedule with my posts.

• I’ll post every other day. My next one will be on Monday.
• I’m going to keep a running tally of my progress. In the past week, I wrote 1,902 words in total, counting all my daily drafts. Most of it is for a story I’ve given a work-in-progress title of “RKDA.” I’ll make a sidebar widget for my works in progress, so you can all see what I’m doing from time to time.
• My posts will continue to deal with my adventures and issues with writing.

Thank you all for reading, don’t hesitate to do leave a comment, even if it is just a “Hey”
Toby

Happy 10th Birthday, Toby!

Seems a bit pointless to be celebrating just 10 days of this blog’s existence but I feel I deserve it. If you don’t celebrate the small victories, how will you know how or when to celebrate the big ones?

This is only going to be a short post. I’m thinking of reducing how often I post to every other day. The reason for this is that I’m struggling to think of new and engaging ideas for blog posts every day. I could just talk about the everyday happenings of Toby but I can’t imagine how I can do this for months and months and be able to read each post I make and think “Yeah, that had a really good amount of deliberate thought go into it.”
On top of that, I’ve stepped up my writing so that it takes up a load more effort than I originally foresaw.

This is not admitting defeat. This is me simply saying “My original pace was great but has grown to be unrealistic”
It will still keep me accountable and I will still be posting very frequently.

Pace slowing. Steam escaping. Motivation… still there, just hiding for tonight.
I leave you all, dear reader(s) with a quote I’ve become quite attached to recently

“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

–Khalil Gibran

 

 

Like a Bolt from the Blue

That phrase is a strange one, no?
It’s actually an old archery term, meaning that when a hail of arrows is heading your way, the one that’s going to hit you is the one you can’t see.
Hooray for facts!

This post is about inspiration. How do you get your ideas for the things you make? This is not just about writing. If you enjoy building something with your hands, or painting, or whatever.
Do you make it up as you go along?
Do you plan meticulously?
Do you wait and wait and then, one day, it just comes to you, all at once?

I’ve had each of these things happen to me. The latter had the most impact, I was trying to sleep at the time. In the daydreamy state before sleep proper sets in, I had a brainstorm for an entire series of books worth of ideas. It didn’t stop, either. It kept going and going until it was 4:30 am and I only fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
The same thing happened the next night. And the next.
It was such a rush, imagining a distant future when other people could read what I was currently experiencing.

I enjoy looking at landscapes for inspiration. Listening to what I deem to be pretty epic music. Daydreaming when I should be doing something more productive. 😛

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

What do you do to attract inspiration?
Let me know by leaving a comment!

Slow Writing Day

I’m having difficulty. No matter how many of my favourite tracks come on, no matter if I gaze wistfully out into the (surprisingly cloudless) English sky or deep into the dark corner of my DVD collection which I’m naggingly aware is out of alphabetical order, I can’t seem to conjure up any decent ideas to put onto paper.

I guess I was a bit overzealous yesterday. I was being so productive that I burnt out.
Part of me wants to sit at the computer until I squeeze enough words out of my tired brain to meet my daily goal. 200 words isn’t that much, right?
That doesn’t seem like the best option, though. Is it worth writing ideas down even if you’re aware that they’re not the best they could be?

“Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”
― Steve Martin

Writing this is helping. It feels like a bit of a warm up, to get my fingers tapping at keys of their own accord, without having to mentally construct each sentence first before giving them the command to type.
Maybe I’m just being silly and the words and ideas will start flowing as soon as I press ‘publish.’

I have two main ways of dealing with problems in my life.

1. I’m over-thinking things. I deal with this by letting the problem go in some way, either by forgetting or ignoring it, or delegating the problem to someone or something else (like I did with my character creation problem).
2. I need to reverse it, turn it on it’s head. Very few problems are so sturdy of construction that they can survive to plague me both ways up. No food in the house? I fancied a walk anyway! Work is ruining all my social plans? The feelings will be that much greater when I finally get to see my friends again. Slow writing day? Great reading day!

How do you deal with slow writing days? Or problems in general?
Feedback is awesome 😀
Toby

And the Words Hit the Page.

Today is a landmark moment for me. Every action is charged with excitement and anticipation. Although I allowed myself a lie in this morning (reading late last night :D), it seems like I’ve managed to do a million and one things since I got up. I feel like an excitable puppy with the thoughts of what I can get up to this afternoon.

Nebulas: the sci-fi version of spring lambs and new life.

I read a great article yesterday about new beginnings (read it here) which really set the tone for my current excitement.
I started reading a new book last night. I’d just finished Excession, which is a fantastic book (like all of Iain M Banks’ works). I decided it was high time I picked up Atlas Shrugged as it’s been sat on my bookshelf for over a year now. Before I knew it, it was 2 am.

Not only did I start a new book but, more importantly, I started writing. By that I mean properly writing. Story writing.
I finally chumped up the courage to open up a blank word doc and started throwing words onto it until they resembled the beginnings of a tale I’ve been waiting to get out of my head for more than a year. Blogging has helped. Last week, when I set this blog up, it felt like the stars had aligned in my levels of motivation and inspiration being high. I was waiting for those twin peaks to collapse and, frankly, I still am waiting.
Since I’ve been blogging almost every day though, my motivation has never been greater. I’ve finally managed to start getting the inspiration into words, rather than letting it stagnate and rot away.

I feel that I’m starting to get the hang of posting on here and since it helps me so much, I’ll keep going at this pace of posting once a day or so.
It’ll be like a warm-up for the 200-words-a-day target I’ve set myself for writing!

Thanks to the few people who have taken the time to read my contributions, I’d love to hear some feedback if you have the time.

Motivation is Everything!
Toby

Character Creation

Descriptive pieces are truly wonderful. The ability to take a snapshot of a story and fill it with all the details you can comprehend and, sometimes, details that you can’t, is truly inviolate. It can be compared to biblical creation. God supposedly started with a blank canvas and by the time he was done, there was, well, everything around us.

To start a story or a chapter, you must start with an empty page and begin to fill it with scene and setting. Only when you have a space filled with existence can you start to think how your characters are going to act or react in this space.

I have a fond memory of reading a book in English class in high school (I forget which book now). We were reading it together, so we could analyse it later as part of our coursework. The first two pages of the very first chapter were dedicated purely to describing the scenery. I just closed my eyes and let the imagery wash over me. It was serene. It really stuck with me and I remember, afterwards, covertly asking some of my classmates if they felt the same way about it. I was disappointed to find out that I was alone in my newly-identified love of imagery.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

This article is not about landscapes, though. It’s meant to be about characters and how to create them. I very nearly got sidetracked.
I wrote in my last post about the difficulty I have in writing with characters. I was focusing so hard on making them all different and interesting individuals and it just wasn’t working. Even with just two characters, trying to hold a discussion between them sounded for all the world like I was arguing with myself.
I feel bad about this. I feel like I’m telling my story with sock-puppets I don’t respect, rather than with people I do.

I succeeded, however, in building a tool to help me create personalities. I identified the problem in that I was trying too hard to keep all of the details inside my head, I needed something independent of me to house them, which I could refer to whilst writing about them.
What I have built is, essentially, a hat that I can pull traits out of at random.

Much like the character creation system in Role-Playing Games such as Skyrim, the hat contains a bunch of traits both physical and mental which I can pick out at random. I’ll start with just a few traits and imagine what the person is like. I can pick out more, imagining this person being born and growing before my eyes. This is a person I can, I must, respect. I watched them grow and I’ll watch them continue to grow throughout the tales they inhabit.
Then, to keep them safe from my meddling ways, I’ll record them exactly as they came out of the hat.

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
― Ernest Hemingway

The Writer’s Toolbox

Let’s talk about tools. Tools are really useful objects or concepts which help the user to reach a point they wouldn’t have been able to reach or would have had difficulty reaching on their own. We can easily imagine a workman with his overalls and his box filled with hammers and wrenches and gizmos and thingamabobs. What might be a little less obvious is how prevalent tools are in everyday life, not just for putting up a shed.

The lady serving drinks in the cafeteria takes an order using a pencil to write on a pad of paper. It’s just a coffee. She fills a kettle with water from a tap which has, no doubt, been pumped, filtered, treated and piped by a vast system of tools that are so common to us that they are embedded in our streets, in our homes and in our societies. The water boils, and she pours it into a mug with some of that instant, freeze-dried coffee powder in it. Onto a tray it goes with a couple of milk portions, some packets of sugar and a teaspoon before it is whisked off to the guy in a suit at a table in the corner. He reaches into his pocket and produces some change to pay for his beverage.
The man wonders how he will cope with the deadline for the project that’s due in 4 hours. The boss will yell at him. He will get drunk tonight and his wife, when she realises why he is so late coming home from work, will go to sleep in the next room to avoid him. The young bully punches the smaller kid. The girl sees this and tells the teacher. The lovers kiss.

Generally speaking, these are all tools. They are all physical or mental devices for achieving a goal, whether the goal is coffee, relief, justification, communication or something else. Not just technology, but civilisation itself is the result of this mountain of tools we’ve constructed to interact with the world around us and with each other.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
― Marshall McLuhan

What tools do writers use?

I’m new to this. I want to write creatively, yet when I sit down at my computer and start typing, I get stuck rather quickly. My repertoire of tools is… non existent.
I have ideas about what the plot to this story should be like, but no idea how or where to begin!
After browsing around the internet to try and find some advice on how to alleviate the problem, I discover that one of the first things people do when starting to write a story is to plan it out. This seems like very sound advice!

*Intermission*

I’m back from planning this tale and I’ve hit another stumbling block. The characters I’m trying to create are all me! Someone advised that you should try to put yourself in your character’s shoes, to try to think as they would, but all I can seem to do is the opposite of this, to make them think as I would.
100 versions of me does not a good story make.

I have an idea though…

“We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”
― John Irving

I am going to forget about creating my character. Instead, I shall create a tool to do it for me.

What tools do you use for writing? Have you ever had a problem similar to my own, in that your characters aren’t their own people?
Please leave a comment below and, if you found this helpful, follow my blog for more!

Fare thee well,
Toby

Introducing…

Greetings Internet!

Welcome to this, my blog, though with nothing to read and no-one to read it, feels more like a diary. I hope to fill it with insights and samples of my writing.

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

Oh and quotes. Lots of quotes.

I’m doing this as an exercise in self-expression. Not from some base desire to be recognised by my peers which, in me, is mysteriously absent, or some wish for my name to be remembered long after I am gone as a lasting legacy. These feelings only become known to me through others, the light of their need casting a deep, dark shadow inside my mind. I imagine this “Legacy Need” to be a metaphorical mountain, to be scaled over the course of a lifetime. My toes only find a deep, dark abyss where this need should be, the shadow is a contrast to the burning desire I expect to feel.
I’m doing this to plumb the depths of this lack-of-desire-abyss and, who knows, I might find the bottom.

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

I’ve not been writing for very long. I’m ‘just starting out,’ you could say. I used to have to do a little creative writing when I was in school, for my GCSE exams and whatnot. I never actually wrote just for the hell of it. I am, however, a voracious reader. I love the escapism and the imagination involved in a good book. Readers of this blog can expect to be bombarded with Fantasy, Science Fiction and Psychological stories of varying lengths. It should be a fun experience for everyone involved.
Prior to setting up this blog, I came upon a hidden wellspring of both inspiration and motivation and, hoping both remain in plentiful supply, things are marching along at a glorious pace!

I shall be posting regularly and, well, I’m sure I’ll get the hang of blog posts soon.
Fare thee well!
Toby