ScriptSuperhero.com

Sometimes it’s hard to know what the best concept is going to be for a solid novel. Along with my wife, I’ve recently discovered Charlaine Harris as an author and her story in an intriguing one.

Harris got into print and had early success with two mystery series, Aurora Teagarden and Lilly Bard. Aurora Teagarden is about a librarian who inadvertently solves crimes, while Lilly Bard is a cleaning woman who does likewise.

Both were keeping her in print and both were selling enough to keep the contract renewals coming, but Harris was unsatisfied. So she took a risk and started two new series; both mixed mysteries with the supernatural, which her earlier books didn’t do. The results were the Harper Connelly series, which features a woman who can sense the dead; and the Southern Vampire/Sookie Stackhouse series, which focuses on a clairvoyant waitress and her vampire companion.

Yup, in both series, the main characters still solve crimes. Both series sell better for her than her previous series, and the Sookie Stackhouse series will, this fall, become the basis for an HBO Original Series, True Blood.

You never know which idea is going to be your million-dollar concept; if Harris had let her early success lull her into a false sense of complacency, she might never have produced her most successful novel series to date, and that would be a shame, kind of like owning unlocked cell phones that never get used.

One of the nice things about writing is that it’s largely unaffected by trendiness. I’m not talking about story styles or the popularity of genres. I’m talking about accessories and tools.

I mean, I use a fairly standard Acer Aspire and MS Office 2007, and while other folks may prefer an earlier version of Word, or a different brand of computer, it’s not like, say, shoes; there’s not UGG Australia word processor out there that all the hot, fashionable writings are composing their scripts with.

I hope the day where that changes never comes.

Writing is hard enough with you have everything you need handy; it’s a lot harder when you’re missing something. Today, I was hoping to finish off a lesson I was writing for a class at my church, but I didn’t have any of my reference materials handy. Even though I only have a couple paragraphs or so to go, I just couldn’t get it done.

Writing without references handy won’t win anyone a CPM or anything, and it also doesn’t exactly result in accurate prose. So I had to put the project off.

That’s where creative writing is a bit more flexible; your handiest reference material is your brain, and it’s hard to lose that.

Sometimes your mind just goes blank.

I’m not talking about the oh-so-typical writer’s block. That’s common and there are many strategies to overcome it.

I’m not talking about not having a story in mind, or lacking a wellspring of ideas. Neither am I talking about not knowing what your next thing to write might be.

Sometimes, in my experience, you can have all that going for you and - BOOM - you sit down at a screen to start writing up that scene, column, blog entry or whatever, and you may know everything you need to write and how you want to write it, but you just… don’t want to start.

There’s a name for this; it’s called “realizing that sometimes, writing is real work.” All workers, no matter their jobs, would simply be somewhere else, doing anything else than what they’re doing at the moment. The more often people run into that feeling, they begin to get restless and think about “writing the Great American novel” instead of doing whatever it is they are doing.

But what do real, hard-working writers do when they have that moment where they realize writing is real, hard work?

Well, for me, fishing is a frequent candidate.

Fortunately, those moments are usually brief and pass as soon as you put your first sentence together, whether it’s a narrator’s controversial statement to open a chapter, or an essay on used Harleys, or a blog post about how, sometimes, writing is work instead of the most fun thing you could possibly be doing right now.

The ideas and concepts for stories that writers come up with are as mysterious to non-writers as the pyramids are to non-Egyptians. The most common question writers are posed with is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Writer Lawrence Block’s knee-jerk response is usually a favorite: “At a warehouse in New Jersey.” Right next to, I imagine, the cat supplies.

But I think there’s a better and more honest response. “By being alive.”

Now, that might sound just as flippant as Block’s response, but think about it; as writers, we get most of our ideas by observing the world around us. We see a mom struggling to keep her three-year-old from pitching a fit in the Wal-Mart, or a couple arguing in a city park, obviously teetering on the edge of a break-up, and we start asking ourselves questions, filling in the blanks, and pretty soon we have a concept for at least a scene, or a good portion of a short story; string a few of those together and wrap them in an overall plot and there’s your novel.

So while it sounds just as dismissive, it’s really not; where do I get my ideas? By being alive.