Hitting That Creative Vein

I have met another writer! Yipee! Perhaps she may not be as serious as I am but she is a writer nonetheless and that always gets me excited. Hanging out today with her was all cool and fun and good of course but one detail particularly worthy of blog writing is of our writing discussion.

Writing discussions, of course, always get me thinking of things and this was one of the things that I started thinking about. She told me how she had trouble finishing a lot of her stories and everything and I told my theory to her.

I can think of a couple of things that I needed to hit the creative vein with. The first example would be my first completed novel which I finished when I was ten. Perhaps for some that might seem young but I technically started to write when I was six. So I can definitely tell you that I wasn't that young, it wasn't easy and it took a good effort. Being as I wasn't serious about my writing then and didn't write daily, I wrote a story in about a year that was about three hundred pages in a notebook that I later discovered was factually incorrect and full of grammar errors.

My second one would be keeping up a diary. I had kept up a diary for a little bit in fourth grade but I didn't really enjoy it and the poor, stale writing reflected that. It was in sixth grade when I had discovered a way to have fun capturing my life that I was able to do it. To this day, I still keep a diary. Of course, my writings have changed as I have. Originally, I wrote as if I was writing to people in the future, explaining my thoughts and daily life references in great detail. I occasionally was philosophical. My diary is more the typical sort now. I write about my daily life and my daily thoughts; philosophical writing is interspersed there and rarely get their own entries. Despite how I swore I would never write anything personal, I eventually did and this prompted me to change the names of those I write there (though they would know who they are anyway if they read it).

My third thing, of course, was this blog. There is at least one blog attempt under "theweirdworder" and the rest I've deleted. That took me plenty of tries to successfully maintain a blog but I believe that I have successfully found the trick. I knew it a couple entries in and I couldn't have been more ecstatic at my discovery.

Perhaps writing my first debate prep could be considered that too, though that's hardly creative. It certainly was painful writing the first one but then once I got my act together, the neg one was super easy for me to write.

The trick is to hit that creative vein. It's like striking gold. Once you hit it, everything gushes out and there's no stopping the words from flowing. Of course, there will be days of writer's block and there will be days when you don't want to write. Yet once you hit that creative vein, there's no turning back. Your writing will only improve from then on out and those writing droughts won't last for long.

A family friend once asked me how I could do it. She told me how she had a story idea but she didn't know how to get started writing it. So I told her. You have to hit that vein. Your first novel will probably not be any good but over time you will get better. And once you complete a first novel or your first couple journal/blog entries or your first debate prep, you have that beautiful knowledge that you can go back and do it again. And that, of course, is the challenge that I live for as a writer.