So I think I realized something...
Yesterday while the little one was happily eating away at his lunch, I found myself with unoccupied hands for a few moments. One of my notebooks- the one with hard covers, wire-bound, and blank paper inside so I can use it for sketching or writing- was sitting there on the table
( Read more... )
No, really. Nothing you come up with the first time will ever be perfect. Or organized. Or, most of the time, even make sense. You might have a great gem for an initial idea, and that's the core of it, whatever it is. But building around that isn't ever gonna go perfect the first time.
Once you realize this, it turns out coming up with ideas becomes suddenly liberating. So here's what I suggest: whenever you come up with a worldbuilding idea, just throw it on the page. It doesn't matter how stupid it might sound to you, or how illogical it is initially. You might look back on it the next day and laugh and say, "what the hell was I thinking?" That's fine, 'cause the first draft of anything is crap--but at least you got the basics down. Hell, I do this ALL the time.
After that just derive, derive, derive. I've found that some of my best ideas come from offshoots of other ideas. Sometimes the initial idea is completely ridiculous, but a tiny part of it wasn't, and I draw something that really works from THAT. Worldbuilding always works this way for me.
Just remember it doesn't have to be The Most Fuckin' Awesome Idea Ever the first time around, and write down anything you come up with anyway. That's really what matters. The idea always comes before the refinement of it.
...er. Sorry for walloftexting at you >>;
~VelkynKarma
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The thing is, I KNOW what you said intellectually. A lot of it is a repeat of things I was telling myself while staring at the blank page. I had this feeling of, "look, you've got some good leads, start going with one of them and maybe it'll take you somewhere awesome" but something just wouldn't let me. My brain just kept pre-emptively telling me, "Well, whatever you come up with, it's gonna suck." So. Yeah. I think it's a case of just shutting up that voice somehow?
Incidentally, it seems that posting this journal and just ADMITTING that my problem isn't a lack of creativity, it's a lack of confidence, has helped me to face it. Today I took that darn notebook and filled up about three pages of it- all to come to the determination that the main character is not a Xenobiologist (which is the first word that came to my mind and doesn't mean what I thought it meant) but a Dracologist (which I made up. Heh). The process of it, though, was good for me and I think a leap forward. I now know specific areas that I need to brainstorm answers for, which helps me a lot to know even which direction to send my brain in order to find the actual world/ story that's in there waiting somewhere.
Of course, I could have mentioned that this is all sort of a response to my previous angsty post on "boohoo where did all the creativity go?"
Thanks for reading and commenting! It is good to hear these things over and over again, and it does, in the end, help build confidence when put into practice. Thank you! ^_^
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This might help too...for Christmas I received a little digital tape recorder, and it's been the most amazing addition to my writing arsenal. I find that writing stuff down takes too long sometimes, especially in a creative rush--by the time I organize my thoughts enough to write something legible down, I've lost half of the essence of the idea. With the recorder I just speak directly into it and just get all the ideas out at once, and I can listen to it later. Sometimes I can get ideas across with inflection that I can't in text either. It's also convenient for when you have a random idea but can't write something down--I take mine on walks, when I'm driving in the car, keep it next to my bed at night, etc, because it's easier to just hit 'record' than it is to type down 1000 words on some random idea.
For me, the initial rambling in the tape recorder is the disorganization, and then when I'm actually writing everything down later I have the opportunity to be more organized about it. So maybe this'll help your thought process? Especially if, as you said in your journal, you have an easy time talking to friends or family about ideas casually but take the actual act of writing itself more seriously or treat it with more permanence?
~VelkynKarma
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