The Thing About Inspiration

I recently joined another time suck called StumbleUpon thanks to my sister.  (She’s a college student; her life is all about time sucks).  Basically you enter your interests, it gives you random websites which you either “like” or “dislike” and as you go through, it gives you websites it thinks you will like.

Needless to say one of the topics that shows up most often for me is writing.  And I recently stumbled upon (haha) the realization that it seems the majority of information out there about writing is about inspiration.

There are hundreds of lists of things to get you started.  Thousands of lists of billions of prompts.  Sure, there’s the advice to write everyday, but more often than not it’s tips on finding ideas.

This is interesting to me because the last thing I need help with is more ideas.  I never, ever, EVER struggle to come up with ideas.  There’s always a story in my brain (or a hundred stories in my brain).  I could outline twenty novels right now if I had to.

I started specifically setting out to write a novel when I was thirteen.  I didn’t actually complete a novel until I was twenty.  Seven years.  Seven years and at least fifty started and stopped novels.  Inspiration, ideas, subjects were not my problem, finishing was.

From my observations, many writers have this same problem… FINISHING not coming up with new ideas.  Maybe there should be more websites on how to finish a novel than how to start one.