Friday, November 16, 2012

Is it possible to run out of words?

Some days I feel like words just flow so freely from my fingertips as I type out dialogue and set up scenes and conflict, but those days are too few and too far between sometimes. Maybe it has something to do with my busy days and short nights to myself. Or maybe my word cup is only filled so full for a certain period of time and I can write and write and write, but when the cup dries up I must wait for something to fill it up again. I wish that I knew what filled up that cup. I wish that I could say "Super-size my cup please and fill it as full as it can go."

I think one of the biggest things that fills up my word cup is the proper amount of sleep. I get less than the recommended number of hours most nights, so that can dry up my words quicker than anything.
I also think that being too busy can suck the words out of my brain. It's not that I don't have a few spare minutes, even sometimes an hour, to write, but when I get a sizable chunk of time to sit at my computer and allow my mind to wander through the story and carefully unfold the plot as I go words tend to flow a lot faster and a lot more cohesively.
Being in public helps too. I can listen to real dialogue and remind myself that people don't talk the way that I write most of the time. And I can watch people interact with each other and their surroundings and try to understand how they navigate through life.
These things really do help my story develop from the feeble meanderings I come up with in my brain and make it into something that people might actually believe.

It's not hard to convince people to stretch their minds around new concepts and things that have never been seen before, after all just last night I was in a sold out theater watching a movie about a sparkly vampire, but if I don't base my story in some sound life models the story holds no weight.

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