I’m a visual person. I have to actually see it happen in my mind before I can write about it. That means that I need to think about a story or even a chapter for a while before I know what to write.
To get inspiration, I have sometimes taken walks in the woods to make it easier to picture the events of the part of the story that I’m trying to write. I will almost always see something on those walks that will spark my imagination, and the story begins to take shape in my thinking.
It’s like I see it as a movie in my mind. If the movie doesn’t make sense or seem interesting to me, then I change it until it does. Then I sit down and write what I saw happen in my head. Sometimes I change it as I’m writing it, but at least I know where I want the story to go.
I haven’t met anyone else who writes like this, but it seems to work for me. Though I may have planned for the story to go a certain way, as I start writing it, the movie in my head might take the story in a different direction.
I had, in fact, intended the first book, Tales of Larkin: Hawthorn’s Discovery, to have a different ending than the one I wrote, but the movie I saw in my head was better than what I had originally planned to write.
Some writers have to read what they’ve written out loud to see if it sounds right, and I do some of that as well. But the main challenge for me is to come up with a creative way to describe in written form the movie of the story that I see in my mind.
For all of you writers, aspiring or otherwise, let me just say that regardless of how you come up with your stories, be sure to spend a lot of time thinking through each part before you actually start writing. I believe doing that will give you direction in where you want the story to go as well as allowing you the time to discover some interesting alternative plot twists.
God’s Blessings to All,
Alan Harris
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