Where do you get your creativity from? When you’re writing a scene (action or otherwise) what do you use for fuel? I implore you to consider the one thing you won’t talk about. That is, to explore your discomfort in order to write. Seriously. What is it that makes you uncomfortable? Perhaps tapping into that, on a deeper level, will fuel your storytelling better than a personal experience ever would.

The thing is, deeply scarring memories will fade and you, too, shall pass through your current stage of drama. Perhaps you shall get a divorce. Perhaps you shall move cross-country to escape the uncomfortable heat. Perhaps you’ll get a part-time job so you have money to put food on the table, and then you’ll have more time to write.

Whatever the situation, if you’re always taking inspiration from your issues, what happens when those situations are resolved? Look around you. There is a literal wealth of stories in every corner of the internet, let alone the universe. What makes you uncomfortable? Apathy? Obesity? Murder or the justification thereof? Racism? An attack on intellectuals? Religious folk?

These are deeper social ills, true, but the secret to tapping into these particular veins is that they’ll never go away. There will never be a time when someone isn’t beating up someone else for land, power, money, sex, whatever. There will never be a moment when fierce forms of tribalism don’t exist, either, for this is part of what it means to be mortal.

These sample elements will always exist in some form or another, either quantifiable or not, and what you think about these things – perhaps what you don’t talk about openly, or what you don’t admit to yourself – it is these basic building blocks that you can tap into time and time again, eternally and ever more, to tell not just the one story – but 1000s of them. Not just the one story of the heroine who must resolve the differences with her teenage self to grow into a woman by facing her mother. Not just the singular tale of an unlikely hero who, time and time again, comes from the worst part of town to rise up and undo a terrifying foe. After all, if you tell just the one and only, what then? Will you get bored? Tired? Will you stop enjoying what you do because you know how the journey ends time and time again?

What makes me uncomfortable? More on that tomorrow in Part II.

Mood: Creepy, crawly, slimy, slithering.
Caffeinated Beverages Consumed: NOT ENOUGH ZOMG.
Work-Out Minutes Logged Yesterday: Outside time. Necessary.
In My Ears: The soothing sounds of the dishwasher.
Game Last Played: Dragon Age: Origins
Movie Last Viewed: MirrorMask
Latest Artistic Project: In progress!
Latest Release: “Fangs and Formaldehyde” from the New Hero anthology through Stone Skin Press