inspiration
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Stephen Spielberg’s Poltergeist: The gold standard of ghost stories
Happy Halloween! I’ve been thinking about why I love to be scared, why I love exploring and writing horror. Saturday night, my husband and I sat down and watched the original Poltergeist and I realized I had my answer. As a child I kept a blanket over the black and white tub TV in my… Read more
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When you decide you can’t fail
Writers are notoriously pessimistic, and for good reason. It is effing hard to publish a book, no matter which route you take. First you spend months, years, decades even writing a novel, than you edit the hell out of it for more months, years, decades. Then you pick a publishing path and go down it… Read more
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Writing through a crisis
I’ve read the stories of many authors, not their books, their personal stories. How they came to be a writer, how they finished their first books, how they got published. A theme has come out through all these stories. My relationship fell apart and for a while I didn’t write My dad got sick and… Read more
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The unformed idea
The majority of my work languishes on my hard drive. I’ll never delete it but if I’m honest with myself, I’ll probably never complete it either. A great deal of it is unworthy of completion. Ridiculously contrived premises based on books or movies or just my own young frustrations. My first and only screenplay (written… Read more
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84,500 words. 1 Month. Done. Bam
Ten tips that helped me accomplish a full length first draft in a month. Read more
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The writing zone
Friday night I had an idea. It started out as a spark, a character, a situation and it rapidly spread into a fire, a plot, subplots, background, twists, heartbreaks, climax and resolution. I wrote the first chapter and then I sat outside for fifteen minutes, staring into space. If anyone had come across me at… Read more
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David Bowie; a character who created himself
Today I awoke to the news. I usually am not too affected by celebrity deaths but the loss of David Bowie affected me profoundly. As a child, he introduced me to the concept of sex appeal as Jareth the Goblin King, as a teenager he provided me with a safe retreat for my own weird… Read more
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Picking an idea for NaNoWriMo that will carry you through
In order to write 50,000 words in 30 days, you certainly need discipline and determination. A plan is nice too, but without passion and inspiration, there will be little joy in the challenge. Without joy, it’s very possible you will not be able to manufacture the motivation to see it through to the end. There… Read more
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When a story writes itself
I have spent many nights glaring at a computer screen typing and deleting the same paragraph, willing my characters to move, trying to force a story to happen. Every writer has. When it happens, sometimes you might be lucky and some read-overs can compel your hands, or a google search can make the story lurch… Read more
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When your Muse is MIA
This week has been a rough one for me. I got some difficult news and some conflicts need to be addressed that I don’t feel like dealing with. For me, this equates to a lack of will to write. My motivation has crapped out and I have no ideas even if hadn’t. Normally this would… Read more
LC W. Allingham 