inspiration

So I allowed myself the weekend off to do important things (read: murder ALL OF MY MUSCLES at a two-day dance workshop), with the full intention of starting again all bright-eyed and fresh on Monday. At this point it appears to be Thursday. Note to self: make more effort.

It's September. The days have started to shrink but it's not quite autumn yet. When I sit in the office and look out of the window, I can feel the next four months coming up on me. I can feel the leaves drop. I can feel the shift from green to orange to grey, from bare arms to layers, from long evenings outside to leaving the office in the dark. It all feels quite nice until this thought path inevitably leads me on to Christmas, and then I have to stop for the sake of my sanity.

Before I get to Christmas, I get to NaNoWriMo.

My experience over the last ten years of attempting to produce 50,000 words of at least semi-readable prose every November is that either I get my idea now, or I don't get it at all. In the years where I've known what I'm going to write before the month starts, it's come from an image or two that I got in September. A child in a swimming pool, an argument in a bathroom, a woman sitting on a table in a bookshop, a motorbike accident, a man with a camera, two people sitting on a bench in the dark. That's usually all I need. With the image comes a mood, a feeling that I can access when I'm writing, and as I turn the image over in my mind, trying different directions and characters, the feeling tells me whether or not the story is working. Then when November comes, I have two or three scenes mapped out in my head, at least one character relationship that I understand, and a sense of the story's voice. These are the years when I like what I write.

More often than not, I don't get the image I connect to, and I greet November in a flailing panic.

Friend: You're doing NaNo again?
Me: Yep.
Friend: What's it about?
Me: I DON'T KNOW there's a mystery and there's a lot of yoghurt involved for some reason and my main characters are a bear and a fireman and France.
Friend: Your main character is France?
Me: Yes.
Friend: How?
Me: I DON'T KNOW it just happened please help.

Given all this, and given that I failed spectacularly last year (mostly due to homelessness), it would be nice to start November with a plan. But making a plan happen is next to impossible. I can't make myself connect to an idea. I've tried a few times to go into the NaNoWriMo forums and adopt a plot or a scene or a character that someone else has thought of and can't find a use for, and it just doesn't work, because I don't care about it. Even if the idea is amazing, if I don't know how I'm supposed to feel when I write it, it won't happen. I'll end up with a few forced and disjointed pages which are either so bad as to make me give up entirely, or so dull that I end up wandering off the point and my characters get stuck in a fish market for three chapters or start arguing about yoghurt or all put on robes and snipe at each other about the nature of questionhood or an iguana shows up in a yacht or someone loses a foot (all of these have happened. The yoghurt and foot things are apparently recurring themes in my work).

Friend: Don't worry about how good it is, just write.
Me: Yeah, I've tried that, and what I end up with is a mystery I don't understand and inexplicable threatening flamingos.
Friend: But you can edit that.
Me: If I edit out all the bad bits, there will be no remaining bits. It'll just be a list of names I thought were funny.

Writer's block, for me, isn't necessarily an inability to write anything at all. It's an inability to care about what I'm writing. There is nothing that comes close to the exhilaration I get when I understand the feeling in my head enough to wrap it up in words and put it onto a page, when I can see my setting clearly enough to recreate it for someone else using as few words as possible, when I stop thinking about sentences and structures because I'm not trying to make a story anymore, the story is there and it's real and I can feel it. It's been a long time since writing fiction felt that natural. 

All I can really do is be receptive, explore the unformed ideas that fly around just outside my head, and hope for something to settle. I miss it, and I'm ready for it. I'm ready to feel it, I'm ready to work at it, I'm ready to be absorbed so far into that I really get on my friends' nerves. I'm ready to write, dammit. I just need my story to find me in September.