What Motivates Me to Write
I been ask how can I just sit down and just crank out a short story in such little time. The answer is quite simple I enjoy writing. I log onto Grooveshark, put on a playlist of music, light up some incense, and open up Microsoft Word. It does not matter what I end up writing, as long I write something by the end of the week. This may sound corny, but I feel like my friends and family are another element to my motivation of writing. This is because I like to weave them stories of my experiences, and my thoughts projected onto paper (word document). Everyday I wake up from in Sunnyville Florida my mind percolates many ideas that may or may not come to fruition.
Sometimes the people or the situations I write about are not just drawn from real life, but from the depths of my imagination. I am a very observant person and the world is my muse. For example the weekend nights of Downtown Orlando features a menagerie of characters. I'm talking about friends going out to celebrate, a woman with her friends on a bachelorette celebrations, and the Christians on the megaphones calling everyone sinners. Observing how these people act and interact with another always catches my attention.
Humble Beginnings
As far back as I can remember and according to my family I have always made up stories. When I was a child I would make up far fetched tales to entertain my family and friends. Even to this day I still make up stories and people can never determine if they are true or not. People end up calling me a liar, but I don't think I am a liar. My real life is boring, why not make up a story to make me sound interesting. I like to think of myself an Improvisational Story Teller. I recommend you try it sometime because it can increase your creativity.
The Inspiration
My inspiration just draws from pondering of several things: life, death, love, relationships, religion, existence, and social interactions. I like to feel these things should be the motivators of our daily lives. These elements occur several times in my head throughout a given day. Quite honestly, I fall in love with different women and I think about different ways I can die and a daily basis. When I see a woman, observe how she acts, how she articulates when she speaks; then what follows a love story I create in my head and see I can use it for a story down the line. When I think about death, I think about different ways of dying. I'm not talking about taking my own life, but how I would just die from an accident or being murdered. For example: I cross a street to run an errand during my lunch break at the Bank of America. I had enough time to make it ac across the street before the light changes but it changes green and a guy was speeding down the street but didn't see me because his view was blocked by a semi truck. The guy who struck me with his car was a 18 year old kid going to see his girlfriend to ask her to go see a movie this weekend, but now his life is ruined because he killed me with his carelessness.
The Writing Process
When I am finally inspired to write something I go through this process to put it into words for someone to read. One of the approaches I take is I think about a situation, then I think about the characters who are going to be involved within the situation, and then I think about the dialogue between them. I feel it is important to write about the character first before writing the story because what happens when you write the character it evolves itself and forms the story. For example: I thought about a little boy who lost his mother, he had no other friends, and would do anything to see his mother again. This how Christopher Lamont was born. Another time I was given the idea to write a story about a zombie boy that falls in love with a living girl. However, I ran with the character and decided to think of the zombie boy as an outcast who suffers through bullying by living kids. This is why when people read one of my short stories they feel the characters are pretty identifiable. I put a lot of concentration into developing a character
The part I write about is the scene. One of the thing people most likely notice about my writing is how I over describe a scene in the text. The reason why is because I like to imagine myself as someone viewing everything. I then ask myself a series of questions: what am I seeing; what do I hear; what do I smell; who's there in this scene; what are they wearing; do they have a scent; etcetera. I want to paint my readers a picture that allows to see a vivid scene in their heads. Doing my best to leave no imaginary stone unturned for them.
The last thing is the dialogue between the characters. This one takes me a bit of time to write because I have this odd approach of taking on the persona of my characters I write about. One character says one thing and then I think about how would I react if someone said something to me in a given situation. Very often I catch myself talking to myself in different tones. This makes me look very crazy, but the end result is hopefully good dialogue that progresses a story.
Challenges
Some of my challenges happen to take the form of overwhelming thoughts of ideas to write down. Another challenge I face is when someone request I write a story about them. As much as I want to; I feel like in the end I will disappoint them. One of the last thing that challenges me is sometimes I just don't feel like writing. I want to write; I have this story in my head I want to write, but I cannot bring myself to write it.
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