Walking and Talking

Last night, before I went to bed, I walked four miles with my dog, Zoe. This was around midnight; Livonia is actually safe enough (and I am actually intimidating enough) that I feel relatively safe taking a walk that late. Plus, walking in Livonia is easy to keep track of, because the streets are divided into a grid by miles. When I lived elsewhere, I was irritated by the fact that I had no idea how far I was going.

What I like about walking is, on the good days, it gets my mind moving. I've been working on this novel, and I'm thirty pages into it, but I had come to a snag in the story; I had reached a point where the initial action and problems had played out, and been resolved, but the story hadn't progressed far enough that the final problem my characters had to face would present itself. Plus, part of that final problem had to be worked into the story towards the beginning, in order to motivate the conclusion. I'm sorry I'm being vague, but describing the story would be labor intensive, and a little embarassing. Let's just say it's a gay romance in a science fiction setting. (I know the audience for that, if it exists at all, hardly merits the sort of effort I'm putting into the writing of it; honestly, I'm writing the sort of book that I would like to read.) So anyways, I was walking, listening to Kirsty MacColl on my MP3 player, when suddenly I had a "Eureka" moment, a point where things sort of snap into place, and make perfect sense. I used to have them all the time as an undergrad writing papers. For this story, I just decided to change one thing about an encounter one of the main characters has, and suddenly what followed made much better sense, and the character didn't end up seeming like such a self-involved loser as well. It gave the character depth, and the story more consistency.

People talk about inspiration as if it's something you passively accept, that you just wait to strike you. I don't think that's the case. I think you have to work to stay inspired, you have to keep your eyes open, and you have to remain flexible enough to use inspiration that presents itself. A few weeks ago there was an article in the New Yorker about writers' block. That got me started thinking about how writing has been sort of mythologized into a corner, what with inspiration, The Great American Novel, et cetera. It's all sort of Romantic mumbo-jumbo (thank you, Mr. Coleridge). I don't know.

Started reading Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich last night, after I walked. (I was going to start writing some, but I ultimately decided against it, as exhausted as I was.)

The song of the day is Victory Lane by Komeda.