: Re: I can't write without an inspiration I've been writing a book for almost a year now. But it takes so long because I have to wait for "inspiration". Sometimes I will get an idea that makes

Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

â€” Michelangelo Buonarroti

There is a convincing, exciting, captivating story that you are carving from blank paper with your plans and words.

If you are not in the mood for working on some of the finest part of your story, you can go somewhere else and roughly chip out big fragments. These are the bits that don't need inspiration. As you reveal more and more of the entire form, you will come back to little areas and you'll get excited about finishing them.

Think about a huge block of marble. "Oh, I'm going to go sculpt an ear to perfection." Why would you get excited about that? But when you see a man with arms and legs and a nose, you give the man a name, you see his posture, you want to learn more about him. Even if the arms and legs and nose are very blocky.

And with so many areas that need to be fleshed out, you will get inspiration for something, somewhere, much more often.

The key, then, is to write as fast as possible in the early stages. Just write utter crap. Don't look for the right word. And don't go back to previous sentences. Inconsistency is fine. If you spend more than 30 seconds on a sentence, pretend you've finished it and start a new paragraph.

You may not enjoy it. But if you do it properly, it won't take a lot of time. (You might actually enjoy it anyway, since you are discovering the story arc rather than wading through some boring details.)

A common trap is that after you do this a while, you'll want to go back and flesh out details, which is a recipe for spending forever on it. Prioritise getting to the end of the story quickly and evaluating the story arc before doing too much fine-grained work.

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: Re: I can't write without an inspiration I've been writing a book for almost a year now. But it takes so long because I have to wait for "inspiration". Sometimes I will get an idea that makes

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: How can I learn about the aesthetic rules behind composing new names for things? This is kind of difficult for me to describe, so let me lead with an example. Suppose I tell you there's a

: I want to write a gay sex scene, the characters are both virgins, and I don't know how to do it without looking like a fool. any advice? my name is Christine. I'm writing a book, and I

: A solution I've seen is as follows: When the character's first introduced they use the alias. Bob enters the library. Standing at a bookshelf is a LIBRARIAN, filing some books.

: Explain the lack of commas in James Joyce's "The Dead" I am closely reading/editing (for my own benefit) the text of Dubliners, the collection of short stories written by James Joyce. In some

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