Photobucket(Yes, now you can have that Billy Ocean song in your head all day too.)

So the good news is that since I last blogged here on Writer Unboxed, I’ve started my next novel. Hurrah! The even better news is that this book – unlike my last – is flowing out of me at unprecedented paces. Well, not unprecedented – I wrote my first novel in three months, and my last novel, Time of My Life, in two – but compared to my forthcoming book, The One That I Want, which felt like utter agony 99% of the time, this is heaven.

Which has gotten me thinking. Before I wrote The One That I Want, I swore, SWORE, that I wouldn’t write a book unless the idea hit me like lightening. I’d tried to do it a different way: in between my debut and Time of My Life, I wrote 150 pages of a novel that I eventually trashed because, well, not only wasn’t I feeling it, but I felt like my lack of total and utter enthusiasm translated onto the page. I mean, I liked the book well-enough, but did I love it? No. Did I eat, sleep and live those characters? No. And as a result, those 150 pages lacked the energy that I think is CRITICAL in taking a good book to a great one.

So I scrapped those 40k words (ugh, but necessary), and trusted that when the right idea came along, I’d know it. And soon enough, BAM, it did: within a few hours of dreaming up the concept to Time of My Life, I’d written the first 15 pages. The rest of the book soon followed. I knew in my bones that it was the book I’d been waiting for.

So imagine my surprise – and frustration – when, upon selling my next book on a pitch – I DIDN’T feel that same tug to rush to my computer and pour out my guts into the manuscript. Nope. I forced myself to write every day, I forced myself to get from page 1 to 300, but I don’t think I enjoyed much of the process until about page 200 when I finally had that “aha!” moment, and from there, wrote the final third of the book in ten days. Those first 200 pages took me six months to write – which might not seem like a long time, but for me, they were, and they FELT like they were. I revised draft after draft until both my editor and I deemed it as good as Time of My Life. And it is. It IS as good, but it sure was a hell of a lot more work to get there.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I used to think that I couldn’t write a book without that total and complete inspiration. I know now that this isn’t the case – I can write that book, and it can still be a great book – but I probably won’t enjoy the experience nearly as much. Now that I’m cranking on this new novel, I’m remembering why writing is so much fun, why I revel in creating characters, sinking under their skins and examining their lives. And I hope that from here on out, I’m blessed to always have that lightening bolt: I think I’ve learned that it’s simply what fuels me – that one big idea that makes me happy to jump out of bed in the morning and run to my computer. I can do it another way, yes, but getting there should be half of the fun, and without that bolt of inspiration, it’s not nearly as much fun for me.

What about you guys? Do you wait for an all-consuming idea or do you dive in, and hope that you get it right as you go?

Photo courtesy Flickr’s exfordy

Allison Winn Scotch
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