I’m feeling a little uninspired today, but I wanted to post something.  Believe it or not, writers aren’t endless fountains of inspiration.  Sure, I go through times when I’m fending off a torrent of ideas, but I also go through droughts.  Fortunately my droughts tend not to last too long, and I usually have a backlog—a much-too-big backlog at that—of things to revise and submit.  (I spent my writing time today revising a story I wrote last year.)  To succeed as a writer, I need to write, and that means writing even when the inspiration doesn’t clock me over the head.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of starting; the very act of writing can often lead to something, sort of like what has happened here.

When I started writing this post, I had no idea what I was going to write.  In fact, I was simply going to write a sentence or two and direct you to a post I read earlier to today and really liked.  Writer and musician Eric Baker keeps a wonderful blog called Clawing at the Keys (love the title), and recently he’s posted some nice entries on character creation.  His post from a couple of days ago was about character motivation, and I really liked what he had to say.  Character motivation is one of the key elements to making a story satisfying as opposed to making it one that leaves the reader wonder, “Why did that idiot do that?”  So if you have the chance, check out Eric’s post—even if you don’t agree with what he’s written, you can always enjoy the cool, groovy music video (he posts one with every post).  Oh, while your there, be sure to check out his fiction, too; I especially enjoyed his delightfully twisted story “Worm.”