need help with thesis proposal, theme: creativity, idiolect, education

hi all,

thanks for the continued response to this thread. i never expected this many people to have an active interest on the topic.

i immensely enjoyed reading the comments by goodgulf - there are a fair number of valid points which i had never considered!

the last comment by yen brought up several interesting points - which leads to a few other questions which i'm interested to find out about:

1) where do authors get inspiration for their stories?
2) what is the story writing process?
3) how would you (as an author) encourage or advise a first time writer?

x wendy

Anywhere and everywhere: conversations with other LSF authors; personal (non-spanking) experiences; news stories; overheard conversations; common expressions; real-life objects and places; titles of other spakning and vanilla stories. It's usually just the tiniest germ of an idea, that only grows when I play "what if?" with it.


I will mull it over in my head until everything seems "right" - characters,setting, plot descriptions. This might take anywhere from hours to years. During the longer intervals, it's often my subconscious having a go at it. Then when I have a few hours, I try to bang out the whole thing in one sitting as I'm prone to writer's block when I stop. It doesn't always work, particularly with longer stories (the few of these that I've written), or when I hit a glitch where I hadn't worked things out in my head as well as I thought I had. Then it may take several days (or more) of grinding it out. Or, I may end having to set it aside for weeks or months (and in one case, 10 years) until I'm able to tackle it again. Despite having worked a plot out ahead of time, there have been more than a few instances (whether the writing takes one or multiple sittings), that the characters have ideas of their own, carrying things off in an altogether different direction. When that happens, I just go with the flow. Once I finish, I'm finished. I tend to make very few revisions at that point. Any alterations have already come during the writing process as I continually go back through what I've already written. I try to do a final editor, but I tend to do a bad job at it. While reading my own work I have this tendency to read what I intended to write rather than what I actually wrote.


Just do it. Again and again and again. As with sex (and yes, a few other things) it keeps getting better and better.