Hi friends,
A quick post to share the word I chose for 2022:
Do you choose words too? What’s yours?
Cheers,
RTW: For Inspiration
Road Trip Wednesday is a “Blog Carnival,” where YA Highway‘s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic.
This week’s topic:
Tons of writers are in the midst of NaNoWriMo, trying to stay inspired as we reach the dreaded middle. Share your most inspiring and/or motivational video, book, or quote on writing!
Well, I’m a little behind on NaNo. I should have 23,800 words today, but I have 18,000. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to catch up because I don’t write on weekends and, next weekend being Thanksgiving, I’ll be visiting friends in another state and that means no writing for 4 extra days.
My inspiration doesn’t change for NaNo. What changes is the support and the team that the community becomes. That’s the most inspiring thing. Seeing tons of writers hammering down word after word and cheering for each other. That’s the real inspiration.
However, my everyday inspiration comes from my Pinterest boards these days. Of course, sometimes I listen to a song or watch a movie and that inspires me, but I don’t go looking for those.
This is one of my favorites quotes:
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”
Neil Gaiman
I know the following three videos aren’t that short, but they are really, really worth it. I mean it.
Here’s the famous commencement speech from Neil Gaiman:
Here’s Steve Job’s commencements speech:
And here’s a speech by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love:
And for fun, this song has been my listen-on-repeat-about-1000-times-a-day lately (I first heard it during an episode of Beauty and the Beast):
How about you? What’s your inspiration for NaNoWriMo–or writing in general?
Cheers,
Baby, You’re a Firework!
Hubby, daughter and I watched Madagascar 3 – Europe’s Most Wanted last Saturday.
SPOILERS OF THE MOVIE AHEAD!
Please, don’t laugh when I tell you two or three tears may have escaped my eyes when Katy Perry’s song Firework began during the magical circus performance scene. I always loved that song, the message it passes to us, and in that scene, where they have to do the impossible, it’s perfect!
And I imagined that song on a writing context, of course, because, well, the writing journey isn’t an easy one. There are days it seems near impossible.
In the movie, the animals lost the faith in what they do, and that was preventing them from being as great as they could be. Besides losing faith, they were scared of trying, they were scared of failing. Didn’t we all, as writers, feel like that at some point? Actually, at several points?
Alex and the gang help them recover that faith. Then comes the scene with Katy Perry’s song. It’s magical, it’s perfect, and it passes a message to us: we gotta believe in what we do, like the characters of the movie believed again in what they did. The circus was their lives, like writing is ours. They found out they couldn’t give up that easily. See why I became emotional with that scene and that song?
I know the four paragraphs above sound redundant, maybe only after seeing the movie you’ll understand what I mean. But again, if you’re a writer like me, you already do, don’t you?
BELIEVE IN THE IMPOSSIBLE!
Here’s the song’s official music video:
I hope I made your day a little better with this post ;)
Cheers,