Professional writers don't have the luxury of
waiting 'till inspiration strikes; to make the rent payment, they have to
keep writing, keep producing, without regard to 'mood.' And, in fact,
most of them say that going back a month or two later, they can't
objectively tell that the stuff they wrote feeling it was crap was any
worse than the stuff they wrote feeling it was gospel.

The same thing holds true in spades in journalism, where I got a lot of
my writing training. When you're writing on deadline, you *can't* wait
for the mood to strike, or even spend a lot of time fiddling around for
the exact wording; you have to write fast and dirty, do a revision to
clean up as best you can, and send it on to the editor's desk. Mike,
what've your experiences been like in this respect? :)

I tend to agree, Travis. If I waited for the mood to strike me, I'd get my
pink slip within a week. Writing for pay is based mostly on economic
considerations: ie, I want to eat, therefore I write.

On the other hand, churning out copy for a newspaper isn't like writing
fiction. I've only been in the business for a few years, and I can write
articles without consious thought. Newspapers expect and demand a totally
neutral, factual style that's very hard to learn, but very easy once
you've picked it up. In fact, the reason I first began writing fanfiction
was to keep my writing skills from being ground to a fine powder by
writing gratingly bland articles day in, day out.

When writing fanfiction, I have moods. I'm either on, slightly on, or
completely off. There are various sorts of external stimuli that can alter
this, of course... but a lot of it seems random. I wrote the first half of
Smoke and Mirrors at 2AM to 3:30AM, having just gotten back from a party
in which I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I wrote the second half over a
frustratingly slow period of three months.

But I don't write fanfics for pay, y'see. If there had been a nice fat
check waiting for me, that three months might have been three weeks. Would
the quality have suffered? I have no idea.

- Mike Loader
===/\=====+==================================================================
  /  \    l  "For, look you, there is humour in all things, and the truest
 / () \   l   philosophy is that which teaches us to find it and make the
/      \  l   most of it." - Jack Point, _The Yeomen of the Guard_
--------  l                    mike@thekeep.org
==========+==================================================================
Fnord.