I've been in a bit of a funk lately, disappointed with the trajectory of my so-called writing career. End result? I have shelved my Thomas O'Shea novel #4 for now, 19 chapters in. Hit a wall, lost enthusiasm, and so forth. So I didn't write anything for a while, moping around and saying to myself, "I have no more to say. I have run out of ideas." Alas.
Maybe this has happened to you. Dead end. Stone wall. Loss of enthusiasm. So relax. It happens to all of us.
I have a chunk of granite on my desk at eye level. It's a little bigger than a baseball, and carved in stone one may read its inscription: "NEVER NEVER QUIT."
So I went for a walk, taking a piece of paper and a pen with me on the one-hour stroll through our semi-rural neighborhood on a sunny afternoon. And some ideas came to me, along with enthusiasm, and I jotted them down. When I got home, I found this quote for you and for me from the late Anne McCaffery, author of the Dragonriders of Pern fantasy series: "Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences."
And so I have begun to tell the readers a story. And you can to. So say we all!
