J.R.R. Tolkien was probably just sitting at home one night chilling with a cup of coffee and out of the blue he decided to invent hobbits. I mean...how does that happen? I'm glad it happened, of course; Lord of the Rings is probably the greatest thing that has ever happened to paper, ink, and, let's all be nerds and face it, the entire cinematic industry.
I don't quite get it though. When I really start to think about it, I have no idea how authors come up with things - what it is in their minds that just lets them invent and invent and invent while I'm just sitting there at my desk reading a thesaurus like it's the Bible because a decent vocabulary is all that my short story about talking vegetables is going to have going for it? Even worse, talking vegetables have already been invented by multiple authors, so it's not like I'm being original there or anything. I wish I could be like Tolkien or Rowling and have the genius to come up with a whole other world that people could obsess over and make trivia games about. Not just because I would enjoy being filthy rich, but because it must be so liberating to have that freedom of creation and possibility in writing. I absolutely hate writing, and honestly...it's mainly because of the writers block and my insane lack of innovation and creativity. What is it that makes certain people so full of ideas and then other people, like me, so devoid of them?
Who knows my dear? I too avidly suffer from writers block. I have no answer to give, but I suppose this one by Niel Gaimon(American Gods?) that I read in my Creative Writing 2 class explains it pretty well:
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