Waiting for inspiration is the death knell to writing. If literary brilliance eludes you, don’t give up; write something fun. I have written one crime novel, one historical fiction, and two travel guides: one to Lake Huron’s shoreline and the other to Lake Michigan’s coast. When it’s hard to create a worthwhile sentence, I switch gears to something fun.
I compiled a 406-page recipe book of family favorites. I can now find recipes that in their previous life were unsorted loose scraps of paper. Last Christmas, I turned a short story about my eight-year-old grandson into a family keepsake for him. My artistically-talented seven-year-old grandson studied book-publishing in school. This summer he is spending a week with me, and I’ll let him draw illustrations for a children’s book I wrote years ago. I will then guide him through the real publishing process. The result won’t be marketable, but it may be priceless.
I am compiling, for my use only, a book of my published short stories, magazine articles and excerpts from my novels and travel books. With a quick check of the table of contents, I will be able to find what I wrote, where it was published, and when. My two travel books included chapters on lighthouses, ghosts, shipwrecks, and stories about the famous and infamous with ties to the lake shores. This sparked a new idea. I will research similar background for Lake Superior and publish a traveler’s companion to Michigan’s Great Lakes. This project may even sell.
Don’t be limited by perceived marketability or a pressure-filled goal to write the next great American novel. Self-publishing makes anything possible. You never know where it may lead. And there’s no rule that writing can’t be fun.