If a fiction writer ever needed inspiration, Post Secret has to be one of the most likely places to find it. But I suspect most fiction writers are like me, with so many ideas they can’t sleep at night for fear they’ll never have time to use even the best of them.
View the blog, or read Post Secret the book, available at Amazon.
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I’ve got to start sleeping with a tape recorder to hand. It’s not that I lose my ideas upon waking. What I have as I wake up is a flood of felicitous phrasing and mellifluous sentences, all just tumbling out of my brain and ready for public airing. But by the time I wake up, I’m reduced to sentence fragments and awkward stumbling approximations.
Now maybe what I have as I wake up is just a figleaf of my imagination; my composition is not so lyrical as I think it is. However, I’ll never know unless I record it and then listen to it later. Who know? Deathless prose.
I’ll never be a poet; just a rhymster.
Comment by Rhubarb — December 14, 2005 @ 6:24 pm
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P.S. Thanks for subscribing!
Comment by Rhubarb — December 14, 2005 @ 6:25 pm
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PostSecret is one of my favorite blogs! I can’t wait for Sundays to read the latest submissions — even the accidental art is sometimes astonishingly good, and the secrets themselves cover the entire spectrum of human emotion and experience, distilled into 10 words or fewer.
Comment by blogdog — December 15, 2005 @ 7:22 am
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Okay. I’m a hayseed. Until now, I’d never heard of PostSecret. I laughed, I cried. Touching. Raw. Putting it on my ‘favorites’ list.
Comment by Reenie — December 15, 2005 @ 8:39 am
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I know what you mean, Rhubarb. I wake up sometimes in the story already, and have the perfect wording in mind. By the time I get to the computer my waking mind has taken over, slow, stumbling, and so awkward in comparison. Sometimes if I sit and listen and quiet my mind it comes back to me. Other times it’s as if I grasped a jewel that’s lost forever on the other side of sleep.
Thanks, blogdog. I wasn’t aware it’s updated on Sundays.
Don’t feel bad, Reenie, I found it once before, lost it, and just found it again. They are exactly as you say, totally honest sometimes in a way one would never be unless anonymous and reaching for one’s own deepest truth.
Comment by Barbara W. Klaser — December 15, 2005 @ 3:54 pm
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Good timing with this. I’ve just posted about how the ideas come to a writer and my own particular problem of it being not in story concept, but fully written out so then losing the story from there. I have never sought out the writing exercises, but in order to learn to think from concept to story, this is a good site to use as an exercise. Though my first thought was that it takes advantage of real pain at times, where else do we get story except from real life? Thanks!
Comment by susan — December 15, 2005 @ 11:14 pm
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Post Secrets is an absolute scream! I stumbled across it when it started, and I used material (with pemission) from it to post to a payiing blog. So, it’s for more than just a laugh or to get ideas-reading it can really pay off!
Comment by Georganna Hancock — December 17, 2005 @ 2:32 pm
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Thanks for visiting my site and leaving such a nice comment. I had to remark, after your having read my post about the scattered and varied thoughts my head is always stuffed with, on your, “But I suspect most fiction writers are like me, with so many ideas they can’t sleep at night…” Nice to know I’m not alone!
Comment by Diana — January 7, 2006 @ 5:14 pm
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i really liked reading these secrets, i love that each secret has a story behind it. it also makes me comfortable with my secrets. i enjoyed this book and it inspired me to do a project about it in school.
Comment by lauren — April 9, 2006 @ 1:05 pm
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You are all so right. I once had a dream with the best plot for a story ever, almost spelt out word for word and in the instant I woke I remembered that tale vividly, but as soon as I swung one foot out from the covers it was gone, just like my sleep.
Also I get that feeling. My mind constantly contrives new tales everyday including the couple that I am working on currently. I fear that I will never finish the stories that I am doing now, let alone the ones I think of daily. I think I want other people to read them, but mainly its because I want to know how they end myself.
Comment by Joey Britton — September 4, 2006 @ 2:07 pm
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zuowen
That so so right.I fear that I will never finish the stories that I am doing now, let alone the ones I think of daily. Thanks!
Comment by zuowen — April 24, 2008 @ 8:14 am