I used to be very prolific, in the literary sense. I used to write and write and write. I had an imagination that could create the most wonderful of situations. I wrote so much fan fiction it's not even funny. Star Wars and Queer as Folk mostly. I created cross over fics combining two completely different series into one great story. I wrote pages and pages and pages. I actually complete three different Star Wars novels. None of what I wrote could ever get published, but I wrote it anyway. My fingers would itch if I went more than a day or so without writing something. My imagination would drive me insane if I came up with an idea and didn't write it down, or type it out. Before computers became so widely available and inexpensive, I used to hand write everything. I used to have a callous on my right middle finger from holding the pen as much as I did. I never got a cramp in my hand from writing too much because as far as my fingers were concerned there was no such thing as writing too much. And computers only made it a million times easier to write. I could store my stories and even post them on the Internet when the time came available. I did so much writing and kept my imagination muscle flexed on an almost regular basis. (Yes I know there's no actual imagination muscle.)
Then I started working at Papa John's. I was working almost all the time. I would go in at 9am and end up working until 9pm. I had a set list of things I had to do each day and there was very little room for imagination in those tasks. I was always so tired when I get home from work that I rarely had the time to write. I still kept trying, though. I wrote and wrote and wrote as much as I could. Now, I really only blame Papa John's for starting the death of my imagination. That was the beginning. I was working on a screen play when I was working for Papa John's and I was very excited about it. I worked on it non stop for so long and got a lot of it done. I started to turn it into a novel when I first joined NaNoWriMo. I was so determined that everything was going to be great with this idea.
Then I met the man that inspired the story in the first place. I'm not going to name him because meeting him was one of the worst celebrity experiences I've had and I don't want my personal experience with this man to taint the way others might feel about him, or the good experiences some have had. I've been told that just because he was a douche when I met him doesn't make him a douche all the time and I do understand that. But this experience with him totally killed my love of this man and my desire to continue to be a fan of his work. I started to see him objectively and realized that when it comes down to it, he's not really all that great an actor and I was really just drawn to his pretty face and beautiful body. And that killed my desire to continue that one particular story.
The problem was, it didn't just end with that one story. I stopped being able to write anything involving anything he'd done. All of my fan fiction just petered out and slowly went away. I have actually lost a lot of the stories I was working on because they were works in progress and nobody wanted to be stuck with a story that was never going to have an end. So only my completed stories live on in Internet land. I've actually lost all of my Star Wars fiction because I deleted my website. I haven't written anything in the realm of fiction in a while. Well, that's not entirely true. I've tried starting stuff. But I rarely come up with my own ideas anymore. I usually end up leaching onto the ideas of my friends and helping them move them along. I tell them ways that I personally think their idea would be better and more sellable. I haven't worked on anything that was really mine in a while.
I haven't come up with an original idea except for the one that has died a slow and horrible death. Everything I've written has been fan fiction, though there has been a lot of it. I used other people's characters and put them in my own situations. You'd think I'd be able to come up with my own characters for those situations but it's always hard. And I usually end up giving them completely ridiculous names and stuff like that. I found it easier to use other peoples' characters with existing backgrounds than trying to come up with my own. So my imagination was great with the situations, but lazy with the characters. Guess that means it wasn't all that great after all. I don't know. I just know that this is the most I've written in a long time and this is not even remotely fiction. This is just me sitting here letting my brain say whatever it has the need to say right now. My fingers were yelling at me for not letting them really do some lengthy typing and I decided to let them shut up.
So you see, the need to write is still there. The itchy fingers and the frustrated mind and all of that. My body is physically in need of me to be able to write something. But my imagination is dead and buried and has been for a long time. So how do I go about feeding my writing addiction when my dealer no longer exists? I certainly have no idea.
