I shared my inspiration yesterday but I forgot to mention what led up these thoughts.
So I haven’t written about it here yet, but I started a non profit called Inspiring Youth and Mentors. We support youth and mentors with adventurous programs and services. One thing I’m pretty excited to be planning is a city wide escape room. Since we are the escape room now, I started watching YouTube videos on escape room creation and development. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to connect game development to writing my novel.
So the first two videos that lit up my brain was a talk from Laura E. Hall
and Adam Clare
They both share their passions about escape room games. Both of these videos made me think about my novels in a different way. First, that creating aha moments were possible as creators. I thought aha moments were some magical divine inner shift that couldn’t be intentionally created in novels. Second thing that they both said was that the escape rooms should be fun for the puzzlers. This wasn’t as much a revelation but more of a reminder to have fun and in a way, this idea gave me permission to create something fun and solvable. But what they both said was that puzzles should be solvable. Impossible puzzles are not fun. They’re mean. So of course James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake comes to mind. And how it’s said that he was so angry that his closest writing friends couldn’t solve his puzzle. Maybe Joyce was the ass creating a possibly unsolvable puzzle but at the same I do enjoy reading both Finnigan’s Wake and Ulysses. I enjoyed downloading the key researching youtube, listening to the books read in the Dublin accent. I also had to get all his books to try and see what led to Finnigan’s Wake. The point is I have fun with it even though I know I’ll never solve it all.
I don’t know if I can cross over everything from these videos into writing but I did take away a lot from what they had to say. Way more than I initially thought which was zero expectations when it came to writing my novel. What can I say,
Inspiration is out there!!
(in my best Disney’s “Up” voice)
Thanks for reading.
Jayne.press 