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hi my friends, the writers of this fine establishment.
how did you get started with creative writing?
i am a digital artist, when i feel my work can improve i know i can just practice more and i will get better! i've always felt atleast a little bit confident that i can do it, i am able to push though and get something on the page no matter how bad i think it is.
but i find writing to be different, it doesn't feel like a lack of practice but a lack of tools. even just writing dot point character descriptions i struggle with.
its not a lack of creativity or anything like that, my head is full of worlds and stories and all that fun stuff, it feels more like an inability to convert those thoughts from my brain into text.
have you any tips? is this something all writers feel sometimes or is it something that is less common? i want to share these stories but i can barely write 10 words about them.
Well I've just started on 'creative writing' being short novels, crime fiction, erotic fiction.
Although I've been writing on my blog and technical docs for a few years, so the concept of writing is not that new for me. Making stories, characters and world wasn't easy.
That said, I can throw a few points:
- It's not about just starting but finishing, so try practicing of ending more stories.
- Start with short stuff. It's easy to overestimate our skills, and underestimate our idea. Writing short stuff helps me to reach faster to an end which makes sense, and helps with motivation and discipline.
- Something I do is talking about the story with some relative or friend, since I think faster than I write. Then I write what I remember of it.
- Sketch 7 or 10 main points about your story. "1 - The protagonist is born, 2 - They find a magic stone, 3 - That stone gives him superpowers... 8 - The stone is an evil god and everything was a trap, 9 - They put the stone in a space ship, 10 - Happy ending"
Sounds stupid, although it helps to shape up the story flow :)
- Read 'The War of Art'. Helped me to pass through my own mind, and understanding why I create stuff (most of the time just starting and never finishing anything)
Doesn't happen at all to me. But then, I guess that's why I'm a writer. Writing involves the transmutation of thought into text. Without that process taking place, writing is impossible. It's like trying to start your car up with a full tank but a missing ignition.
It could be that linguistics isn't your forte- that you're not particularly locked into how language operates, how words lock into each other. In that case, if you're more comfortable with the spoken word, I'd probably recommend buying a tape recorder you can dictate ideas to.
> how did you get started with creative writing?
It wasn't by choice. I got put into an "elective" creative writing class in my last year of high school. I didn't want to be there; I still wanted to be a musician and never mind that American heavy metal bands had no use for an electric viola in the mid-1990s. But after a while I got it into my head that I would just go with it and fuck with the instructor, who had no use for any sort of genre fiction that wasn't modernist realism in the traditions of Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Mailer -- and never mind that their idea of "literature" was also genre fiction.
I ended up turning in as my final project a pulpy af fantasy story about a metalhead who puts heaven and hell alike to the sword because God decided that the day of Armageddon would be the day he finally got to see Iron Maiden. He had some help from the Lead Bodhisattva, who lent him a sword forged from antichristium, element 666.
It got me a F, which I probably deserved since it made The Eye of Argon look like The Book of the New Sun, but the instructor also added some commentary that pissed me off enough that I decided to keep writing partly to spite them, including the phrase, "If you ever publish anything I'll damned well eat it."
So, when I finally published a novel via a small press, I sent them a copy and a jar of Grey Poupon.
> its not a lack of creativity or anything like that, my head is full of worlds and stories and all that fun stuff, it feels more like an inability to convert those thoughts from my brain into text.
Welcome to my life, even though I've been writing since I was 17.
> have you any tips? is this something all writers feel sometimes or is it something that is less common? i want to share these stories but i can barely write 10 words about them.
I've got a blog post from 2021 that might help you. It's got a bunch of questions that I use to develop characters, and I start with the "bad guys".
I usually just go on automatic and let my fingers do the talking. I would sit, for example, at a library and have a coffee and just pull out my notebook and write away, just letting the ideas come out of my mind however ridiculous they came out. Lately, trying to write again, I still do. I could obliterate alliteration with brute perambulations and it would be fun, though nothing much meaningful would come out of it.
It helps to read, a lot. I like short stories, you can get a glimpse from many authors' styles and so to find your own voice. That's my advice, just read a lot and write a lot, and do not mind what comes out, if you have the ideas they all should eventually let themselves out. The point is to find/develop your own voice.
Here is one technique that helped me to advance a Story that I was trying to write:
Try to concentrate on only two characters of your story and write an "elevator pitch". Preferably two characters that are not too similar.
What would these two talk about if they were to get stuck in an elevator together? How would they try to get out?
Imagine a 10 minutes dialogue with little to none environment.
Try other 2 characters, or extend the stay in the confined space of an elevator to a couple hours, when the boredom starts to kick in.
Your story is set in a "non-contemporary-world" without elevators? Let them fall into a hole of some sort, while walking along a path between the fields.
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