Hey, this thread is several years old and somehow managed to escape my notice. It's totally rad that there are people working seriously at this craft, and congrats to
Transcendent God Champion for actually shipping.
So, hi, folks. When I was a teenager, I used to write long forum posts and play Pokemon. Now, I mostly just write stories.
What do you like to write?: I like writing speculative fiction, and tend to favor fantasy over sci-fi. My sci-fi stories usually lean toward "techno thriller" (think Michael Crichton) that are basically set in a contemporary setting with one or two new technologies that are slightly more advanced than they are in the present day. ("Five minutes into the future," some might call it.) Creative fiction is also cool.
Are you working on a current project?: I'm writing for several visual novel projects. One of them,
Necrobarista, just got announced, and it has
a really cool trailer that you should definitely watch. (If you pause the trailer in the right spots, you can see some of my writing.)
What got you interested in writing?: I read a lot as a kid. I often used elementary school assignments as an excuse to write pulpy stories (usually detective stories inspired by the Three Investigators and the Hardy Boys). Around the end of elementary I started spending less time with books and more time online, though one of my favorite internet forum activities did involve crafting artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Nearly a decade later, during my college years, I watched Brandon Sanderson's 2010 JordanCon lectures, where he talks about how writing is a skill that you can learn. So I decided to take the engineering mindset that I was applying to my studies (mechanical engineering) and apply it to crafting stories. I enrolled in several creative writing electives, had a ball of a time doing it, and decided that I wanted to go for pro. (Didn't change my major, though. I figured an engineering degree would be more valuable than an English degree, since tech employers actually care about certain credentials, whereas publishers will pick up a good manuscript regardless of whether the author has any formal schooling.)
Are you branching out?: Well, I'm getting paid to write scripts for several visual novel projects, so that part of "become a pro writer" worked out, though I'd like to get into trade publishing some day. Awhile back I finished a 20k word fantasy novella (which was actually part of the portfolio that got me several of my current paid gigs), and I've been thinking about expanding that novella into a full-length novel. (The novella essentially tells the first act of what I had originally conceived as a longer story.) But for now, I have to focus on what is paying the bills. (And that's certainly not something for me to complain about.)
Do you have a method?: I'm an outliner. I tend to have an outline/roadmap for each I scene (usually it's just in my head, though for longer projects I'll write it out), so I usually can just bang out first drafts without having to deal with "writer's block." When I'm just in the mode of "I have an idea that is pretty fully articulated already in my head and I just need to get it out onto the page," I can write around 2k words per hour, but it in reality that "2k words in 1 hour of writing" is realistically more like "2k words in several hours (or days) of thinking about the scene and 1 hour of actually typing." (Some of my most productive "writing time" actually takes place on long walks, or at the gym.)
Favorites: I like hard fantasy (Brandon Sanderson), cyberpunk (Neal Stephenson), and urban fantasy (Dan Wells). Orson Scott Card's "Shadow of the Hegemon" might be my favorite novel, I've probably read it more than any other novel. I've also started reading more literary fiction lately. "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" is a very cool novel, told in 2nd person (I think it's the first novel I've ever read of that sort), and at the recommendation of a bunch of journalists I follow, I also decided to pick up The Nix by Nathan Hill, which was pretty enjoyable.
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What inspires you to write? These days, it's mostly about deadlines and getting paid. When I work on spec material, the focus is still on deadlines and getting paid, but the deadlines are self-imposed, and the "getting paid" part is on a longer time scale. But sometimes I just want to try something new, hone the skill set, put another tool in my belt.
Where do you find inspiration? I steal ideas from reality. Characters' personalities and quirks and passions are often based on real people. (That's what the first generation of writers did: they observed the world around them and told stories based on that. Then you have generations of "inbred" writers who learned how to write by reading. Sort of like how you have lots of artists who learned how to draw by imitating the style of other artists, it can come out feeling like a caricature of a caricature. I think there's a time and a place for that, but I prefer to go back to the original source material.) I also love reading history books and other nonfiction that provide lots of room for "divergent thinking," that inkling of "what if things had gone differently?"
What happens when you're lacking new ideas, or as some would call it, get a case of the dreaded writer's block? Step outside, go for a walk. Study the people waiting at the bus stop and see if there's anything unusual about their appearance; pick out traits and ask myself "why?" Get a haircut and overhear a conversation between a 40-year-old woman and her hairdresser. Go to a bar, chat with the bouncer, play darts and strike up a conversation with anyone who looks like they're alone. Pick up the Science section of the NYT and look at headlines, but instead of actually reading the stories, come up with my own ideas for stories that might have those headlines.
One form of "bottom-up" storytelling that I like involves taking a familiar setting, changing something about it, and then asking, "Okay, what effect does this have?" In a fantasy setting, how would wizards affect medieval warfare and the way military campaigns were waged? How would society develop differently if in the year 1500, people discovered technology (or magic) that provided them with instant point-to-point communication? People colonize Mars and start having kids; what effect does the gravity have on those kids and their height and bone density and what's it like being in a community of 150 people? (This approach to "bottom-up" storytelling was actually discussed in
the latest episode of Rationally Writing.)
On a complete non-related subject: I can't help myself to stop self-sabotage.
I have a lot of things I want to write, but before I even start, I convince myself that it won't do any good or the idea is silly. So the day passes with me just scrolling memes and more memes.
I think one of the more useful lessons I've gotten from Brandon Sanderson is to treat writing like any other skill, rather than something mythical as people often do.
For example, playing a guitar is a skill. People understand that the first time you pick up a guitar, it's not going to sound like real music. You spend some time learning to pluck the strings, learn basic chords, and spend many hours practicing in the privacy of your own bedroom, working to acquire the skill that will allow you play music that people actually want to hear. Also, people understand that to learn to play the guitar, you must actually
play the guitar. You don't learn to play the guitar by listening to guitar music; I've spend thousands of hours listening to people play the guitar, yet I could pick up an instrument and not know the first thing about playing it.
Writing is, in many respects, like learning to play the guitar. The first time you write, it's not going to look like the work that you'd see in a novel that you picked up off the bookshelf. (And note that the text you see in published novels is often the result of many rounds of revision! You don't get to see pro authors' first drafts.) If you sit down and write with the mindset, "In 2 hours, I'll have finished a great story that I can show to other people," that might not be true. You might not fulfill that expectation. But you can fulfill the expectation, "I'm going to spend 2 hours practicing, and at the end of 2 hours, I'll have incrementally improved some of my skills as a writer."
During my early days as a writer, I had a lot of sessions where I wrote a story, decided that it was crap, and never showed it to anyone. Eventually, the hard drives that contained those old stories crashed or were discarded, and now, those stories are lost forever. Did I "waste my time" writing those bad-to-mediocre stories that were never shared? No, that was time well-spent. During that time, I was improving my skill as a writer. Writing a story that never gets seen by anyone isn't a "waste" because nobody saw it, anymore than it would be a "waste" for me to practice throwing darts at a dart board in the privacy of my home. Practicing darts (sometimes missing the dart board entirely) is how I get better at darts. Practicing writing is how I get better at writing.
Going back to the original question posed here, it feels like the thought process is, "I'd like to write a story. Okay, I could spend the next 2 hours writing. But...my story will probably turn out poorly, because I'm not skilled enough as a writer to tell that story well. So instead of trying to write a good story, which is an impossible task, I'm just going to browse imgur and reddit."
Here's the analogy:
"I'd like to run a 4-minute mile. Okay, I could put on my running shoes and go for a run. But...I won't be able to run a 4-minute mile. At best, I'll probably finish the mile in 8 minutes, which is nowhere close to my goal. So instead of trying to run a 4-minute mile tonight, which would be impossible for me, I'm just going to sit at home and browse reddit and imgur."
Obviously, that's ludicrous. I can't go directly to running a 4-minute mile. There's a long road of incremental improvement that I have to travel down before I can reach that point. Realistically, today, I should be happy if I can just beat my personal best time, even if it's a time that would be unimpressive by most people's standards. Because while running a 7-minute mile is something that some pro athletes would scoff at, for me, it would be a real improvement.
I think that this (wrong) mindset comes from incorrectly identifying what your goals are. Think about the running example. I state my goal as:
"I want to run a 4-minute mile."
But really, I don't
just want to run a 4-minute mile. If a wizard cast a magic haste spell on me that allowed me to run a 4-minute mile once, but then after that my speed returned to normal, I wouldn't think to myself, "Well, I already achieved my goal of running a 4-minute mile!" No, my goal is really this:
"I want to become a fast runner, someone who is capable of running a 4-minute mile."
See the difference?
If my goal is to run a 4-minute mile, I can't achieve that tonight, or even in the next week. But if my goal is simply, "I want to be a faster runner today than I was yesterday," that puts me into a self-improvement mindset where every day I can work toward my goal of being a fast runner, and perhaps one day even a runner fast enough to run a 4-minute mile.
Likewise, your goal isn't to write a a good story. I mean, you'd like to do that, much in the same way that I'd like to run a 4-minute mile. But really, your goal is to become a good writer. You want to become a writer who is capable of writing good stories. So while you might not be able to write an awesome 10/10 story tonight, you can at least focus on the goal of being a better writer today than you were yesterday. And if you do that repeatedly, over a long enough time scale, your skill as a writer will consistently improve and you will eventually reach a point where you can say, "Hey, I'm a good writer!"
It might help you to realize that this is actually the way that publishers look at it, too. Look at recent books by big authors like Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson, and notice that if you look at the font on the cover, the name "STEPHEN KING" or "BRANDON SANDERSON" is bigger than the title of the novel. Publishers want a good manuscript, but more than a good manuscript, they want a good author; they want someone who can repeatedly and consistently continue to produce good manuscripts. The AUTHOR is the product. YOU are the product. The goal of writing is to improve YOU, improve YOUR skillset. The story you're writing is just a means to an end; it's the practice that you're using to change from a mediocre writer into a good one. So write that story. Maybe it comes out as a mediocre 4/10 story, but what matters today is being better than you were before, staying on the road to self improvement through repeated and deliberate practice.
All I can suggest is picking something to start, committing to a schedule, and then not letting yourself skip no matter how bad what you've written. If you're sufficiently embarrased use a pen name/alternant handle, but don't let quality deter you.
I think this gets at the productive self-improvement mindset. Going back to the running analogy, suppose I run two laps (half a mile), and check my time at see that I've been running for 5 minutes. If I ran half a mile in 5 minutes, that means I'm on pace for a 10 minute mile. Whoa, that's slow! You know, that's so slow that I should probably just give up now and not even bother to finish the mile.
Of course, that mindset is stupid. I should finish the mile. I could say, "But the first half of that mile was so terrible! Even if I pick up the pace in the second half, there's no way that I could possibly beat my personal best!" But really, the reason that I'm out there on the track is not the number on my wristwatch. I'm there to practice. I'm here to train.
Oh, and I'm also there because it feels good. It's an enjoyable experience. And the most enjoyable days tend to be the ones where I improve the most. Acquiring a skill, getting good at something, improving incrementally, that's
fun. I think it's why most of us love video games (like competitive Pokemon, perhaps), because a lot of good games are about the learning experience, making the player feel like they're getting better at something. Well, writing is a great skill to acquire, it actually allows you to create something to share with the world, and the skill cap is huge.
Even if you have no intention of writing professionally, even if you're just a fanfic writer who wants to share stories with friends, I still think treating writing with the same self-improvement mindset is a good idea, because
becoming a better writer is fun. It can be difficult (much in the same way that some video game levels are hard and challenging), but it's also an incredibly rewarding experience that gives that sense of accomplishment that I think all of us crave so much.
The more I write, the easier it is to write. Partly, this is because of the skills I've acquired, but a large part of it comes from the fact that as I've spent more time writing, it's gotten more enjoyable. Summoning the motivation to sit down and write a story isn't something that I really struggle with. In fact, I look forward to it. I spent large portions of my day eagerly anticipating the moment when I get to sit in front of the computer and start typing, sometimes giddy with anticipation. The more you do this, the more you improve, and the more you improve, the more fun it becomes.
