First, huge thanks for your kind and detailed reply! I know you will someday bounce back from your burn-out. And if anything, AI slop and social media make actual, proper writing even more valuable and important. I don't have any reason to care about slop quickly vomited by a prompt, and I don't have any reason to care about the shallow trivialities of social media that get forgotten the moment you see them, and neither for the "background watch" that is some of Netflix's stuff. None of those things are going to be something that lasts in human culture, something meaningful. We will always need the artists to make something beautiful despite our instincts to make the world around noisier and uglier.
There's a classic quote from legendary filmmaker Jean Renoir, who said "when technique is primitive, everything is beautiful. When technique is perfected, everything is ugly except the work of genius artists who are able to transcend technique". Remember the days when every photo was treasured because it was so hard to take one? Nowadays with smartphones, we don't care about random photographs as much, and we don't put the same care into them. True great photography demands knowledge, preparation and transcendental artistic intent that appears over and over again and can't be a lucky coincidence.
I admit that grammar, location descriptions and, most of all, dialogue and characterization are what really scares me from writing. I love to discuss scenarios and plots. But huge thanks for your support. Maybe I will take on writing someday. There was a time where I experimented with AI slop, just for my amusement and nothing more, and it feels so shallow. I don't understand how anyone can feel satisfaction from actually sharing it publicly and saying they wrote it! I guess that it's for the same reason that there are also bad people in the world.
I will pitch my FMAB idea to other writers. Regardless, though, please feel free to tackle it whenever you want!
I hope my post can be encouraging to you!
How right you are, Anon! You have no idea how much you warmed my heart with your confidence in the endurance of human art. <3
You know what, every time I start a brand new script staring at a blank page on my screen... I have the same fears as you. Laying it all out feels so daunting. And I think maybe because written words read flat, 1-dimensional, and in a linear fashion, we often tend to think it has to all be laid out like that at creation stages. I find that it helps to switch my thinking to a painter's mindset! Because everyone can paint, right? According to Bob Ross. XD
But seriously though. You start with a rough sketch, just all the little stick figures first, and then you flesh it out layer by layer, you know? At the end, you come away with a painting that took like, 12 different layers of going back in for shadows, for highlights, peripherals, and the like. I like to see my writing as something like that. I write out some super crude one-liners like "Seattle: Carmen and Player date, cherry blossom drizzle, dreamy sequence, crisis bam boom oops goodbye Player". It's nonsensical, but hey, I at least got that first sketch down! XD
I used to be frustrated at the way that a lot of my stories were just dialogue at first. It looked so lame and weak. But that's just the first draft! And everyone's got their own process. Whatever your process turns out to be - it WILL emerge once you take that first step. You just gotta give it a chance to emerge by taking that step. I've written prose with zero dialogue, stream-of-consciousness, magical realism, stage plays, screenplays, lyrical poetry, and everything in between, and trust me: none of them looked good at the first, or even fifth, draft.
Fanfiction is so fun because there are already interesting characters pre-made for us. But we're also free to project whatever we want - there's no right or wrong way to do characterizations. Personally, I hella project. All my own struggles, traumas, quirks, frustrations, the things I thought I was alone in feeling - I found that there were people out there that felt seen from my writing and I wasn't alone after all.
And baby. Your grammar is perfect. Don't you even worry.
And even if it weren't... we're not reading dictionaries. We're reading stories about the human condition. Stories that make us FEEL something. My grammar sucked for a long time because English isn't my first language. I wrote anyway, and I still read and bookmark stories with imperfect grammar because they still touch my heart or make me laugh. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
If it's between "do nothing until you're perfect" and "do some good, even if sloppy", I'd say pick the latter. Creating art is doing good in the world. :3
Thank you again for your lovely message - I'm always happy to chat more!
