hey! not to do with ajwiaap but kinda related, but how do you have the mental stamina to be able to write so much and keep a fic going?
also, do you have any tips on how to be able to write and be able to finish a chapter/oneshot?
permission to go off the rails and just yap about writing?
so first of all, i have been unemployed / working very few hours over the past three years, which has given me a ton of free time. i haven't spent majority of my mental stamina focusing on things like school or work, which is a huge roadblock for creativity. my output has been big because my time to write has been big.
as for keeping a fic going, i cant tell you how many things i've written that have been left unfinished and unpublished. i have six years worth of dead longfics hanging out in my google docs. my interests shift and i start something new and that cycle repeats. i am actually not sure why ajwiaap is thriving where my other projects weren't. i like to think that it's because i've gotten good at writing for myself (idk this might be the most obvious and cliché advice but it WOKRS). i used to make decisions on plot elements with a little voice in my head considering how things will be received and with ajwiaap i have time after time decided to just do whatever makes me feel evil/happy (the decision to have clown drug branzy is not something i would've gone with in the past). im more sure of what i want to read than i was when i was a teenager and therefore more sure what i want to write.
another big thing is that i cannot for the life of me focus on two projects at the same time. ajwiaap is all-consuming. i have constant one-shot ideas and i cannot write them because my attention is almost exclusively on ajwiaap. i see this as a curse and gods way of saying he hates me, but i think its also pretty good to work on only a few things at a time. juggling multiple things can just end up feeling like juggling multiple "failures".
as for more concrete advice:
motivation to write will come and go. when its there, write. when it's not there, try to bring something into existence anyway. when i have low motivation to write, im still thinking about the fic/imagining scenes/letting things play out in my head. and when i have a single drop of motivation i try to write the worst draft you have ever seen. spelling errors, no dialogue indicators, just unfiltered crap. then when motivation comes back i can make it legible.
if you finish something and aren't happy with it. let it exist for a week, come back, it will most likely be better than you remember. if it isn't, think very hard about which parts aren't clicking and try again.
in my experience, there's A LOT of trying again. every single chapter of ajwiaap is in fact 3-5 drafts in a lab coat. this is just the way i write. i know there are many many people who finish a first draft and finds it already ready for publishing. this rarely happens to me. i don't preplan much and i find the story as im writing, so there's a lot of going back. its a hassle. i have the patience for it because i don't feel pressured to publish (back to the point about writing for yourself)
write as much as possible.
read too. im so bad at reading books but every time i do im magically motivated to write.
read bad books to feel good about yourself (colleen hoover my beloved i loved layla)
read good books to finds out what you like and what you want to improve on
(those last few points are more about engaging with the writing hobby as a whole, but im leaving them here)
play hollow knight: silksong
this ended up way longer than i thought it would.
tldr: i dont even knooooew omg idkkkkk
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