Let me go point by point:
How do you develop the ability to tell a good story? Is it something innate, or does it only come through years of hard work and practice?
I’m sure some people have an “innate” knack for telling a good story, but I am not one of those people so I had to practice. You be the judge if I’m any good now! But I’ve definitely improved a bit since I first started writing. Storytelling is a learnable skill, definitely.
Should you remain conscious of every word you write, or is it better to just let go and allow the story to tell itself?
After years of working to improve as a writer, I’ve concluded it’s best to have several different “modes”:
You’ve got your playful drafting mode, when you don’t give a fuck and you’re just slinging playdough at the wall and telling your story with finger puppets. You don’t remain conscious of every word; in fact, you try to give as few fucks as possible about the words! Unless the pleasure of specific words drives your creativity, in which case go with that. The point is, you tell the story as innocently and playfully and with as much joy and freedom as possible, doing whatever you need to do to disinhibit yourself. (I’m so self-critical I often have to trick myself into this headspace, for instance by deliberately writing badly or with bizarre brainstorming/freewriting exercises.)
Then you’ve got your analytic mode where you’re, say, reading yours or somebody else’s work and breaking it into functional parts. I do this a lot with stories I love and want to learn from. If there’s a passage I find really sexy, for instance, I try to figure out why it’s sexy, what makes it sexy for me. Is it the word choice? The sentence rhythm? The sensory details? The deep POV? Some combination of those things? I’ll extract maybe one little lesson, one “trick” I’d like to try in my own work, and apply it to the next thing I write.
And finally you’ve got what I think of as your mechanic mode, where you’re taking stuff you’ve learned in analytic mode and using it to revise your own writing. Say you’ve decided, oh, I want more of my POV character’s emotional responses to the events in my story. So in this mode, you’re going through your messy draft and seeing which bits you can tweak to make that happen.
(I also have an editor mode, in which I only focus on smoothing out the prose. I do things like make sure I don’t repeat any words or phrases too closely together, crap like that. I can’t do substantive revisions and think about that little shit at the same time, though, so I separate the tasks. Writing is like carpentry: you don’t want to sand and polish something that you’re going to make bigger changes to later.)
The point of these different modes is, you want to be in one at a time, because they require very different attitudes. If you’re drafting, you’re giving zero fucks. If you’re revising, you’re giving one kind of fuck but maybe not another. Etc.
How valuable is others’ advice?
Most advice of the “don’t use adverbs” variety is not that useful, especially if you’re at the beginning of your process. New writers should stay away from “rules” because they just tie you up in self-critical knots. Instead, find writing you like and figure out why you like it. Or, just write a lot and splash around in the pool and see what happens. Don’t read Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing unless you want to write like Elmore Leonard.
As for feedback on your work: personally, I find that readers’ responses are valuable to me, but rarely their advice. Like, I want to know how they reacted to various moments in my story, but I don’t usually ask them what specific things I should change. I just want to know if my jokes landed, or if the part that’s supposed to be hot was, in fact, hot. I then use their reactions to decide for myself what to change. Most people, even experienced writers, don’t give very good revision tips, first and foremost because it isn’t their story and they don’t know exactly what you’re trying to do. They also aren’t good at separating “what didn’t work for me” from “what wouldn’t work for anyone.” So treat your readers less like critics who must be appeased and more like a focus group that shows you how your material might play with certain audiences.
(Every now and then, you’ll find someone who’s a great story mechanic who reads your stories with a charitable eye and gives great, practical, specific advice on how to make them better. If you find one of these people, hang on to them.)
What’s the best way to handle unsolicited harsh criticism?
“Thanks for your feedback. I’m sorry this wasn’t to your taste!”
(Most nasty crit I see on fanfic boils down to “I was hoping to read this one kind of story and yours turned out to be another kind, and I’m mad about that.” Just ignore that shit.)
Most importantly, what do you do if you’re a Type A perfectionist who crumbles into a state of quivering anxiety at the mere thought of producing something that isn’t Good™?
I have this problem myself. There are a few things you can do:
Make your first drafts deliberately messy. Don’t use correct punctuation, write in the most colloquial you-talking-to-yourself voice you can, give your draft as many markers of “this is not a finished aesthetic object available to critical evaluation” as possible so you won’t be tempted for a second to mistake it for something that ought to be judged by standards appropriate to a finished story.
Do you post headcanons? Write a headcanon and let it sorta morph into a fic as you go. Take a mode of writing you’re comfortable with - exchanging ideas over chat, for instance - and just elaborate on it and expand it, rather than sitting down all seriously and shit and being all “I must now write A PROPER STORY.”
Writing fast helps you give zero fucks. Fill your draft with placeholders like [devastatingly sexy description of Ben Solo in slave-girl bikini goes here] so you don’t get bogged down in details. Set word-count goals or do timed writing sprints to keep yourself moving. If the results are desperately in need of revision, well, they should be. You wrote them super fast; nothing written under those conditions is supposed to be good.
Start with the part of the story you’re most excited about. Don’t start with the set-up, the backstory or the boring part we need to slog through before we get to the good part. Start with the scene that made you want to write the story. That “but first I’ve got to establish the blah blah blah” impulse is a way of procrastinating because you’re afraid, and it can really kill your interest in the story.
When you start revising your rough draft into something more story-shaped, give yourself a limited amount of time. You’ll want to polish it until doomsday, so set a deadline. Once the deadline comes, send the draft to someone you trust and find out how it worked for them. Get them to liveblog their reactions over chat if they can. Reread it yourself and focus on what you like about it. Don’t think of subsequent drafts as fixing what’s wrong with the story, but as refining and maximizing what’s good about it.
If revising starts to depress you, switch back to drafting. Work on something else if you have to; just generate more words. Play and splash around. Don’t let yourself get too far down the rabbit-hole of revising and re-revising. If you’re learning how to make clay pots, you don’t spend weeks perfecting a single pot; you make a bunch of practice pots. Write short stuff so it’s easier to let go of. Don’t ruminate and agonize over a story you “can’t get right”; either throw it out or post it and move on. Anon kink memes are good for this. You’re writing short stuff, you’re anonymous, and you’re writing for someone who will be so goddamn happy their prompt got filled at all that the fic doesn’t need to be a masterpiece to make their day.
I wrote a big post about shitty first drafts that goes into more detail on this subject. I can only speak to my own experience, but maybe it’ll help.
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