How to gain the courage to start writing? Or just to stop being a lazy bun overall? I have the entire plot, I know what I want to happen, I don't know how to begin it.
How to gain the courage to start writing?
This is a good question.
And it doesn’t have an easy answer.
It does, however, have a complex answer made up of multiple parts and a longterm journey that can take YEARS… the steps of which are actually quite simple, even easy.
One of the keys to writing that they don’t talk about that much, in the face of all the “how to write” advice and techniques and tricks, is that writing depends upon you having faith IN YOURSELF. You have to trust yourself to find the words. You have to believe that you have a story worth telling. You have to think that even if you aren’t writing the greatest thing in this moment, you can and WILL be writing things that are what you want later.
The struggle of the writer is not actually to find the right word or how to get that story out, it is to constantly sit down in front of the page, and face YOURSELF.
YOU are the challenge. All those stories are inside of you, you have to figure out how deal with yourself to get them out. I’d guess that ‘laziness’ you talk about is actually your fear distracting you from reaching for what you really want.
One of the biggest things I do, when I feel overwhelmed with writing (or anything really,) is to break that thing down into smaller parts, parts that I feel are digestible, to lower the stakes. There are lots of ways to do this.
break your ‘entire plot’ that you say you have down into chapters and scenes. focus on one scene.
set a timer for 15 minutes. commit to writing for JUST 15 minutes. you can do just fifteen minutes, and don’t stop writing in that time. do nothing but write. (if you want to keep writing after the bell, keep writing.)
start writing by taking your main character and have them experience their story using the five sense. sight, touch, taste, smell, hear. add in some emotions.
choose a small goal for the MC. now write about something (or someone!) who will get in the way of that goal.
write one scene three different ways. there are many ways to write a thing, start realizing that your story isn’t “wrong” it’s just going down a different path. that means it’s not the end of the world if you don’t have the perfect words.
as a prewriting exercise, try doing an interview with your MC, or your antagonist. Or a secondary character.
make a writing date with yourself, or even better, with someone else. Promise them (or yourself) that you will write a plausible number of words in that time. Or one page. Or tackle that scene.
Join a writing challenge. If nanowrimo is too stressful, try campnano, which allows you to set your own goals. I like 30k words in the month, which sets me at a doable 1k a day pace. But you can do it smaller. Or you can set your goals to hours.
Take on a prompt. If you can’t get yourself started on your story, start writing your characters into a prompt that you get from elsewhere. There are many writing prompts you can find on line. I myself keep a bowl of prompt words, I can pull one word or three and base my writing on the random words I’ve selected.
i collect writing stuffs on @rosy-writes so check that out.
