Hey, hope this ask doesn’t come across as bothersome, I was just wondering if you had any advice for a completely amateur writer. (I’ve only ever written short things for myself) I just wanna get out there and maybe have a popular blog or website like you! I know it takes a lot of hard work, I just don’t even know where to start.
No, no bother at all! I’m happy to give some advice to people just starting out 😃
To me blogging and writing are very separate skill sets so I’ll focus on writing here, but if you have any specific blogging questions send them my way too!
note: this is from my personal experience, I am still a work-in-progress writer as well haha
On writing: write, write, write
I started out writing fanfic, I wrote bc I was frustrated with how other people were writing my favorite ships (particularly lapidot and davekat at the time) and wanted to see my own vision of it lol
In those beginning years (my freshman year of college and beyond) I wrote like nobodies business, my first long fic was 30k words and got like 6 kudos per chapter- which was not a lot
my word count was relatively high and my readership was relatively low, I wrote a fic called “Laundromat” which I am still embarrassed about and got laughed at online- which really sucked. However, I only got where I am today by keeping-on keeping on.
In the first two years I wrote about 7,000 words a week and about 360,000 words total:
note: I didn’t write anything in 2014, only 2015 and 2016
The lesson from then was to simply get up again and do it over and over, practice is the mother of creation
there are a couple “mental approaches” you can use in order to keep going even when no one is reading (I can make a Writing Tips post about it if people are interested in a more in-depth analysis of it), but mostly it’s to approach writing as a game, a puzzle, something to keep coming back to to try and “improve”
It’s the Many Pots approach: a teacher divided his class into two groups, one who would be graded on the number of pots they made, the other on one pot they made that had to be “perfect.” The best pots did not come from the quality group, but the quantity one.
I hope this helps! It’s a journey that comes with highs and lows as you start out, but it does it get better every single time. Write as much as you can, don’t be afraid to be bad, some of it is going to be bad.
I’m still a work in progress myself, but I’m happy to share anything I’ve learned if you have more questions!
