You are one of my writing inspiration people and I...How do you write without stopping at the blank page? Without thinking it won't work or getting unmotivated or freezing? How do you see something and decide 'yes! This is good and this needs to be done!'? I've been struggling with it since I started, and it's caused me to reject/neglect my own writing for years now. I just don't know where to start. No pressure to respond, honest. Your fics make me laugh and feel and are really crisp, so ty
To be frank it’s been a few hours and I’m still a little stunned.
It’s an honor that you think of me that highly, especially considering how I still feel about as rusty as the Tin Man pre-Dorothy most days. (like holy shit, you really think that highly of what i write?!! does not compute! error! error! reboot. boop) Thank you! Hopefully I can continue to meet those expectations.
This is probably not going to be the inspirational speech I assume you were hoping for.
Frankly, I don’t. Let’s first talk about the optimistic example where you’ve already started on something and are struggling with finishing it; I’ll use The Kitchen Gods for an example since the numbers are nice and round. It’s just about 10K words and it’s about 90% first draft. It also took me five weeks, “working”, ah ha, ah ha, on it every day, to complete. I’d estimate about half of that time was spent just staring at the page trying to figure out how to continue it. A further quarter was spent typing about five words to a sentence down before retiring for the night. And most of the time when I wanted to stop (which was often, mind) I was more or less thinking exactly that. I was thinking, “oh, come on, this is just largely plotless fluff, you can do better than this, you can write something better than this” or “blasted. words. get. on. page.”
In this case finishing it is just mostly a matter of discipline. Get up, set a timer, and work on it for ten minutes or half an hour or an hour, regardless of how tired you feel or uninspired you are. It doesn’t matter if you just do research and take notes, or if you rewrite a section, or if you just slap five words down on the page and call it a day after playing Solitaire for the rest of the day. What I’ve found is that that sort of writing is less about being in a constant state of creative flux (I’d recommend reading this) and more about making a habit of it, hammering at it day after day until you get up and write on reflex. Admittedly the product is usually not that fantastic and is barely better than the product of a chimpanzee slapping at a typewriter, but it’s written down, and it’s easier to build on a foundation than it is to hash together something from scratch.
And now what I suspect you’re really struggling with, which is actually starting the damn thing, and which is what I also think is probably the hardest step.
I don’t really have much good advice here either. Discussing things with someone sometimes helps to jog an idea loose and onto the paper, at which point you’re dealing with the above (that this also usually adds a good deal of nuance and complexity to otherwise flat plots is a happy consequence). Just filing away the idea in the back of your mind and letting it rattle around until Its Time Has Come has also been the source of a few of my stories and drabbles; it’s part of why there’s a couple dozen things in my draft folder, and why I look through it fairly often. Probably the best advice I can give here is the same advice as above: make a habit of writing. Slap down a few words about your idea in a drabbles document and save it away, hash out a basic plot and theme, whatever, but write, a little bit, every day. It comes easier after that, and then it’s not so much a matter of motivation but a matter of robotic routine, which is a helluva lot easier than motivation.
In the end the only thing I can say is that if there’s a good idea, it’ll latch on. It won’t let go. It will stay with you. I have a few ideas bouncing around in my head dating back to the second year of middle school, that, one day, when I’ve learned enough and talked enough and attached enough little branches that I’ve nicked off of other people and books, will come out as a full-fledged story.
Your ideas are good, and they do deserve writing, and they do deserve reading. They simply need the right time. Plants don’t do much growing in the dead of winter.
(Of course I need to touch on “does this really need to see the light of day?”—looking at you, 50 Shades—at some point. In which case I recommend taking a very careful look at your plot and characters and the general shade of the idea and its implications. Remember, satire punches up, otherwise it’s bullying. It’s a point that I think applies well to writing and media in general. But to be frank truly terrible claptrap like that doesn’t come along often in my opinion. There’s a little bit good in most things published out there.)
