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starchaserdreams · 11 months

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Erm, hello!

I am an aspiring writer. I have these stories in my head that I love and want to write about. But when I try, it's the absolute worst shit I've ever seen in my life.

Sorry, what I'm trying to ask is, any tips for younger writers who have no idea what they're doing...?

Hi! I have no idea what I'm doing ever, but I'll try to answer as best as I can. I'll start with generic advice, then say what works for me specifically. Sorry this got so long.

We're all kind of fumbling through life. The writing habits that I have have come from three sources:

a) hearing what other people do and building from them. I'm always in one writers group or another (currently I'm in a local writers group, and I'm regularly involved with two different NaNoWriMo groups in November, one locally and one virtually) and I've picked up a lot from them

b) a metric fuckton of trial and error. Because while part (a) is great some of the time, most of the things that work for other people don't work for me. I can't set a strict schedule at the same time everyday. I can't edit for a long time after I write.

c) NaNoWriMo (see link) helped me SO MUCH. I don't think everything can be written that way, but in terms of getting a handle on your own voice, preventing yourself from stopping to edit, and letting the story flow on its own, NaNo is amazing. It's a great starting point. Editing can come later, once the words are done on the page.

If you're unfamiliar, it's a (totally free) event that happens in November every year where everyone tries to write 50,000 words of a brand new novel in the span of one month. That's 1,667 words per day, so there isn't much time to stop and edit as you go. You just keep going. It's a competition against yourself rather than anyone else, to see if you can accomplish the task. It's also a community based event, so you can commiserate with other writers about the bad and celebrate with them about the good.

They have smaller events in April and July, but to really get the feel of it, November is when it's a party (or a rollercoaster, either way). I went to write-ins in cafes, bars, grocery stores, on the subway, etc. The event is a whole vibe, and now they have in person events again (they paused for covid). If you want to stay virtual, they have that too!

And as for what works for me:

1.

This most certainly wouldn't work for everyone, but it's my current strategy:

I think best when I'm in motion. By far. So most of my storyboarding I do while walking or driving, and I dictate into the notes app on my phone.

I do most of my dialogue this way too, because speaking it out loud makes it feel more like a conversation and more natural. I won't dictate the narration, but I'll include action tags. So it comes out like "Anthony: *flings door open, eyes wide* what in blazes are you doing??" (I add punctuation later)

Then when I get home, I often have several thousand words of notes to work from. My notes file for my last fic was 30k words, almost all of which had been dictated. It's a lot. It might sound daunting.

But it was done while out for a walk or drive, so it felt easy and effortless. And then when it came time to actually write, I got 48,000 words of a first draft done in 8 days (about 15k of which was just copy pasted from the outline. The whole time it felt like cheating and using guidelines to write the actual story, but it was all my original work, just done at different times.

2.

Keep writing as an exciting treat rather than a chore.

I've started to create little writers retreats for myself. My friends and I rented an AirBnB for two nights this winter, where the entire goal was reading and writing. Sure there was sitting around the fire talking and eating good food, but we built it up so that the writing was the exciting part. It worked SO WELL. We did writing activities together too, not just staring at a word doc. We did character studies and made little AUs to imagine our characters in.

A friend and I took a six hour road trip for another writers retreat too. We spent the 12 hours (RT) in the car talking about our stories and characters. We'd started with dozens of prompts so we'd have enough material, and we never ran out. Then we took rest stops at gas stations and restaurants and did little 15 minute writing sprints. It really got me fired up. I wrote 6,000 words over the two days of that retreat!

Keeping writing fun can be big things (my sister and I did a writers retreat like that in Hawaii) or little things (I always treat myself to a donut and a coffee on Sunday mornings and then have a leisurely morning in the cafe writing).

I can't say if any of this will work for you, because I can't even say whether it'll still work for *me* in a few years. But I hope it's food for thought!

Anyway this is like one million words long so sorry about that, hope it was interesting.

#psa for nanowrimo #thats what this felt like #but i cannot speak highly enough of that organizations work #they are the reason i forced myself to write when it felt like a chore #and the reason i remembered i love it #nanowrimo #writing #habits #i have a lot to say on this subject obviously so sorry i said all of it #fanfiction #creative writing #writing goals #just writer things #also that line from anthony isnt real but i wanna work it into assumptions my regency novel #new writers on tumblr #young writers #millennial writer #creative process #novel #storyboarding #dialogue #thinking beat in motion #i feel like thats an adhd thing but i could be making that up

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