I have stories in my head ( broad strokes). I can vividly imagine narrative moments in media res that I would love to do justice to by filling out the before and after. I create personalities in my head that I talk to and could transcribe. I know what themes and motifs I would like to touch... but every time I sit down to actually try and drag these imaginings into reality my mind goes blank. I sit, I struggle, I am at a crossroad amidst a blank void.
How do I learn how to give structure to this impulse to create fiction? Where do I learn how to create a program or methodology that allows me to take these abstract yearnings and give them a concrete form?
Any and all advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you for listening.
Play a text-based roleplay game like SS13 (Goon RP is good and still very active despite being like 20 years old at this point...which...shit i really have been playing SS13 on-and-off for like 15 years at this point GODDAMN) or join one of those RP forums where people create threads for 'scenarios' or whatnot and other forum members can enter the roleplay by leaving a post/reply/etc. I say this because, as a teen who at one point was enamored with becoming a fiction-writer for quite some time, that's what I loved to do and how I think I managed to get decent enough at just sitting down & committing an idea to paper.
Still get similar impulses to create fiction and will usually just scratch the itch through a few rounds of SS13 since I have no desire to really write a novel - but you did just remind me that over New Years I found an old notepad from like 2014-2016 that had three pages of a story sketched out with a really shitty map, but I think that was more just me being like:
:so-true: "i love worldbuilding i should get really high and do that tonight" lmao
That's really good advice. I've always been adjacent to RP communities (even took part in RP threads on /tg/ BEFORE the bastards took over the site).
SS13 has a lot of potential, maybe we should try and get a hexbear server going? I very much enjoy games where cargo unionizes. Like, the only game I've played where unionizing a warehouse usually helps the team win.
Running a Hexbear server would be fairly easy to do these days, especially since Goon has gone public with their codebase and one can just fork it from their github. Maybe I should look into it, I dream of a day where I can play a Revolution round where I'm not the only head-rev PDA messaging people Lenin quotes.
Another idea you may want to look into would be a MUD. Same idea of text-based RP, but unlike farting spacemen you can easily just join a LOTR/WoT/etc based MUD like MUME or WOTMud. Number of players will always vary, especially with some of the longer-running MUDs - but they're a dime-a-dozen and you can find one for nearly any genre/setting.
ooh, that's awesome idea. I used to play the Wheel of Time MUD. Even took part in the infamous "band of merry mad men"