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.
Do it over and over and over and over and over and over again
I've written a few stories to actual completion, but mostly my ADHD stops me from starting and my perfectionism stops me from finishing, but there's no easy answer other than practice. You have to write a first draft and cringe through how horrible it is before you have something to improve on. It will never be perfect. Never ever ever. Never in a billion fucking years will the perfectly realized Platonic Ideal of your story manifest through divine inspiration. It will have to go through the electrified meat gelatin in your head and down your feeble arms and come out through your filthy monkey fingers, like everyone else. Something will be lost between your ideas and what gets down on the page, down to the revision process which will make you cut lots of shit out just to make the whole better.
Get it onto the page. Let it be the worst fucking thing anyone has ever written. Then put it away. Come back to it. Realize there's something you can do with it, or at least figure out what doesn't work. Don't make the mistake I did for years and throw it away. Just keep building on it and re-writing it. It will never be perfect, but you can get closer.
"Let it be the worst".... Never before have such words had such a powerfully positive effect. My filthy monkey fingers shall type. My brain of electric gelatin shall ponder. You are correct, between the realization and the actualization something is lost, but is it not in that process that true value is found? How can something be lost if it was never there to begin with? It is better to be fail at bringing forth meaning than to never attempt a summoning.
Thank you.