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.
Try practicing by rewriting a popular story, the structure is already there.
That’s really cool advice. I never woulda thought of paraphrasing something I liked as an exercise.
Thank you :meow-hug:
:this:
essentially what roleplay designed around the setting of any popular series/book/etc usually results in lol. Can't tell you the number of times I basically rewrote Naruto/Bleach/Dragonball Z as a kid on a bunch of forum roleplay sites like that.
Throwing together a rough summary out of bullet points can help break through that initial mind-blanking. I used to do that, just make an outline of a story with bullet points, save it as its own file, then copy it into a new file and start elaborating on each point, deleting the old bullet point once there's actual text to replace it. That way you have the original summary to work with even as you clean up the actual rough draft.
Eventually it stopped being necessary or helpful, but it served as a decent method for learning away the mind-blanking effect of sitting down to a blank page.
That sounds very logical. So, using bullet points as a skeleton....kinda like a list of "scenes" that need to happen. Yes, that is good advice. Thank you :meow-hug:
Yeah. Scenes, specific plot points within them, even a loose play-by-play of what happens. Whatever comes to mind, thrown down without regard for form or consistent style (I'd frequently just make bullet points that are themselves lists of smaller sentence fragments, for example). It's there to be rewritten so it doesn't have to do anything but serve as a reminder of what you thought of.
"It's there to be rewritten". A powerful sentence. A useful one, too.
To add to this: pre-writing in general can help you organize your thoughts and get you asking questions about how things fit together, which can lead to new ideas or help you plug plot holes. Word maps, simple who-what-when-where-why summaries to hone your focus, simple sketches to help you figure out how a location is laid out so you know this character is coming this way and this one goes that way for your chase/cat-and-mouse thriller scene, or just figuring out what the scenery looks like so you know what sorts of details to add.
Don't feel self-conscious about the things you do to help you flesh out your story. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
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.
write write write. it doesn't matter if it's bad or not what you thought or whatever. get words on a page. do not worry about quality insofar as your initial drafting, you are seeking progression and plot. it needs to materialize, only then can it be fixed; you can rewrite what you write, you can't rewrite what you haven't written. take an idea and run with it. stories tend to be in this weird state of abstraction until you sit down and put some of it on paper. only then does it fall into place.
"can't rewrite what you haven't written"... that resonates. Thank you.
The blank page is the fucking worst. Make the blank page go away.
I'm no writer but I've done hobby gamedev, and I can echo everyone else who says you just gotta shit out something. Anything. It'll be terrible, and your brain will latch on to it and insist you do this and that to make it better.
Thank you. The overwhelming amount of support says "DO SOMETHING". I hear you... I won't let the page stay blank.
Im in much of the same boat. I’d say get something, anything down on a page. It won’t be good right off the bat but then you can improve.
A page a day, no matter what as long as it's possible, is an excellent way to build up both experience and discipline.
Haha :doomer: it’s not like I write things currently and immediately delete with prejudice out of self-shame and a deep sense of inadequacy lmao. That’s totally not an issue ha haha :bawllin-sad:
For real though, that’s good advice once I overcome my issues that prevent me implementing it.
haha, I'm not laughing because I'm laughing at it. It's a laughter of relief and feeling I'm amongst those who understand. I always delete my writing because of I am terrified of being judged, after all shouldn't I know better than anyone why my writing is bad ? lol. I like your idea and it truly does help. I hope we can both reach a point where we share our work here.
I wrote the fun parts and just took the path of least resistance to connect them. And when I had a narrative that was garbo, I rewrote the entire thing from scratch with a better narrative that actually made sense.
Starting with the fun parts is good idea! Getting that on screen/page ought to be motivating, like, "hey, isn't this cool" lets make it work.
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?
Like almost any skill, practice is the most important part.
What worked for me is starting with a "seed" of an idea, then extrapolating on that "seed" to see where it took me.
You said you had stories in your head. Try focusing on one specific story, and from there, one specific character/idea/theme in that story. Often, the fiction will write itself if you ask yourself questions about what that character/idea/theme is and why it is and how that would connect to everything else.
I'll give an example. Suppose you wanted a story where there was a medieval fantasy world, except there was an early and prodigal version of Marxism that was rising up somewhere in it. If you ask yourself questions such as "which part of the world and what culture therein would adopt this first" and "how would neighboring cultures and regions respond to that" and even "how would magic, arcane, divine, or something else, respond to this new ideological force?" You may find a lot of the outline filling itself out.
In my first completed novel trilogy, I wanted piloted mecha, while also acknowledging that remotely operated and autonomous drones already exist in contemporary warfare. My efforts to find a story justification for piloted mecha wrote much of the story's history for me, and even created unexpected opportunities for new story ideas while answering those questions.
That makes enough sense I feel like it should have been obvious. Thank you. If you don't mind, how do I grapple with a story that starts, in traditional terms at least, in media res? The story within my heart that I wish to be heard is one of a man who missed the call. By its very nature this is a story that begins with tons of context that the reader is goin to need filled in for anything to make sense.
I really resonate with your idea of a "seed" and allowing it to sprout and grow...maybe I need to allow it to sit within the fallowness of the mind for a while longer. or maybe this is my fear of decisiveness finding an excuse...
As somebody who has overcome this and more by taking that plunge, do you think a writer needs a program? Should I take the Butcher/Sanderson route and find a formula or should I take the time to allow something to arise and burst through however long that may take? The way my mind, as is, works a formulaic approach would be easier, but I don't want to be a formulaic writer despite my natural disposition...
If you don’t mind, how do I grapple with a story that starts, in traditional terms at least, in media res?
Since you say you're new at this, you can look at a Martin Scorcese film or even the first :no-copyright: movie for inspiration in doing that. It can be challenging for a beginner, but you may learn a lot from diving in like that.
"The Man Who Missed the Call" arguably is an excellent story title... or at least a chapter name. I like your idea already!
The story could, just to make it easier, "start from the beginning" after that first chapter, sort of like an extended Ghost of Christmas Past experience to show how the man missed that call.
do you think a writer needs a program
Arguably, no. They can help but it may be more of a crutch than a help especially if you're in a crowded market (and you likely will be) if you intend to sell that story someday.
The way my mind, as is, works a formulaic approach would be easier, but I don’t want to be a formulaic writer despite my natural disposition…
Follow the "seed" formula but let it bloom organically from there. With your "Man Who Missed the Call," let the seed of that idea lead to you answering questions like "what was the call?" and let it flourish from there. In a way, starting with the defeat may actually be easier for readers to take than for the final chapter to be that failure, with sympathy (or contempt, depending) for the failed protagonist.
You have provided some really useful tips and (because of) the optimistic helpfulness has been affirming. Full disclosure: I stole the idea of a missed call from Robert Jordan's initial idea for Wheel of Time, but it is just SO GOOD somebody needs to write it. I'm going to try for a short story instead of gaming tonight. Thank you. I really needed somebody to chime in and help me get over the mental road block.
Thanks bud, you can be sure Imma post it here once I finally get to the level of writing something worth sharing.
Oh! One more thought about what you already said:
What if the story doesn't look back that much except in lore and references and the entirety of the story really is "now that the calling is missed, now what? What becomes of the world? The man who missed the call?" That may be awesome. I'd read it!
I hope this is not creepy, but I really liked your trilogy so this means a lot tbh.
I'm glad you liked it! It means a lot to me to know that some people read it and liked it.
spoiler
In a way, now that I think of it, Thirteen in my trilogy was "the woman who missed the call" in the setting's backstory. She had one shot (so it seemed) to prevent the ruling class from escaping the planet they were ruining, and it was too much for her and she became an indebted servant to one of those rulers.
Hahah, holy shit. I can't think of anything cooler than playing even a small role in an author I like rethinking about their work after talking to them. Keep on commenting brother, your role as a prominent poster who also writes is what helped me get the courage to start. I just hope I'm not the only one lol.
Thank you. It means a lot to me to know that!
As for me, I can't think of anything cooler than having been some help to maybe get a fellow writer started. The more leftist writers, the better! :solidarity:
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"
Someone posted this in the comm before, I find it's full of little tidbits https://archive.ph/20140802210318/http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4
