Now I know it's not true ADD, one of my younger brothers has it and the difference is clear, but I tend to refer to things by terms that make sense to me regardless of their actual meaning so long as it's for my own use, although I usually "translate" it into common English when I need to talk about it, this time I can't find a way to so sorry I don't mean to offend anyone with ADD or ADHD. That being said: When writing I find myself often to be inspired to write other things, In truth I want to make a career out of writing novels, I know how hard entry level writing is and how rare successful writing is, but I'm dedicated so I want to do it. As one may guess however, writing for long periods a single story while still consuming media (videos, video games, movies, etc) can spur inspiration for other things, novels or short stories. My question here is: Does anyone have tricks they could give me to help me focus on my one work at hand? Unless it's actually fine to have multiple works ongoing together. What are your thoughts? P.s. Thanks for the replies, this is my first post and yes I saw the introduction section of the forum but I'm not good at that stuff so: Hi~ My name's Nawa! Nice to meet you! Introduction over!!
I'm the same. I constantly get inspiration for new ideas, characters, worlds and whatnot. Just last night I dreamt of a world where humans enslaved centaurs and minotaurs and put them in "break" camps to subdue them and render them mindless. However, I let all my ideas simmer for long periods as that's how my stories get as good as they are. I deeply love my work so finishing a piece means a lot especially after 12-14 months of planning and dreaming of it. By the time I'm done writing it, the next one will be ready to tried out.
How do you keep the idea from being forgotten by a torrent of new ideas? Often my ideas stem from a single thing, such as a visual description of a character's ability, like the most recent being a ripple effect through the world like a pebble landing in water, or a personality trait or something very basic like that
I suppose, so your advice would be to stick to my idea and wait till it's done before the next? Thanks for the advice, I'd like more opinions though, just to see multiple points of view
From other posts, if I remember correctly, it seems a popular consensus is that new writers, especially new writers, should finish their stories (whether long or short) and do the editing process. Writing 50,000 words is great. It doesn't really help your actual craftmanship if you never bother to polish it by editing. It'd just be 50,000 spewed words by an amateur, right? So, when you finish, you edit, you learn new methods/techniques, and you learn about your own writing allowing you to fix mistakes before they happen. That's why it's important to finish your pieces as the editing process is invaluable to learning and seeing your own work more objectively.
All right thanks, my current project is my second attempt at a novel, the first one I stopped right before ending the story because after reading it over I saw too drastic a change and too much stuff crammed in one story, essentially an attempt to cram all I liked in one story, this one though I'm making sure to keep it more clean as I go. Thanks for the help
Dedication to the craft. It's not easy but then, nobody said it was. Tell the story you want to be told, one bit at a time.