Having a blog is an excellent idea. An audience always helps me write. When I know my work will be getting to someone that I know, I take it as a matter of pride to write as well as I can. This is one of the reasons I found myself producing so much quality work in my high school creative writing class, and one of the aspects of the forum RPG I ran that kept me coming back to write for it. If you can get an audience, even if it's only a close friend or family member, it'll help you to keep writing.
I wait until I'm alone, go somewhere still, then I put one of those sleeping eye-cover things over my eyes and put earplugs in and focus my mind's eye on the void until something bubbles up from the deep. Sometimes it takes a long, long time, but it's never failed me.
I've found that usually when I get writer's block it's because I'm trying to edit myself while I'm writing. It's very difficult to do both at once. I'm a seat of the pants writer though. Fling it out there, then edit it. So maybe it's different for other people. Take for instance the short story contest. I hadn't really paid much attention to the contests until about 3:00 this afternoon. Of course it had to be done by 10 am tomorrow when I looked at it. I sat in front of this computer for HOURS begging something to come out of my head and nothing happened because I was editing it all before I could type it. Made myself stop it and got it done in 3 hours. I just give myself permission to write crap, and then I edit it into decentness
I'm one of those people who is always working on 4+ stories and I just every once and while will think about the character, come up with a good idea and then continue on. That way I'm always busy but the ideas flow pretty naturally. Sometimes for plot related writers block, I just try to write out different ways the plot could progress and choose the best one. Hope this helps!
I have a set time and I make myself write solidly for two hours - quality on first draft is unimportant. Doing that I can write a novel in a month. Rewrite it next month then edit it the one after.
This is a mindset I need to get into more. I am so perfectionistic, I will be on my first draft, getting stuck on a single descriptive or dialogue phrase. Get stuck, get frustrated, walk away for a little while to think it over, and come back to it. But I could just write a generic (fix this! Just needs to mean "no!" in a funny way) in, instead, and move on. The perfect phrase always comes to me... just takes time sometimes. I did better about it with the last thing I wrote. Just write, inner editor away, get it out! Then revise and fix, then let others read and fix what they see. This helps when other people see where you felt it fumbled but couldn't quite get it out right... Others can rearrange a thing and fix it when we can't, sometimes! Turning the inner editor off is difficult at times. But it's the first helpful suggestion for NaNoWriMo, and is talked about heavily in No Plot, No Problem, written by the same person who started NaNoWriMo. It does seem to help, though it seems counter-intuitive at first.
I find it is pointless and actually in the long run more damaging to the quality of my work to care too much about the first draft. It is much easier to change a piece which you wrote 5K words doing a couple of hours a day, than one where you took the same time to write 500 words. I don't think twice about deleting thousands of words to work in a small plot idea that comes to mind. I couldn't do that if I had spent time on every word. Most of my first draft gets changed, replaced and tweaked to the point where anything I had done in it is pointless.
If I get stuck I skip to the next part. Once I'm there I might realize I need to add things in prior to this new scene and those things can help shape the one I skipped past. Even if that doesn't happen, I'll still have a solid destination for the missing scene to work itself towards, which makes it easier to write. Maybe it'll just end up being a filler scene, but those aren't intrinsically bad. Better than gaps, anyway.
Completely agree. I just throw it down. Characters pop up that shock me, they do things that astound me and then on the second draft I throw it away. I often write 8k words in 5 hours of writing only to have a mere 4k survive on a second draft.
I know it seems kind of stupid but I got a short story assignment for school that I worked hard on but it was so bad that my teacher wouldn't even finish reading it. That hurt and it took a hard hit on my interest in writing although I still have ideas coming to me I just don't want to write them down because I feel like a bad writer. Thats also why I haven't posted in here for a while. Should I just force myself to sit down and write until I start liking it again?
You probably are a bad writer. Most people are. You have to write about a million words before you become a good writer. So the way to become good isn't giving up, it to start writing. Enjoy writing in itself, not the feeling if you good or bad at it. Settle for the feeling that you are getting better at it.
Emotion, Intuition and Ratio are the three main forces in life that needs in balance. My assessment from your few words is that you need a dote of Ratio to get your Emotion back in line. Analyze. Be honest to yourself and see where the tutor has a point. See if you can improve. If not, move on. Do a cold read (put it away a few weeks) and analyze again. If then you are still negative about your writing abilities, forget it and find another challenge that does match your skills and talents. There is more to life than just writing. HTH.
Writing is sometimes hard work. And when I write 'sometimes' I mean often. It's not like you will be inspired all the time, and it's not like you need to like it all the time either. If it's something you do, out of a compulsion you'll do it anyway.
You must love writing long, long before you will become a good writer. I still remember my fifth grade teacher's response to a short story I wrote for an assignment. I remember that he drew a picture of the protagonist of the story based on how I had described him--it was an object lesson. His drawing was nothing like what I had pictured in my head. I was distraught. He told me that I needed to think about what the reader would see when they read my words, because they wouldn't be able to see what I saw in my head. I sucked as a writer forever, but I never stopped writing because I wanted to tell stories. I think everyone has a few hundred pages worth of completely awful words in them. If you take the time to write them out, you won't regret it.
i agree with what has been said above. I felt the exact same way when finishing a draft this winter and reading it through-it sucked! But then somebody told me we all have a right to be bad and that is no reason for stop writing altogether. if you do, you sure will never be good at it. even if you would be bad right now (which is NOT something you should take for granted just because your teacher said so) there is nothing that says you cannot write just out of pure love for the writing, for your own pleasue. Lots of people have hobbies even though they know they will never make a living as professionals out of it. But dont give up, with a lot of practise you will get better and better. It is something you learn with practise, no one is born with the ability to write bestsellers without any practise.
I don't see the point in writing if you don't enjoy it. Writing can be like a chore sometimes, and I'd much rather play video games or surf the internet. Even now, I should be writing, because I force myself to write 5000 words a day and I have only written 1500. Now and then it feels like every sentence on the screen sounds worse than the previous one. But you know what? I still love writing, and can't imagine not doing it, even if it's the last thing I want to do sometimes. You can compare it to having a dog. The walking and the training can drive you insane sometimes, and then the dog snuggles with you on the couch, and you just know you love him no matter what. Maybe all you need is a little break, or maybe you need to force yourself to write, but if you don't enjoy it in the end, just quit. If the dog snuggling with you doesn't make the work worth it, the dog is better off in a new home. The world's not gonna end. You're gonna find other things you enjoy doing.
Writers need to stop feeling, and saying, that the first things they write are crap, and, to stop taking it personally when someone else tells them that. The only way you will enjoy what you write is if YOU love what you write. Don't read it and think it's horrible, read it and think it's wonderful, and then write more wonderful things. Leave out the rest of the world and all the quotes and all the words of others saying firsts are hard. I think writing is the only profession where people are doomed before they even start.
That's pretty much the key right there. Write what you would want to read. You have your job and school to write the things you don't like for. There's no reason not to enjoy yourself. When I'm writing stuff for whatever story I'm working on, I'm generally pretty pleased. It's what I want to be doing, and usually I have fun.
Do you write letters? I only ask because when I was a kid I had notebooks FULL of letters. To everyone. My parents, friends, grandparents, my dog, sister, the neighbor down the street. Now I know how positively ridiculous that sounds, but I never gave them to anyone, and I protected the books with my life til I burned them, but they taught me how to write. I told each of those people about my life, about the other people, about everything, the way I thought they would want to hear it. It helped me get my frustrations out, my heartaches, learn to write emotions. Maybe something like that would help?
Yes, just keep writing. You'll never get anywhere if you let those thoughts of anxiety and failure get to you. They'll win in the end if you beat about the bush. Give it a try. I've forced myself to start writing, and I've improved so much. And I like it now too.
My first "novel" was laughable. I wouldn't worry about it....just keep practising if you enjoy writing.
