The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Trying to do more fiction writing (given the sheer number of story ideas I have piling up), but I keep getting discouraged. Why bother putting in the effort, I keep thinking, when the result is guaranteed to suck and nobody's going to want to read any of it? Because "write what you know," and I don't really know anything, because I've not had much of a life (being a useless subhuman parasite any sane society would have put down over a decade ago). Because "three-dimensional characters" are key, and I'm too autistic to get into another person's head well enough to write believable human beings. And the amount of research each story demands, in order to get all the details exactly right, just keeps growing and growing, even as the advice all says to spend less time researching and more time writing (so I'm doing that wrong, too).
Without going into too much detail, I think I have, to some degree, similar problems to yours*. And I write. Sometimes I get good reviews from people online, sometimes not. Whether the reviews are good or bad, I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy having done it once I've finished. I would even go so far as to say that it's "therapeutic".
I don't think I'm good with character either. I'd like to be someday. But Lovecraft seemingly couldn't write dialogue, and most people would say dialogue is important. And yet Lovecraft did rather well for himself (posthumously). He wrote stories where the lack of dialogue wasn't important. If you have glaring weaknesses as a writer that you're struggling to overcome, or just don't feel like overcoming, just play to your strengths. I think a lot of successful writers have weaknesses, to some extent.
Also: if you want people to read what you write, try short stories. You would be maximizing for number of readers and not number of times a page of what you wrote has been read by someone.
*Except I don't research too much. Or if I do I'm not burdened by it.
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I think you’re kinda overthinking it. Most of the advice (beyond the absolute basics) is written for people who want to be professional writers. I do believe in structure and planning, but if you’re just doing it for fun, a lot of the the advice is completely over the top where you need every detail exactly right and to have a twenty page description of your world building and the 15-point beat sheet and know what your characters eat for dinner every night is overkill. Even more so if what you’re writing is short fiction.
If you’re not going pro, I think that getting a blog and putting your stories on there is probably saner. Get a substack or a live journal or even a tumblr blog. Publish short stories there and see what happens. You can break that up with meta posts about your writing, thoughts about various topics, pictures or whatever you want. And because it’s just a blog, you’re not under the same pressure that everyone trying to become a serious author (a field that’s overcrowded even before you get to people who publish and can’t write in standard English let alone plot a story), and you can do whatever you actually want to do. Unless you’re really looking for a career, and willing to put full time into writing and promoting your writing, trying to publish or self publish isn’t going to work. Just have fun for now, and don’t worry so much about publishing unless you’re seeing a big following.
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If you want an audience regardless of the quality of your writing, write fanfiction. You'll get a few readers who desperately want more fandom content as long as your writing isn't totally unreadable
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Arthur C. Clarke was too autistic to write good three-dimensional characters. You know what he did? Got a co-author.
Fantastic ideas require fantastic execution, but most comic books have separate writers and artists. Many of them have separate pencillers, inkers, and colorists.
I myself can write a good scene with decent characterization, but I can count on one hand the number of completed stories I’ve written.
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Writing advice is meant to be absorbed and then ignored. You have to do your due dilligence and take it all in, and of course you need to get the fundamentals down (don't skip the fundamentals), but you should know how to ignore advice.
Some writers will tell you two different things if asked the same question at different times. The value of the corpus of words words words which constitutes writing advice is simply that it exists in all its sprawling horror. It is there to be consulted when you're lost. It won't teach you everything you need to know right now. It's an immanent tool, not a fixed pattern. It is the I Ching with mildly better results.
That said, some writing advice.
Do you have a coherent message? Can you put it in words, in a paragraph or two?
Signal-to-noise ratio is the single most important thing after message. You can equally damage the communication by mulling over things too much which the reader won't care about, even if it is of high technical quality. On the other hand, some things work simply because high techical quality was the point. What's important is if the message is transmitted.
You only need so much of each aspect as to get the message across effectively, and too much takes the focus away from the message. Your readers aren't stupid. Give them what you value in a form which they can accept, and they'll fill in the gaps themselves, sometimes by doing their own research.
There really is no substitute for words outputted as far as getting off the ground goes, assuming that you haven't written lots and lots of words already. If you struggle to rack up words with a project which seems important to you, find a really dumb one which you won't take seriously (you don't have to hate it), anything that you can actually just write (you don't have to publish). You can't reflect on your writing if you have no writing to reflect on, however bad, and the mind seems to do this automatically.
Everyone is telling you to do this because we've all been there. At some point, it clicks, and it seems to do so simply by the amount of words. When you're there, at least you'll have a more realistic idea of where you stand and what your prospects are. The way you sound, I wouldn't trust your opinion of yourself.
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At a certain point, you need to stop giving a fuck about it and write.
Unlike you, I retain modest confidence that I'm a good writer, and so far, I haven't been disabused of that notion. Whether your critique of yourself is warranted, I can hardly say without reading what you've written.
I made it a point to unashamedly write something that is niche. To a fault even, it was explicitly designed to be the kind of fiction that I wish I could read, and that came first, and eventually, I noticed that people enjoyed it. Hardly a chart topper, but it turns out there's a non-zero market for people who read incredibly nerdy hard scifi set in the wake of an abortive singularity, and in turn, I pull no punches, I think about shit before putting it in, and I make it a point that if readers notice some inconsistency in the world building or unseen implications, I either address it later, or show that I've thought things through.
I used to struggle writing characters. And that got better with practice. Don't feel ashamed to steal archetypes or relabel tropes, if that's what you need to do to get started. Writing is an ancient tradition by now, and you're fooling yourself if you think that complete originality is feasible or even necessarily desirable.
Just write. Accept feedback if it's in coherent English. Ask an LLM if you want. Or don't. But unless you actually put things out there, you'll never know if you were cooking or experiencing fevered dreams from a leaky gas line.
And how do I do that? After all, that's part of what I was asking to begin with.
Except even that doesn't work for me. Because how do you figure out how Stock Archetype X behaves in Situation Y? That's no less mysterious than figuring out how Character X behaves in Situation Y. How do I calculate out the utterly unpredictable behavior of any mind that isn't my own?
The last time I got feedback — from a SF/F writers group, it was that everybody in the group hated everything about the story, that I should throw it out completely, and start over, ideally with a ripoff of "Game of Thrones." (Then they went back to discussing the paranormal romance novels they were writing, and trying to figure out how to keep the love scenes sexy and the love interest hot and dominating while also following norms of affirmative consent.)
Just write already. Put it out there. If you're too worried about your reputation, there's a reason they're called pen names.
It's not that hard. After all, you're not doing an interpretive dance right now.
Unless you're planning to give up your day job (well, in the metaphorical sense) and take up writing full time, you have nothing to lose barring some self esteem if the peanut gallery isn't initially appreciative. If you never try, you'll never know.
Well, there's always self-insert isekai fiction. Not the most glamorous work, but there's a market.
Don't tell me you don't have any theory of mind. That's not true even of the autistic, or at least the kind capable of talking to people over the internet. Worst case, ask an LLM. Don't worry, nobody will know unless you literally regurgitate its wording. Ask it for help, like what a character with X and Y traits will do in Z situation. Adapt accordingly. Or just ask a very patient human I guess. Why don't more people realize we have, for free, alien intelligences with the ability to think? Pay for Claude Opus if you want the best when it comes to fiction, including advice on narratives.
My condolences, but as long as there's no money involved you shouldn't give a fuck what they say. I bet IRL groups are probably the worst in this regard.
I posted my work in a niche subreddit, /r/rational, because:
A) If I'm browsing it, that means I know what I like.
B) I expect sensible feedback. And to the extent that nobody who doesn't like what I do will be there, it'll be feedback I can use.
But again. Write. Post. Rewrite. Repost. Change names and try again if you're ashamed of the reception. If this doesn't seem to work, well, it's entirely possible you're just not cut out for it, and that's not meant as a personal attack. But you need to put something out there before more than a dozen randos can judge you.
MBTI types are somewhat useful for this even if the theory is bunk. The descriptions are detailed enough that you can predict what people who share those traits will do in a given situation. It gives strengths and weaknesses for every type, which you can use to predict that your ESFP character might well do something stupid before he completely thinks it through, while your INTP will spend several hours studying a theory and not take any action.
The theory's not bunk, it's just obsolete. Even the upgrade from binary scores to continuum scores just isn't enough to catch up to something like OCEAN that generates bases for continuum scores via PCA rather than Jung+guessin.
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writing advice is useless, so do not worry about things like character development and the like. no one who writes a great story originally set out to check those boxes of what constitutes good writing, and following such advice will not make a story any good.
In other words, don't worry if it's worth reading? But if it's not worth reading, wasn't it a waste of time to have written it?
I'm a professional artist, and as a hobby I occasionally teach art classes for kids.
The biggest obstacle to learning art is, to put it bluntly, a lack of willingness to draw and paint badly. The only way to get to the good art is to get through all the bad art first, to practice and polish your skills and senses until you actually get good at it.
I've done a bit of writing as well, and I think it works the same way. First drafts are never good, unless you're a once-in-a-century prodigy or insanely lucky. What stops you from getting a good finished product is fear of making bad product, because you have to make the bad version before you can sift through and refine out the good version. What you put on paper is never as good as what you see in your head, at least at first, but what's in your head is worthless. Only what actually ships has value.
Assuming you get better. But if you never actually improve from all the practice…?
As my childhood karate instructor liked to say "practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect." If you keep doing the kata wrong, all you do is ingrain bad habits.
I know my first draft will be terrible, but when the fifth draft is just as terrible, as is the sixth, the seventh…
Some bridges you just have to cross when you get to them. Planning out your whole life, or even a medium to long-term project, will make you paralyzed.
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I've found that it helps to write either very early in the morning or late at night, when you're not so hung up with logical worries like that. Also, if you put it online in the right places, usually someone will read it, even if it's weird crazy people who give you crazy negative feedback.
I don't know what you mean here — I've not noticed any such pattern.
Such as?
But if everyone who reads it hates it, then what good was writing it? Would my time have not been better spent doing something else?
My feeling is that those are all the sort of analytical, logical questions that get in the way of fiction writing, which is why I recommend doing it early or late. Or at least, when you're feeling more free and creative. But I don't know man, do whatever works for you.
Again, why would time of day affect "the sort of analytical, logical questions that get in the way" or how "free and creative" I'm feeling?
You dont notice your mood and thinking change over the course of the day? Youre able to switch instantly from something like writing code to writing fiction? If you can, great, its just not easy for most people.
Not really. At least, not with regards to this sort of worrying — what other people tend to call "catastrophizing" and I call 'the identification of how things can fail as a necessary precondition to take the necessary measures to prevent such bad outcomes' and 'not going blithely through life with a naïve optimism that everything will just somehow work out for the best for me with no real effort on my part.'
No, because, despite ~30 years of effort, I still can't really code.
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