A lot of people who have had ideas in their head have thought about getting those ideas written down on something. The idea of having your story as a full novel, book, or anything else close to that is almost as inviting as the idea of playing a game of poker at an online casino South Africa. Otherwise known as an incredibly good idea.
Writing can be an incredibly rewarding and fun hobby to pursue. It helps your mind think, it can improve your grammar, vocabulary and your general way of speaking. You’ll learn extremely obscure facts sometimes when you want to make sure that your depiction of Venusian lemurs is accurate both in their social life and physical appearance.
You’ll get to express your emotions and feelings into the pages and create a story that’s entirely your own, a world that’s yours to control.
Writing and ideas come easier to some than to others. Some people can sit down and write thousands of words per day and never notice the time passing. Other people struggle to get only a few hundred words written down.
You can’t call either of these writers really better than the other if they both produce masterpieces. One of them just did it faster. It’s not some sort of competition, you’re doing something you enjoy, why should you care how well you do it?
Writing is a way of expressing yourself and your thoughts, it doesn’t need to be some beautiful masterpiece. Especially not when you first start. Writing can be a struggle sometimes. It can be hard and sometimes it feels like you should just stop and scrap the entire idea.
But if everyone did that nothing would ever get done. So instead of scrapping every idea that comes into your head and giving on a fun and rewarding hobby what if instead you looked at some of these tips and advice I have for you and reevaluated your giving up?
Don’t Write For Fame and Fortune
You shouldn’t get into writing just to make money. It won’t work out that way.
There are so many people in the world who want to write, there simply aren’t enough people buying books for you to plan around the idea of living off anything you write. It’s a hard pill to swallow for some but it’s a true thing that you simply need to accept.
If you start working only towards the idea of getting your book published and it being some sort of bestselling success more likely than not the only thing you’re working towards is a disappointment.
You should write because you want to write, not because you think that writing is going to make you lots of money or make you famous or anything in between those.
The first and only person you should be trying to impress with your writing when you start is yourself.
You should write what you would want to read, not what you think can make money. You don’t need to start with some grand massive series with a dozen planned books and practically a small army of main characters.
You can start small, write short stories. They don’t need to be good, they just need to be words written down somewhere.
It doesn’t need to be some grand interesting plot with lots of twists, you can start with stories that are dull and learn how to make them better as you go. Practice is the best path to perfection.
None of the great writers out there ever sat down and wrote their masterpiece the first time they tried. It takes time, work, and a lot of patience. But you can do it too if you try hard enough.
You Don’t Need to Write it all at Once
I don’t mean literally write it all at once, no one can write an entire book in one sitting, I mean you don’t have to write a final draft in one go.
That is the point of a draft, to let you draft out ideas before you have to fully write them down. You shouldn’t even start with your rough draft.
What you should always start with is an outline for your story. An outline is just the absolute bare minimum. Get the idea of what this story is from your head onto something in the simplest form.
It doesn’t need many describing words, what you need is the idea and the theme of it down.
It can be stuff like this character and this character enter this scene they discuss this, they discover that they learn this, etc, etc. It can be filled with things like (???) or vague thoughts you’ve had about something related to it.
It’s like a guide for what scenes you should write out when you do start your first draft. You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint, why should writing be any different? Setting up a proper outline can be a literal lifesaver when it comes to working and staying motivated while writing.
You have a structure and plan to follow, you are just filling out the details. Dealing with writers’ block in a situation like that is a much better environment. Because you can remember that you’re just writing the first draft.
Even if you don’t know how to describe the scene you have to write now you can always come back and redo it. Heck, you don’t even need to start with writing the story in order, although I don’t know how much I can recommend that idea.
For many great authors out there the first real draft they wrote was absolutely nothing like the final story they published. There is no reason why your story needs to be any different.
All you have to do is write and if it’s not good you can always come back and fix it later. If you focus so much on getting the right words down on the page you might end up getting no words down on the page.
Writers Block is Okay, You Didn’t Do Anything Wrong
Sometimes you just can’t write. Or you can’t for the life of you think of anything to write. That’s okay, it happens to literally every author out there.
You aren’t some sort of worse author because you weren’t able to meet whatever word count you are normally able to meet every day today. Sometimes that just happens. Our brains are weird and kind of rude sometimes. Don’t hold that against yourself.
Not having good ideas to write down is a perfectly normal thing to happen. We can’t always come up with grand adventures and amazing characters and intrigue and twists on the fly.
Sometimes we start writing something and realize we are just copying some other thing that we saw or listened to or read sometimes and it’s nothing like our own idea. That’s alright too, obviously, you shouldn’t outright plagiarize things but if that’s just what you write down it doesn’t mean you can’t have some more original thoughts later.
You might not want to finish what you started because it’s barely your own idea and that’s alright, start fresh, sometimes you’ll come up with something better. Or maybe you just won’t care and you’ll accept it and you just write some fan fiction.
It might not be the greatest literature you can write on the planet, no one is getting famous (or probably wants to be) from their fan fiction but sometimes if you just want to write using someone else’s world and characters so that you don’t have to work on making your own, it can be a way out.
The act of writing itself might be more important to you than whatever the final product turns out to be and you should be okay with that. Writing should be a hobby for you and it should be fun, you shouldn’t be bogged down and pained with trying to make some amazing final product for other people.
The only person that needs to be happy with it is you.