Becoming the writer you want to be:

>First I wrote when I felt like it. Now I write 4 to 5 hours daily.
My hat is off to you sir, I sometimes get what I can only describe as creative flares that feel like I'm getting a million thoughts at once but I get burned out after about an hour or two.

>I'd effortpost on your challenge thread.

Thanks bruh, I'll work on making an interesting OP so people can remake the thread when it dies.
Maybe make a Hall of Fame as well for the very best of them (I wouldn't even mind buying a domain for this since I do webdev on the side anyway).

>Exactly. I've actually been able to read pages in my dream, wake up, and try to record it.
A lot of my creativity has been devoted to instilling better creative habits. Recording my dreams has been a consistent in my life for at least 7 years; plenty of material to sift through.

I've only been doing it for about a month or so but I've gotten 2-3 stories out of it that felt interesting and that I've used as the basis for a story outline.

A good technique that may also yield money and/or contacts is improvising for strangers (poetry is the obvious choice here, but very short stories or aphorisms work too). Just go up to strangers in bars or whatever and ask them if they would be interested in a composition on the subject of their choice. Alternatively, set up shop in the street with a sign saying something along the lines of "poet for hire", "poems on the spot", or "a poem while you wait". You will inevitably get unwanted attention, and unappreciative people, but the time constraint combined with direct interaction is usually sufficient to push you to surpass yourself.

It's also great for reducing social anxiety, met a lot of very cool people that way.

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>Maybe make a Hall of Fame as well
That's a good idea; I bet it'd even inspire a lot of the writers on the board to participate in more threads like that having some sort of posterity behind it besides getting lost in the archives.
>I've only been doing it for about a month
Fuck you for doing what I've been doing much better than I have.
Keep it up.

That's actually not a bad idea (although, Chad might beat my ass for such displays) and something I think I'd be good at. Plus, THINK OF ALL THE BITCHES!!!

Demosthenes had a bunker built under his home where he practiced his speeches. He also cut of half of his hair, so that he could not leave the house without becoming the laughingstock of the people. Now THAT is water.

>That's a good idea; I bet it'd even inspire a lot of the writers on the board to participate in more threads like that having some sort of posterity behind it besides getting lost in the archives.

Exactly, even on bottom of the barrel budget hosting, it's just text files so they wont take up a lot of space and I could possibly host thousands of them.

>Fuck you for doing what I've been doing much better than I have.
>Keep it up.
I blame my cat honestly, every time I have to get up at about 4 in the morning to let him out I have the most wild and vivid dreams.
If I ever make a full length novel or the big book of short stories that I want to make, my cat gets named as a co-author.

Read 50-100 pages of good literature every day. Reread the best books of the lot and study their devices, structure, and style. Try to read widely but also deeply, i.e. if you find an author you admire, read more than just their greatest work, consider reading chronologically from the beginning and seeing how they improved and honed their craft through time. Write every day and set a minimum daily word count for yourself, between 500-1000 words is good. Don’t write only when you feel inspired, consider your days of working in an uninspired state of mind as a sort of sharpening and practicing of your skills, so that when the moment comes you are well prepared and ready to milk that inspirational state of mind for everything it can give you. Redraft and revise your work often, refining it until you can’t think of a single thing that needs improvement. Find people who are great writers or readers to read your work and give you constructive feedback. Also, although reading a lot will give you a subconscious idea of the correct grammar and structuring of texts, it is even better to study composition and grammar to attain an explicit knowledge of the rules and guidelines of written language. If you know the boundaries well, you can more easily work at the outer limits of grammatically correct possibilities, stretching the written word to the greatest extent of its possibility. Study the lives of great writers for inspiration and to find your kindred spirits, read biographies and literary criticism of the best texts. They will illuminate for you the processes of writing good literature.

>my cat gets named as a co-author.
Considering how bizarre some of my own dreams are, I find it funny dedicating a book like that to your cat; especially if some of the dreams are of darker content.

I really like your idea for the challenge threads. I support that.

Thank you so much. This is really helpful, user. It also reaffirms that I'm doing a lot better than I thought I was; room for improvements, of course. This is the writing advice/affirmation I've been needing.

I'm thinking of dressing up as a hobo, growing some facial hair and making a cardboard sign that says "Will write poems for money- a quarter for each line."

I like imagining you doing this, then at the end of the day, you just get in your Honda civic and drive home. (idk why I chose that car)

srs question:
what if the kind of writer I want to be is not necesarily a good one?
to clarify: I want to write a fantasy series, and I want it to be fast-paced and bizarre like a sci-fi novel, but I also want it to be funny and satirical and hence contain a lot of modern vernacular and circumstances. whenever I post samples anywhere, no one gets what I want and they laugh at me and tell me I'm shit. on some level I want to improve and make the thing as good as it can be, but I also know no one will agree with my vision or want to hear it until they read a smple they consider quality

should I even care? should I write my book even if it's unreadable shit? or should I trust others and change my vision?

I think you should stick to whatever thoughts you have and not let others choose what they think is best for you, only you can do that

Try putting your texts aside for a decent amount of time, switch to writing something else entirely to take your mind off of what you put aside. Then after, say, a couple months take these texts and read them with a clear head: You'll see what is in the text, not what you thought is in the text or what you hoped would be there. Maybe then you will understand some of the criticism you received, but if not, try showing your texts to friends and ask for an honest opinion.

And you know, sometimes changing a little is enough for the whole text to bloom. You have my blessing, user.

Not sure I'm quite there but I'm mostly content with where I'm now so...

>Through diligent routine and practice, or maybe striking while the inspiration is hot?
Both. I can't stand routines for long and only write when I can't stop myself from it ... which happens quite often and leads to a twelve hours a day, seven days a week routine for half a year or so, then I have to take a break for a month, which then pulls me out of the flow for twice as long at best and like four months at worst. Though obviously I have writing relating thoughts and write down notes during the breaks too.

Thing is, I couldn't do it another way. Writing every day because I have some word-count goal or doing some sort of challenge/exercise would feel like labour and I'm not fucking with that. If I'm not enjoying something, why doing it? (Enjoyment being used loosely here, since shit like sitting on a single sentence for a day is a pain but fun at the same time)

>has shitposting on Yea Forums aided you in your craft?
Feedback and different perspectives are a plus, and shockingly I even got some good recommendations for reading too, although based on the time spent vs insights gained, it probably was a net loss; especially lately when the board got overrun by /pol/ kiddies.

Based and red pilled.

Knowing yourself (relatively speaking) and what you want to say is the sort of shit that's obvious on every page and the key difference between someone who writes and a writer.

Obviously you should care. Why the hell would you even consider doing what you want when you can do what others tell you to do? Extra points if "others" are random fags on a Mongolian Yak exchange forum.

Well, I’m no authority, but I’ve found that learning to take my time in things, while remaining active throughout the day, is helpful. A calm mind can get more done than one that is stressed.

Actually, here’s a big component: withholding judgement of others. It’s a good way to stop being self-centered.

>withholding judgement of others.
And if you can't stop that, going further and adding context or that you lack context helps too. That rude asshole who bumped into you? He might be too stressed over financing his dad's funeral while dealing with debt to react any better than he did.

I think Joseph Heller called it having a good bullshit detector, and he said it was most important to use it on yourself.

For an example, Thomas Mann is a good archetype of restraint and objectivity, though probably not a perfect one. I think what separates him from others was his awareness of the fundamentals of the psyche, most importantly of sexuality and how it affects an individual’s notion of time and magnitude. Mann has an ability to make these concepts self evident through his writings, and, though these concepts may seem abstract, they are actually a simple matter borne through self observation.

What enabled Mann to interpret himself was self-mastery.

There are others, too, all of which reach similar conclusions about the minds relationship with matter, and the limitations therein. The more one overcomes these limitations, the more one knows how the mind-body phenomena works.

OP, here. Great thread; I saved a lot of these posts to reflect on. Thanks for the knowledge, gents.

bump to save the one good thread on Yea Forums

Start using a schedule. Force yourself to write at certain times: 15 minutes of writing, small break, 15 minutes of writing, long break. If you have no story to tell, talk (write) to yourself about possible ideas, your goals, what goes on in your mind etc. Once I kept to my schedule, I realized that all the pondering and theorizing I did has been - to be honest - a giant waste of time. I kind of knew this all along, though I kept procrastinating for 10 years, accomplishing nothing.

let's assemble and open up a store with customized poems for every occasion, drive-thru, and home delivery like McDonald's

This already exists, it's called a book store.

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you can order a customized poem with your name in it in your local bookstore?? gee, it's time my local book shop steps up his game.

I'd argue that a poem in the truest sense (that is to say: the expression of the poet's inner workings through words, or some crap like that) is closer to your self and thus more customized than a poem that is made on the spot for a buyer who wants to see reflected in the poem some superficial details of the moment he bought the poem at McPoems like what colour his hair was or what car he drives fuck. So yes, what you buy in the book store is more personal and customized than what you buy at McPoems, because the one has in it the human spirit, the other somer consumerist crap, the one fits your soul like a sock and the other is, well, a sock.

>McPoem
sold

>Through diligent routine and practice, or maybe striking while the inspiration is hot?
Diligent routine and practice. Amateurs write only when they feel inspired. You should treat your writing like your job. Just as your boss expects you to show up on Monday morning whether you feel inspired or not, you need to show up to your writing every morning whether you feel inspired or not
>Also, has shitposting on Yea Forums aided you in your craft?
Absolutely not. It's a colossal waste of time and everyone here knows it.
>I see a lot of great writers on this board
Yes and the saddest part is that this place will slowly suck away all the time they could be spent honing their skills and creating long-form works. Be careful with this place. Be careful with all of your online habits.

I wrote for many years. Mostly YA adventure stuff that was just copying anime I was watching. About 10 shitty first draft novels later, I started shitposting on Yea Forums and reading Yea Forums classics and I stopped writing as much and over about two years, I only wrote five hipster artsy novellas and realized everything I had done was pretty bad.

Then stuff happened in my life and I stopped coming on this site for the first time in years and I saw the cynical mindset I'd been viewing the world through and decided to change it. I wasn't writing much, namely one novel about an edgy serial killer that I try to forget because it's so cringe-worthy, probably more-so than my anime YA stories.

Now, things are better and I only visit Yea Forums one day a week and I try to make every post positive. Yea Forums helped me learn about many authors that I never would have known existed, and it taught me that there are things to aim for with writing.
that being said, I'm back to writing anime YA stories, but I'm also published and take pride in my prose and plot being above your average YA

Can you live off your novels?

No, most authors can't. But in another few years I could probably work part-time instead of full-time, depending on the success of future novels. I'd rather have more money than less money, though, so I don't intend to.

I began young around 15. I did it every day for as long as I could push myself mostly by writing throwaway stuff, total trash, but the point was to practice. I started reading heavily by the time I was 17 and that enhanced the whole process.

If you start early it will shape your brain. The only shot you have at becoming a "genius" is if you started early.

I have trouble outlining my novel. Can you guys recommend any books or give advice?

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What kind of anime YA novels did you write ?
Was it shonen type anime stories ?
People love those a lot these days so I can see them getting really popular even if they're really cheesy.
Never give up

Outlining is one of the more fun aspects of writing a novel.
Who are the characters ?
The places they visit ?
What are their relations to eachother ?
Maybe you can write out what you can see in your mind as to how each scene will develop, this doesn't have to be very detailed but can be just a general description of what happens in each scene.
How about describing all the of the mcguffins that are used in the story (things that move the plot forward), since you need to know what they do before you can use them in the story.

>What kind of anime YA novels
Sorta shonen. They all dealt with something supernatural, whether it was parallel worlds or ghostly occurrences, but the tone was always YA. Some were basically just battle shonen because I loved writing fight scenes.

>Sorta shonen. They all dealt with something supernatural, whether it was parallel worlds or ghostly occurrences, but the tone was always YA. Some were basically just battle shonen because I loved writing fight scenes.
That sound almost exactly like how I write my stories.
I love shonen myself and I still have to find a specific subgenre that does fights as well as the superpowered bullshit that is shonen.
It just touches the right place to keep me interested.

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I've heard there are good web serials that focus on character development and fighting, but I've never found one with quality prose besides mine.
For now, manga is the closest I've found to scratching that itch. Light novels are sadly garbage imo.

Perhaps you could work on the stories and get an artist to draw it ?
Or simply work on drawing the manga yourself, I know Clip Studio is really good for drawing manga (It's literally made for it) and a drawing tablet is like a 40 dollar investment (probably less if you go for a chink brand over a wacom).
Honestly I've seen some really shit art for webcomics that still kept me interested because the story was just that good.
One that I read recently was Radiant (a french manga) that I thought was a lot of fun and actually made me read through the entire story in like a single day.

Surprised this thread is still alive.
>Perhaps you could work on the stories and get an artist to draw it
That'd be a dream. I don't have high hopes, though. Back when I was a NEET I tried drawing for about two years and decided it wasn't for me. Writing comes to me very easily, so I've put all my time towards that.
I had no idea Radiant was based off a french work. I dropped it after the first episode, but now I'm intrigued.

Radiant was fun, it really has that french vibe that makes it just that little bit different from regular anime and manga.