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Reblogged writing-prompt-s
BREAKING NEWS: Writer discovers for the millionth time that they can write whatever they want. Join us now to see if the lesson will stick.
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Hello Neil,i know you have 120k asks, so you will never see this, but genuinely, how do i start writing? I know it probably sounds silly to you, but I am 15 and already feel behind. I want to be a writer, I have loved reading ever since I read Coraline at 9 and have always wanted to do something creative with my life and to be an author just feels so fitting for me,I just don't know how to do it I guess. I keep trying but it always turns out bad,I don't even know where to beigin and how to pace the story or do anything really.I write short fanfics sometimes and when i go back to read them they are just objectively bad. I know what I do and dont like in stories,I just can't seem to accomplish what I want when I try to write it. And I do have so many ideas, but it never goes anywhere, and I can't put the words on the page. I know improving takes time but I just wish I had some guidance on how to improve(English is my third language so I probably made mistakes, I apologize )
You sound a lot l would have done at the age of 15, had I been articulate enough for anything like that. At the age of 15 or I knew was that I really wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to write and draw comics one day. I had some ideas that would turn out to be good ideas 15 years later or 25 years later but at that time they were just ideas and I didn't know how to make them into stories.
The most important thing you can do is to keep writing. The second most important thing you can do is to live and learn and experience the world and accumulate a store of things that you have to say and things that you need to write about.
@thecommonmold I know I'm not Neil, but I would like to add to this if you would allow me.
I was always creative when I was a child. Always daydreaming, being lost in my mind and the worlds I would create, but I never really knew how to write in a "good" way. I actaully started writing when I was 14, starting out with self-insert fan fictions for my favorite anime. My best friend and I would even collab with these stories, passing notebooks back and forth and learning to work WITH another individual and their ideas and the direction of the stories. For about 3 years, all we did was self-insert fan fictions until we felt comfortable enough to write something original. I would read her stories, she would read mine, or we would collab and build worlds. We developed our writing skills through practice, through observing other writers, through critiques from other friends or online strangers. We thought we were AMAZING writers at the age of 17!
But every time we looked back at the stories from when we were kids, they were really bad! We laughed at how horrible we were at writing, and how we thought we were so great. BUT (and this is very important) we were able to look back at these stories and see where we came from, and how much we have progressed! Look at people who have learned to draw. Maybe someone who makes AMAZING art. Look at where they started, and where they are now. They could have looked back at their old artwork, they could have gotten discouraged, they could have stopped and never picked up a sketch book again. But they didn't. They learned from their mistakes, they looked at their old artwork as Progress instead of garbage.
I know how hard it is to get started with something. I overthink so badly, and I feel like I need to be perfect or it's not worth it. I'm 32 and still suffer with those thoughts. BUT you can't make progress without practice. Here are a couple bit of advice and practices you could use:
- Do NOT write for perfection. You will get so caught up in the details that you will be stuck and you won't end up writing anything at all. Your own mind can be your worst enemy sometimes... Write for the joy of writing, regardless of mistakes! You can always go back and fix it up later!
- Do not get discouraged by your old work. It is going to be bad! And going forward, some of your future works are going to seem bad in a few years. They are PRACTICE! They are PROGRESS! Cherish your bad works and learn from them. They are not garbage, they are learning experiences.
- Don't only write things that are meant to be a part of a bigger story. Write things JUST for practice. To get out of your comfort zone, to give you a different view.
FOR EXAMPLE:
- Take a notebook to a park. Fine a spot where you are comfortable, sit down, and describe what you see. The sights, the sounds. What the birds are doing, what the plants sound like in the wind. What the sun feels like on your skin, what the other people around you are doing. Emerse yourself in your "scene". You can do this anywhere as well. In a mall, on a bus, in a classroom, on a bench in the middle of a city. This helps with building believable descriptions and helps with emersing readers into the scene that you are setting.
- Once you are comfortable with doing this, add a character to the scene! Describe what they feel while walking through the park, the city, the school hallways. Learn how to describe what your characters are feeling and observing.
- Find writing promts online, and write short drabbles revolving around those prompts. Get out of your comfort zone and just write "pointless" stories! There are plenty of books and sites that have writing prompts that you could use. Some are simple things where you are given a list of words that you need to use in your story ("Use Lobsters, green, wind, robot, and dice at some point in your story") and you would have to build a story using those things, or you could use prompts that tell you how a scene opens and you finish the scene.
The most important thing is to keep writing. Not everything needs to have a meaning, not everything needs to be perfect and publishable. You need to practice somehow! I developed ALOT of my writing skills with role playing! You can find role playing sites to join and practice that way as well!
Don't be too hard on yourself. You are still young, you are still learning. You will NEVER stop learning and getting better. You just need to put pen to paper and write SOMETHING even if it's just a jumble of words!
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Great Men Theory - And Why It Sucks
When I already rant on my Sundays about historical misconceptions and how history is taught wrong, I cannot help but also talk about the entire Great Men Theory and how much it has influenced how we teach history to... basically everyone. This entire fucking theory goes back to a dude called Thomas Carlyle, who wrote in one of his books:
Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.
And sadly... This way of talking about history is nice and convinient, no matter how factually wrong it is. Because instead of having to explore historical society and what made people back then "tick", you can can do: "And then this one dude did this. And this other big dude did that." And done.
Before I knew about this theory, I already encountered it. In the way many German kids will encounter it. Nazi Germany. Because while we have this big thing going about "rememberance culture" and what not... Yeah, we mostly talk about Nazi Germany, as if Hitler and some of his dude friends, like Himmler and Göbbels, did stuff and nobody else could've done something about it. And we will talk about the few folks who tried to do something about it. This leaves many under the impression that actually Hitler and his fellow friends were subjucating the German populus, who were unable to do a thing about the Holocaust or the war. And that... Just is not how it played out in reality. Most people in Germany at the time supported Hitler, knew about the Holocaust and were A-Okay with it.
And this is something that happens again and again in the way we talk about history. We talk about the big dudes and whatever they did or didn't do. Either as heroes or as villains. But we leave out all the people who were there to either enforce their policies, suffer from it, or rise up against it.
This creates a version of history, in which 99,99999% of all people were basically just "NPCs" in a game played by the few. Which not only does wrong by this majority of people, who might as well have had a hand in some of the things happening, but it also is used as a constant propaganda tool. Be it to ignore, how many attrocities have been supported and partaken in by a lot of people, so folks today do not need to deal with that fallout. Or be it to ignore the man, who have fought for a better outcome - often to either make protest seem senseless, or to make those few great man seem more heroic. (See also: Basically any anti-colonialist movement that got erased from history.)
I am not even denying that those in power had a bigger influence on history than anyone else. But not because they were born with some traits that made it so, but for the most part, because they were born into power through their bloodline, or at least into riches.
And it does not mean that nobody else had an influence, even if we like to forget the "everyone else" usually.
