writing
"There's no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you"
-Maya Angelou
Welcome to c/writing!
This is a space for all kinds of discussion referring to writing. This could include the structure and style found in different types of writing, authors worth talking about, different genres, trends, etc.
This is also a space for users who wish to share their own writing for feedback. This could look like independently posting excerpts of poems/prose/plays or it could be replying to one of the writing prompt threads. Brainstorming and worldbuilding ideas are welcome too!
Ideally, this will be a community where we work together to become better writers and appreciators of writing in all its forms.
All that said, please note that Code of Conduct still applies here. Please apply content warnings where applicable and spoiler material that might be inappropriate.
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It's crystalized gradually, over months, really. Just coming up with specific scenarios, characters, themes, as well as other various tidbits, writing them down when they come to me, and constantly thinking "Okay, what's the through-line here?" Over time this builds out a world where, once I feel it is established, I can then constrain myself within to flesh out a coherent, limited set of major ideas and hit the ground running with it.
I guess, personally, my major piece of advice is that you probably will not be able to write everything you want to write within the same story without it losing a sense of coherency as a creative work. You're either lucky or plain if you can manage to encompass the entirety of your ambitions into one linear plot. Start chunking your preferences into groups. Develop an internal set theory for your plot bunnies. Figure out what works well together and what doesn't.
And as always, the most important piece of writing advice is that you actually have to start putting pen to paper/fingers to keys rather than infinitely graphing out your potential story. Your internal universe may be pristine but it matters naught if others can’t indulge in it. It’s like programming, premature optimization is a path to never making anything, the most important thing is that it runs and functions. Tinkering is a purely contextual activity. What use is designing the perfect jet engine if, once you’ve realized the parameters, you find yourself deciding that an elevator is a more appropriate mechanism to arrive at your destination?
This is really great advice and basically what I was struggling with! I had a near comprehensive list of Marxist and liberal themes that I was trying to shoehorn into a pastiche of short stories I've written and it just... wasn't working
<3 hell yeah lol