I have stories in my head ( broad strokes). I can vividly imagine narrative moments in media res that I would love to do justice to by filling out the before and after. I create personalities in my head that I talk to and could transcribe. I know what themes and motifs I would like to touch… but every time I sit down to actually try and drag these imaginings into reality my mind goes blank. I sit, I struggle, I am at a crossroad amidst a blank void.
How do I learn how to give structure to this impulse to create fiction? Where do I learn how to create a program or methodology that allows me to take these abstract yearnings and give them a concrete form?
Any and all advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you for listening.
The blank page is the fucking worst. Make the blank page go away.
I’m no writer but I’ve done hobby gamedev, and I can echo everyone else who says you just gotta shit out something. Anything. It’ll be terrible, and your brain will latch on to it and insist you do this and that to make it better.
Play a text-based roleplay game like SS13 (Goon RP is good and still very active despite being like 20 years old at this point…which…shit i really have been playing SS13 on-and-off for like 15 years at this point GODDAMN) or join one of those RP forums where people create threads for ‘scenarios’ or whatnot and other forum members can enter the roleplay by leaving a post/reply/etc. I say this because, as a teen who at one point was enamored with becoming a fiction-writer for quite some time, that’s what I loved to do and how I think I managed to get decent enough at just sitting down & committing an idea to paper.
Still get similar impulses to create fiction and will usually just scratch the itch through a few rounds of SS13 since I have no desire to really write a novel - but you did just remind me that over New Years I found an old notepad from like 2014-2016 that had three pages of a story sketched out with a really shitty map, but I think that was more just me being like:
:so-true: “i love worldbuilding i should get really high and do that tonight” lmao
Throwing together a rough summary out of bullet points can help break through that initial mind-blanking. I used to do that, just make an outline of a story with bullet points, save it as its own file, then copy it into a new file and start elaborating on each point, deleting the old bullet point once there’s actual text to replace it. That way you have the original summary to work with even as you clean up the actual rough draft.
Eventually it stopped being necessary or helpful, but it served as a decent method for learning away the mind-blanking effect of sitting down to a blank page.
To add to this: pre-writing in general can help you organize your thoughts and get you asking questions about how things fit together, which can lead to new ideas or help you plug plot holes. Word maps, simple who-what-when-where-why summaries to hone your focus, simple sketches to help you figure out how a location is laid out so you know this character is coming this way and this one goes that way for your chase/cat-and-mouse thriller scene, or just figuring out what the scenery looks like so you know what sorts of details to add.
Don’t feel self-conscious about the things you do to help you flesh out your story. If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.
