First time asker. How or where did you learn to write? I’m perpetually stuck and your work feels like what I’d want my work to look and feel like. If you respond, thanks so much!
Fascinating question. I really appreciate the implication that I'm not still learning to write.
The short answer is by reading and watching and overall consuming stories written by other people. The stories that move you are also the stories that inspire you, and inspiration is direction that helps you figure out what you want to pursue. When a story hits you with a moment that cuts right to your core, you might want to figure out why that moment hit you so hard, what parts of it worked, what parts of the rest of the story built up to it, how it's doing that. Possibly even more vitally, when a story is absolutely losing you, chase down what's broken about it and why that might be happening. Once you start seeing how stories are put together, it becomes a lot easier to build your own.
It's not enough just to read. Writing can't be done in a vacuum. You have to read what other people write in order to write your own works, but you have to also go out into the world and experience it in order to build worlds of your own. Writing is an act of creation, but it's also an act of consumption; you the writer are consuming the things that you've learned and experienced and turning them into something new. You can't do that on an empty stomach. Step zero of writing is touching grass.
Writing makes you hungry, and hunger gives you direction. If fantasy inspires you, that might give you the direction of researching folklore and mythology and the other pillars that inspired the great works in the fantasy genre. A love of battle anime might turn into a pursuit of martial arts. Mystery novels might lead you into forensics or psychology or anatomical study. The things you love reading about are connected to other things you'll probably love learning, and once you learn them they'll become foundational substrate in your mind from which your own stories can grow.
Sometimes the harder question isn't how to write, it's how to stop writing. Storytelling is a hard habit to break, arguably impossible. The majority of us do it mostly unconsciously or in times of stress - catastrophizing, fears, anxieties are us telling ourselves scary stories about worst case scenarios. What if the worst possible thing happened, or this nightmare played out; what if I fell here, what if this killed me, what if they hate me, what if they gave me reason to hate them, what if I woke up and a scary guy was there? Our minds concoct stories constantly and compulsively, usually unprompted. Learning to recognize this for what it is is a very useful first step in the pursuit of writing on purpose.
It's easy for these stories to compel us when we spin them, because we're our own captive audience. The hard part of writing is figuring out how to take that story out of our heads and get it into someone else's instead. This is where the craft of writing comes into play, and it's again best learned by reading. How do the stories you experience influence your thoughts and feelings? What methods of phrasing and framing do they use to comfort you, intrigue you, gutpunch you? What matters to the writer to communicate with specificity, and what are they leaving up to you, their audience? Why did the writer choose to do it like that? How would you do it?
Once the story is out of your brain and into a first draft, editing and constructive criticism become possible. Step one was "make it exist", steps two through forever are "make it good." You intend your story to impact in a certain way, but you won't know how well you've succeeded until you see how other people take it. Not all critiques are equally useful, so at this stage it's mostly good to find people whose perspectives you trust and value and listen to them. Once the story exists in its final form, disregard this step and stay out of your story's reviews. Those aren't criticism of your writing process, they're buyer testimonials for readers. They're not useful for you.
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