The Writer's Gym

The reason it's funny is because: fucking look at him. With affection, I would not trust Astarion to organize a trip to a Cheesecake Factory alone.

I don't know if this was a bug or what but in my first run as Dark Urge, I made it to the ending after rejecting Bhaal and helping off Cazador without letting Astarion ascend. We'd had some chats about how power corrupts and destroys. There had been growth. And to my absolute delight, right at the brain, just before I pulled the final toggle to destroy or control it, Astarion leaned in to say "okay fantastic LET'S CONTROL IT AND TAKE OVER THE CULT >:3" and I was entranced. Everything wrong with him. Yeah the last two mad grabs for power we were involved in went tits up but this time we're doing something even more disastrous so it'll definitely work out. Astarion once more actively accidentally lobbying for the worst case scenario for him personally, by mistake, because one of his primary qualities is planning in the "Step 1: drastic decision > Step 2: ??? > Step 3: victory party!!" format.

Man walked into Baldur's Gate to kill a master vampire with the plan of 'find a backdoor to my own house, where I have lived for 200 years, and kill the vampire'. That's not a plan. That's an intent. Great intent and happy to help but all actual planning was conducted by Tav/Dark Urge/other Origin character.

Oh, this is so cool! I don’t get asked about the mechanics of writing very often, and it’s one of my favorite subjects to talk about (at length).

As to your question, I’m going to assume that by pre-writing you mean outlining. Generally speaking, I do not pre-write much at all. However, I tend to think a lot about the story and have a pretty strong idea of the shape of it before I start, with room to be surprised along the way. However, every writer is different. In my case, the motivation to write a story is like a steam engine. If I let the steam out by talking about the story, or psyching myself up about it to the point where I’m so invested that nothing I write will ever match my image of it, it’ll never happen. This can also happen if I write too detailed an outline, too much about what a story will be without actually just writing the story. If you feel stuck, sometimes a good idea is to start from your favorite scene and branch from there, rather than from the “beginning”. Also you should always try to start a story as “late” as possible. We don’t need the whole character biography, we just need the actions that immediately kickstarted the plot (“They stood across from one another, weapons drawn. This is how they got there.” rather than “Once upon a time.”) 

So if you’re like me I’d say your rules are: don’t talk to anyone about the story until you’ve already written the part you want to talk to them about. Do not over-anticipate your story and over-outline it to the point where you’ve let all the steam out. Be excited about it, and write the scenes you’re excited about while you’re excited about them. Everything will start to fall into place the more content you have on the page, and you’ll see the difference immediately between the nebulous dream of a story you had, and the story as it exists in reality. And let me just say, from experience, the story in my head was never as good as the story that actually made it to the page, because it wasn’t real. There was no one else to hear it. Even the crappiest story you’ve ever written is better than the one you never wrote.

*dramatic sigh* After messing around on tumblr for 3 hours I finally managed to get my butt into gear and write a little bit. I guess I could press on and write more than I did but I hit the goal and I’m tired and calling it quits early. 

Feb 3rd/ Day 3

Daily Word Goal: 222

Daily Word Written: 472

Write.

Seriously, I know that sounds simplistic. But it’s the only way.

Here’s the deal. If you want to become a writer (I’m assuming here that you mean “someone who writes as a career”: otherwise feel free to ignore what follows this), there are some things that simply starting to write will begin to reveal to you (and that nothing else can). These include:

What you’re interested in writing about

Whether you have anything interesting to say / worth saying about it

Whether you’re capable of writing well enough to hold your own interest

Whether you’re capable of writing well enough to hold anybody else’s

Whether you’re capable of doing the work of being a writer (which pretty much means either writing every day, or at the very least thinking about writing every day, for the rest of your life on this planet)

Whether (assuming that you discover you are capable) you really want to spend the rest of your life doing this. (Because though you may at some point decide to stop writing and do something else, it’s by no means certain that you’ll be able to stop. Even if you do stop writing, you may never be able to stop thinking about writing. And depending on your personality, this may be either an occasional mild annoyance, or your very own personal hell.)

It’s worth pausing here to say that wanting to be a career writer is not necessarily a wholly positive thing. It can be considered, as I’ve said elsewhere, as rather like a career in sewer maintenance. It’s difficult work, often unpleasant, usually lonely, often ineffective no matter how hard you work at it, frequently disruptive to family life, usually poorly paid for many years, hard to explain rationally to other human beings whether you’re enjoying it or not, almost always misunderstood by them, and even at the best of times, equivocal as to results. In these ways, writing as a career is missing almost all of the things most people seem to look for in their work.

But you won’t get to grips with any of this until you start writing and find out what it does to / for you. And additionally, until you find out:

Whether it’s enough fun to keep on doing it

Because at the (figurative) end of the day, it’s your enjoyment of and pleasure in what you create that will spur other people’s enjoyment of it. Suffering for your art is no particular virtue.* Yes, there’ll be hard work, lots of it, and some suffering — that’s kind of unavoidable in the long term — but at the (literal) end of the day, you should usually be able to walk away from the writing pad or the computer feeling good, feeling that you had fun, that it was worthwhile. The most misunderstood truth about writing, the one that career writers are always looking for the right way to phrase so that it doesn’t sound arrogant or exclusionary, is this: I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me.

I live in here: I have to live with this creation. You can always put the book down, walk away and forget about it. I don’t have that luxury. So I write to make me happy. If what I write makes you happy too, happy enough to keep buying my books, that’s gravy. But if I’m not enjoying what I do at least some of the time — enough to drown out the difficulties and annoyances at least in retrospect — there’s no point. If I didn’t enjoy the work, the odds are that you won’t either… and when it’s all over, neither of us will have anything worthwhile. Therefore I will tend to my own creative enjoyment first, and trust it to take care of yours.

…Anyway, if you just start writing, that’s half the battle. Sooner or later you’ll start working out where your heart lies, what kind of writing works best for you, what bits of your writing work best for other people (the latter two not always congruent, so beware…), and so forth. Sooner or later you’ll start developing a voice that’s identifiably yours and not a welded-together chorus of your favorites (and this takes a while: a lot of good writing, in the early stages anyway, is based on imitation of the writers you love).

That’s the point where you start thinking about how to propagate, foster and market what you’ve got: by submission to publishers, by self-publishing, by hunting down an agent, whatever. There’s a ton of advice on that out there in the online world: seek it out.

Meanwhile: why are you still reading this? Go write.

✐ Daily Weird Prompt ✐

Before The Fall

Write about a character who once lived in an utopia, just before it fell into chaos. The catch? This character survived the destruction, and has now found a home in an unlikely place. Double catch? One day, one of their new friends asks to hear the full story of this ‘perfect city.’

Any work you create based off this prompt belongs to you, no sourcing is necessary though it would be really appreciated! And don’t forget to tag maxkirin (or tweet @MistreKirin), so that I can check-out your stories!