The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Trying to do more fiction writing (given the sheer number of story ideas I have piling up), but I keep getting discouraged. Why bother putting in the effort, I keep thinking, when the result is guaranteed to suck and nobody's going to want to read any of it? Because "write what you know," and I don't really know anything, because I've not had much of a life (being a useless subhuman parasite any sane society would have put down over a decade ago). Because "three-dimensional characters" are key, and I'm too autistic to get into another person's head well enough to write believable human beings. And the amount of research each story demands, in order to get all the details exactly right, just keeps growing and growing, even as the advice all says to spend less time researching and more time writing (so I'm doing that wrong, too).
writing advice is useless, so do not worry about things like character development and the like. no one who writes a great story originally set out to check those boxes of what constitutes good writing, and following such advice will not make a story any good.
In other words, don't worry if it's worth reading? But if it's not worth reading, wasn't it a waste of time to have written it?
I'm a professional artist, and as a hobby I occasionally teach art classes for kids.
The biggest obstacle to learning art is, to put it bluntly, a lack of willingness to draw and paint badly. The only way to get to the good art is to get through all the bad art first, to practice and polish your skills and senses until you actually get good at it.
I've done a bit of writing as well, and I think it works the same way. First drafts are never good, unless you're a once-in-a-century prodigy or insanely lucky. What stops you from getting a good finished product is fear of making bad product, because you have to make the bad version before you can sift through and refine out the good version. What you put on paper is never as good as what you see in your head, at least at first, but what's in your head is worthless. Only what actually ships has value.
Assuming you get better. But if you never actually improve from all the practice…?
As my childhood karate instructor liked to say "practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect." If you keep doing the kata wrong, all you do is ingrain bad habits.
I know my first draft will be terrible, but when the fifth draft is just as terrible, as is the sixth, the seventh…
Some bridges you just have to cross when you get to them. Planning out your whole life, or even a medium to long-term project, will make you paralyzed.
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