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).
Jump in the discussion.
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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 meant to be absorbed and then ignored. You have to do your due dilligence and take it all in, and of course you need to get the fundamentals down (don't skip the fundamentals), but you should know how to ignore advice.
Some writers will tell you two different things if asked the same question at different times. The value of the corpus of words words words which constitutes writing advice is simply that it exists in all its sprawling horror. It is there to be consulted when you're lost. It won't teach you everything you need to know right now. It's an immanent tool, not a fixed pattern. It is the I Ching with mildly better results.
That said, some writing advice.
Do you have a coherent message? Can you put it in words, in a paragraph or two?
Signal-to-noise ratio is the single most important thing after message. You can equally damage the communication by mulling over things too much which the reader won't care about, even if it is of high technical quality. On the other hand, some things work simply because high techical quality was the point. What's important is if the message is transmitted.
You only need so much of each aspect as to get the message across effectively, and too much takes the focus away from the message. Your readers aren't stupid. Give them what you value in a form which they can accept, and they'll fill in the gaps themselves, sometimes by doing their own research.
There really is no substitute for words outputted as far as getting off the ground goes, assuming that you haven't written lots and lots of words already. If you struggle to rack up words with a project which seems important to you, find a really dumb one which you won't take seriously (you don't have to hate it), anything that you can actually just write (you don't have to publish). You can't reflect on your writing if you have no writing to reflect on, however bad, and the mind seems to do this automatically.
Everyone is telling you to do this because we've all been there. At some point, it clicks, and it seems to do so simply by the amount of words. When you're there, at least you'll have a more realistic idea of where you stand and what your prospects are. The way you sound, I wouldn't trust your opinion of yourself.
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