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:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
No email address required.
Notes -
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).
I think you’re kinda overthinking it. Most of the advice (beyond the absolute basics) is written for people who want to be professional writers. I do believe in structure and planning, but if you’re just doing it for fun, a lot of the the advice is completely over the top where you need every detail exactly right and to have a twenty page description of your world building and the 15-point beat sheet and know what your characters eat for dinner every night is overkill. Even more so if what you’re writing is short fiction.
If you’re not going pro, I think that getting a blog and putting your stories on there is probably saner. Get a substack or a live journal or even a tumblr blog. Publish short stories there and see what happens. You can break that up with meta posts about your writing, thoughts about various topics, pictures or whatever you want. And because it’s just a blog, you’re not under the same pressure that everyone trying to become a serious author (a field that’s overcrowded even before you get to people who publish and can’t write in standard English let alone plot a story), and you can do whatever you actually want to do. Unless you’re really looking for a career, and willing to put full time into writing and promoting your writing, trying to publish or self publish isn’t going to work. Just have fun for now, and don’t worry so much about publishing unless you’re seeing a big following.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link