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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).
At a certain point, you need to stop giving a fuck about it and write.
Unlike you, I retain modest confidence that I'm a good writer, and so far, I haven't been disabused of that notion. Whether your critique of yourself is warranted, I can hardly say without reading what you've written.
I made it a point to unashamedly write something that is niche. To a fault even, it was explicitly designed to be the kind of fiction that I wish I could read, and that came first, and eventually, I noticed that people enjoyed it. Hardly a chart topper, but it turns out there's a non-zero market for people who read incredibly nerdy hard scifi set in the wake of an abortive singularity, and in turn, I pull no punches, I think about shit before putting it in, and I make it a point that if readers notice some inconsistency in the world building or unseen implications, I either address it later, or show that I've thought things through.
I used to struggle writing characters. And that got better with practice. Don't feel ashamed to steal archetypes or relabel tropes, if that's what you need to do to get started. Writing is an ancient tradition by now, and you're fooling yourself if you think that complete originality is feasible or even necessarily desirable.
Just write. Accept feedback if it's in coherent English. Ask an LLM if you want. Or don't. But unless you actually put things out there, you'll never know if you were cooking or experiencing fevered dreams from a leaky gas line.
And how do I do that? After all, that's part of what I was asking to begin with.
Except even that doesn't work for me. Because how do you figure out how Stock Archetype X behaves in Situation Y? That's no less mysterious than figuring out how Character X behaves in Situation Y. How do I calculate out the utterly unpredictable behavior of any mind that isn't my own?
The last time I got feedback — from a SF/F writers group, it was that everybody in the group hated everything about the story, that I should throw it out completely, and start over, ideally with a ripoff of "Game of Thrones." (Then they went back to discussing the paranormal romance novels they were writing, and trying to figure out how to keep the love scenes sexy and the love interest hot and dominating while also following norms of affirmative consent.)
Just write already. Put it out there. If you're too worried about your reputation, there's a reason they're called pen names.
It's not that hard. After all, you're not doing an interpretive dance right now.
Unless you're planning to give up your day job (well, in the metaphorical sense) and take up writing full time, you have nothing to lose barring some self esteem if the peanut gallery isn't initially appreciative. If you never try, you'll never know.
Well, there's always self-insert isekai fiction. Not the most glamorous work, but there's a market.
Don't tell me you don't have any theory of mind. That's not true even of the autistic, or at least the kind capable of talking to people over the internet. Worst case, ask an LLM. Don't worry, nobody will know unless you literally regurgitate its wording. Ask it for help, like what a character with X and Y traits will do in Z situation. Adapt accordingly. Or just ask a very patient human I guess. Why don't more people realize we have, for free, alien intelligences with the ability to think? Pay for Claude Opus if you want the best when it comes to fiction, including advice on narratives.
My condolences, but as long as there's no money involved you shouldn't give a fuck what they say. I bet IRL groups are probably the worst in this regard.
I posted my work in a niche subreddit, /r/rational, because:
A) If I'm browsing it, that means I know what I like.
B) I expect sensible feedback. And to the extent that nobody who doesn't like what I do will be there, it'll be feedback I can use.
But again. Write. Post. Rewrite. Repost. Change names and try again if you're ashamed of the reception. If this doesn't seem to work, well, it's entirely possible you're just not cut out for it, and that's not meant as a personal attack. But you need to put something out there before more than a dozen randos can judge you.
MBTI types are somewhat useful for this even if the theory is bunk. The descriptions are detailed enough that you can predict what people who share those traits will do in a given situation. It gives strengths and weaknesses for every type, which you can use to predict that your ESFP character might well do something stupid before he completely thinks it through, while your INTP will spend several hours studying a theory and not take any action.
The theory's not bunk, it's just obsolete. Even the upgrade from binary scores to continuum scores just isn't enough to catch up to something like OCEAN that generates bases for continuum scores via PCA rather than Jung+guessin.
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