Starting advice for writing?

[myradin]

I love reading, and would love to try and write a few fanfics based on story ideas that I would enjoy reading…. But I've never written a story before other than exams.

How would you go about starting? Do you set a timeline and write through it, or just write as you go along? Any advice on dialogue? I think the main thing that I wonder about is writing good dialogue, for some reason feels like the hardest part to write in my mind.

Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but I thought I'd ask in the forum I read most on. Appreciate any advice

 

[AntXHuman333]

You'll learn good writing from both consuming and creating media, but experience writing will help much more, from my experience. I'd say that you should start with writing what you want to write. But, there are a two main caveats to this:

1. Start small, don't aim to create the next LoTR or something on your first shot. If your idea's big and you really want to stick to it, then try writing a small part of it. A character's arc, something like that. I wish I'd done that.
2. Make sure that you keep writing what you yourself like. It helps a lot with longevity in writing. Don't just aim for the most views or kudos or likes, even though I'll admit they feel great to get. It's a balancing act, but I'd always keep yourself as a priority.

When I started writing, I just put pen to paper (or hand to keyboard) and wrote my first fanfic out. But it's daunting to just...start, with little idea of what to begin with. I remember writing out something really clunky that started a crossover plot. But even then, I learned a lot from it. It's hard, but write what comes to mind on how your story starts. You don't even have to go at the beginning: write a scene you really want to write, or make an outline of what the general story looks like! It all depends on what you have in mind so far. Remember: even though the best time to start writing always seems like yesterday, the second best is today.

On dialogue, it'll always be clunky at first, like all first things are. There are a lot of tutorials online for this, and it depends on what kind of story you want to write. But my advice would be that it should always have a reason to be there. If someone's said to be crying alone, they don't need to cry out "I'm so sad" for no reason in particular. Make sure you have a goal in mind while writing dialogue, whether it be progressing the plot, building characters or the world, or something else.

 

[Sailor Autochthonia]

For starting, there's no trick to it, or strategy or advice going in that'll help you much at all; you've just gotta bite the bullet and do it.

If you look for advice before you start, you'll never get started, because there's a billion little pieces to writing, and a billion ways to do each of those pieces, and a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions on all billion-billion of those things, when you'll only actually need pointers on the things you screw up, and you'll want those pointers to come from people whose process is similar to yours. And you won't know what you're screwing up or what your process looks like until you've got a few thousand words down.

As for dialogue, well, first see above, second, read it out loud. Read your whole story out loud, exactly as it's written. It'll help you avoid awkward or repetitive word choices and messy grammar.

And also have fun. And also also keep writing when it's NOT fun, because a bunch of it is work like any other kind of work.

 

[Guardian Box]

Just do it.

No matter how hard you try and how much you prepare for your first work, your second one will be better.

 

[Spudr]

Just start writing. Don't spend time planning, don't procrastinate, just write a short story (no more than 10k words). Once you manage to do that, then you might consider writing something more ambitious.

 

[Leviticusrex]

Write. If a thought makes you laugh, write it down. If you think a scene sounds cool, just write it down. Don't worry about starting at any recognizable point, just put pen to paper.

I mean this kindly, you may not like what you write. It may read as amateurish to you, especially if you've consumed a ton of other media. This is normal and fine, don't be discouraged you aren't immediately churning out volumes. If you are doing it for the love of the game, then even a quick 50 word snippet you save to a folder pushes you forward.

 

[humon]

The way I got started was to write with other people on forums. I was originally doing D&D type stories with a group of other writers. These were very easy to get into, because all I had to think about was one character. At the most basic level it was just: what does he look like and how does he react to each DM prompt. Nobody really cared if it was well written, only that my combat action for that round was clearly identified. But I cared about the writing, so I got to work on thinking about the finer details of that character, like how he talks, how he carries himself, how he treats people, who his friends and enemies are, how he organizes his equipment, what his muscle memory is primed to do in response to an emergency, all these little things that make a character more human.

I also tried my hand at being a DM and creating a scenario for other people to react to, which forced me to think about the broader context of the story and how everything fits together. Every step of the way, the question I asked myself was, "Is this the sort of situation I would enjoy playing through as a player?"

The next step was that I started writing smut scenes with partners (both asynchronously on forums, and synchronously on MUDs). The advantage there was that I had an audience of just one person who gave me quick feedback on whether I was doing something right or wrong. I could focus my effort on trying to write the kind of posts that I knew that one person would enjoy reading and responding to. So it was a good way to improve my skill because I had that regular feedback. I will note that it can be hard at first to find people willing to write with you in this way, so when I started I was just looking for any means by which to gain experience, which included taking people up on scenarios that weren't my first choice, but my partner was happy to have someone to bounce off of.

Then I started making these smut scenarios more elaborate: adding background context, an overarching plot, little nuances of the setting, real stakes that impacted the characters involved and shaped how they responded to situations...

More elaborate scenarios involved creating a bunch of extra NPC characters, and in the process of creating them I had to think about how they all relate to each other, their place in the story setting, and what their different motivations are. When you understand these details, dialogue starts to flow naturally, because you can see obvious points of conflict between characters, or differences in worldview that need to be resolved. I would run a dialectic in my head from two different points of view and let it take its natural course, then write down the gist of it, then go back over it and personalize it for those two characters to bring out their personalities more, and also the general tone of the situation (joking, serious, romance, grimdark, slice-of-life, whatever).

It got to the point where I imagined an entire story framework in my head that I would pitch to someone as a basis for writing together on it, and we'd then go through it, with my partner's character often changing the way the story goes with the actions she takes, kind of like if I was the DM and she was a solo player. And every time the plot shifted, I would learn something and get a little richer in how I generated these plots and their twists.

The final step for me was to remove the partner from the process entirely and just write everything by myself. I brought to mind all the times when a partner had disappointed me, and what I wished they had written instead, and then I went ahead and wrote that.


A note on dialogue: When it comes to putting words on paper, I like to start by just writing the lines only, without any other description, like a movie script with just dashes in front of every line, so I can go quickly back and forth and feel the flow of the conversation. Then after I've written out enough to play with, I go back and imagine the mental space of each character when they said each line, and think about whether that's really something they would say in that moment, or if I want to tweak the line to be more in line with their personality, or add some emotive description around it to make it feel more real, or add a little bit about something the character is thinking but not saying (I do this sparingly, but it can sometimes help explain things to the reader that wouldn't come out directly from the dialogue itself, especially when it comes to exposition of the story setting). You don't want to add too much description everywhere, or it bloats the page and disrupts the flow, but a little bit in key places helps a lot to flesh it out and make them seem more human. Then read it again after all your edits are done, and ask yourself if it still flows right. If no, find the spot where the flow broke down, and go back in and fix it.