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.