winneganfake:
philsandifer:
maxkirin:
There will never be a...
There will never be a better time to write, than right now. So, sit down, open up a fresh new document, and get that book done! You can do this! ♥︎ (Inspired by this post).
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I want to, in all sincerity, offer a real alternative to this advice.
Don’t write it.
Seriously. Writing is a deeply and fundamentally obsessive process. A book requires a manic dedication. It necessitates piles upon piles of television never watched, Cracked articles never read, and Tetris high scores never beaten. It’s hard, and lonely, and doing it well usually requires quite a lot of doing it badly first, which is frustrating as all hell. Your reward for writing it will be scant recognition at best. You will probably make next to no money off of it, few people will read it or care, and the entire process is full of quiet disappointment.
You can in fact be a worthwhile and fantastic person without ever writing a book. It’s perfectly OK to wish you had written a book without having the slightest real inclination to put in the grueling effort needed to do it. Pie in the sky dreams are just fine, and you’re not a lesser human being for having them.
If you are the sort of person who should start the dreadful process of writing books, it’s not going to be advice to do so that motivates you, it’s going to be an outright pathological inability to perform the simple task of not writing a book.
I’d like to invite the above commenter to come over here that I might directly kick their ass. Or at least yell at them in person for being a lazy uninspiring twatwaffle who clearly has nothing better to do then piss in people’s cereal bowls.
As for the rest of you, if you want to try and write a book, then go fucking try and write a book. Will you succeed at it? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. That’s not what is important. So long as you’re not hurting yourself or others in the attempt, GO FOR IT. If nothing else, you’ll learn something out of the whole, process, even if the one thing you learn is “Gee, I shouldn’t have done that.” BETTER TO MAKE THE ATTEMPT AND FAIL SPECTACULARLY, THAN TO HAVE SAT ON ONE’S ASS PLAYING TETRIS THE ENTIRE TIME.
Need I say more? Yes? FINE. Here:
And if you need to, go buy one, stick it on your goddamn wall, and read it every time some twatwaffle comes along and tries to convince you that those hours were better spent on fucking Tetris.
To the comment above me: some people need that reality check.
Yes, go out and do it. Write. Write your heart out if that’s what you want to do: write short stories, novels, epics, series, sagas, whatever you. Write what you want if you want to write it. But there is a reality to it.
It will be hard. You will stop, stumble, and have to start over in places. Sometimes only a sentence, but there will be times where you’ll have to rewrite a paragraph, or a page, or a chapter, or the whole damn book all over again. You’ll stop watching movies and TV because you’ll be putting time into your craft; you’ll stop playing video games; you’ll stop listening to music that doesn’t inspire your latest work. This is because you will be putting your attention on your work. You will need to come up for air; you will need to make time to push yourself away from your writing and go outside, or watch Markiplier’s latest video, or listen to Linkin Park’s new album, or see the Leonardo DaVinci exhibit at the museum. You will have to force yourself to do these things because writing is hard, and you’ll want to come back and fix your story problems, and you’ll need distractions here and there.
It will be hard. It will not pay, at least not right away. If you’re not writing for money, then that’s not an issue. But it will be hard. And you’ll need to understand that. And you’ll need to remember why you’re writing it sometimes.
But when you finish, that feeling will be unlike anything you’ve experienced before. You will have finished, and be done, and you’ll be able to say you did it. Not to anyone else — but to yourself. Because ultimately, that’s who you answer to when you write: yourself.
