Sorry about that! Glad its working now.
1 Like
True, true.
wouldn’t call myself a poet, but I do write poetry. Occasionally
1 Like
Anywho, I got my start with short stories (most of which I never finished) and then I did some group roleplays, which helped me develop my style since posts had quality requirements. From there, I moved onto CYOA’s and growing impatient for votes to move the story along, I went into novel writing and I started finishing projects. I’ve improved so much since then.
2 Likes
Does writing a story for 1st Grade English class count? 
I think that’s how I got started in writing. I was pretty imaginative (I think I had maladaptive daydreaming) so writing was my way of turning my thoughts into stories.
Read. A lot. I used to read a lot of fiction (back when I had the time) and I got a lot of inspiration from there. I also learned things that could help me in my writing (for example, if one character has dialogue that’s more than a paragraph long, the closing speech mark should be placed only at the end of the last paragraph. I only found out when I encountered it in a novel). If I hadn’t read that much, I would be half the writer I am today.
2 Likes
Yes 
Oh, cool! Me too lol.
1 Like
cool! what kind of poetry do you write?
1 Like
whatever inspires me. I write something every day/ every other day for practice, what about you?
1 Like
That’s great! I haven’t written any poetry in a long while, unless those random days i randomly get struck with a lyrics and write it down.
1 Like
I make myself do it. I like practicing. Like how I try and write a little everyday for stories. At least you sometimes get inspired.
1 Like
And that’s great, I would love to actually try that out as well, but right now I don’t even have enough time to write my WIP’s much less poetry.
1 Like
Five minutes to write whatever kind of poem comes to mind before bed? I don’t plan I just write it and see if it is good or not. I get that though, there’s never enough time.
1 Like
Well, this is how I got started.
From like middle school until like my mid twenties, I actually had something of a creative writing phobia. I had straight A’s, but the one type of assignment I refused to do was creative writing. I had a fear that someone was over my shoulder watching my paper the whole time.
A few years ago, I had a random dystopia sci-fi idea floating around, and last December I actually tried writing the damn thing. I had no clue what I was doing and ended up with like 1400 words before quitting.
That brings me to idea two and three, which I made it to about 4000 and 7000 words respectively. Cue many more false starts, and I end up with a 29k “finished” sci-fi novella. It was terrible(especially the end). But, with each false start, I learned more about how things work, especially with my main struggling area of pacing. My first works had the issue of being both super fast paced, yet extremely boring at the same time.
So, basically, I’m still starting, since I only have one year’s experience. It’ll be a while until something comes of it, if it ever does.
2 Likes
That is a really fantastic example! A lot of times people get so discouraged because they didn’t write a full novel on their first try. But this is exactly what the process is like. Starting, stopping, and getting a little further every time! Even if you don’t finish something, it was practice, and that’s nothing to be discouraged about.
Good luck as you keep going! Sounds like you are off to a good start so far!
I started my writing journey by telling short stories to my friends in elementary school. They liked to listen to them and asked me for more, so eventually I tried to write some of them down too. A whole set of discarded ideas, dismissed chapters and deleted files later, I finally wrote my first real novel at seventeen. I got it printed by a print-on-demand publisher and felt really proud about it at the time, although I cringe every time I have to look at it. It was a long story though (I think about 150K words or more).
1 Like
I actually have, and recently, too! I was in a bit of a slump last year and took some characters from my series, along with some characters from a friend’s story, and wrote a cross-over fanfic 
my MC also kind of made it into the canon of my friend’s story, haha 
1 Like
I love cross-over fics with friends! Working with other people’s OCs is fun because you can actually talk to them about how they might react and develop your characters in whole new ways! I also love cross-over RPs. One of my favorite bits of writing is actually a cross-over RP with one of my friends who is honestly my favorite writer. It was so much fun and I got to develop my character so much when he got put in the same room as her most intense villain. O.o
1 Like
How do you do outlines, book and chapter outlines?
1 Like
Have you ever read Wikipedia entries about movies or books where they summarise the plot in a few paragraphs? Think of your book outline that way. You want to be specific enough to describe the important things so they’ll stay in your mind when you come back to the outline, but at the same time, don’t get so bogged down in the details or you might as well just ditch the outline and start writing (and that’s great too 
).
But let’s say you do want to make an outline. Just keep in mind that you don’t have to fill in all the gaps right away. Just make sure that all the main points are highlighted from beginning to end. Throw in details when they are important to the story (if your main character is carrying a dark secret for instance, you can detail that a bit more because it’s important to their character development. But if its something trivial like your character wondering “should I go to Starbucks or not?”, then you shouldn’t devote too much time, if any, to that in the outline, it will just take time and energy away from more important things), and leave out things that are superfluous. Once you have your main points, everything else will begin to fall into place.
I say this as someone who has written countless outlines but has never actually finished a story so the obvious cautionary tale here is strike while the iron is hot and finish what you start Use that intial burst of satisfaction you get from competing an outline (and it is satisfying) and channel it into writing your story. Then you’ll be just fine 
1 Like
Thank you!
1 Like
No problem!
1 Like