Hey! Two posts from me within a month of each other? Unheard of. Suppose I’ve got a writing itch and I’m all out of Gold Bond.
I’m interested in writing this right now because in Somnol we’ve been chattering about writing, and specifically what holds folks back from doing it. And boy, do we all have reasons for being held back!
does this look infected to you?
As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I’ve been doing a little bit of writing. A lot of bit of writing; since August 2024, I’ve penned a 20K-word novella which I then expanded into a 120K-word (currently) novel, a 25K-word novella, and about 180K words of other novels in draft. That’s not counting other little things I wrote on a lark, or a draft choose-your-own-adventure story I’m doing for my site.
Is it good writing? I guess you’ll find out! But the point is, rather explosively, I’ve become a writer. Not a copywriter, which I already was for work; a fun writer. I hadn’t done it (that is, writing prose and not just webcomic scripts) in years.
“Itch” really is the best way I can describe it. I’ve usually got that creative itch, but for years I was singularly interested in getting my webcomic done. I’m an obsessive beast—of course I am, I’m in Somnolescent—and I daydream compulsively, which means a lot of my waking life is spent ruminating on characters, concepts, and scenes. (A lot of my sleeping life is spent losing my teeth.)
Occasionally that’s with media that I didn’t make. I’ve gotten way into Lord of the Rings, so thinking about hobbits now takes a piece of that pie. But 90% of the time, what I’m chewing on are my own worlds or characters. That’s the basis of all my writing.
I was spring-loaded when writing the first novella draft of Desertbound, my 120K word premiere novel. (That makes it sound like it’s a huge deal; it’s a fun backpack fantasy featuring OCs I’d scrapped 10 years ago, who I retrofitted to fit into Pinede.) When I hunkered down to write it, I cranked it out in under two weeks because I’d been chewing on the concept for several months and had already hashed out the plot before I put pen to paper.
“isn’t this your fanfic”
But for years, I was hesitant to put pen to paper. That wasn’t always the case, as like any kid I was gung ho about whatever I was into and absolutely shameless. I remember getting hyped about creative writing for school assignments and always ended up expanding on my stories way more than the teachers required. They never docked marks for my lack of brevity, I imagine because they knew I was having fun and didn’t want to stamp that out.
I wrote in my free time, too. Though the files are long, long gone now, I remember writing a short story (that I don’t believe I ever finished) called Hannah and the Golem, which was absolutely just an urban fantasy ripoff of Iron Giant with no plot, being written by a 12-year-old. Once I got onto the internet at large, I got into roleplaying on forums and writing fanfiction, particularly for Portal 2.
This is where I met Brianna, which is how I met Cammy, which is a funny chain of events to think of in retrospect. I found the roleplaying forum she and I met on through Scratch, and it was almost completely abandoned, so we were probably very close to missing each other—funny how things work out, eh?
I had the same itch for writing then. That RP was terrible quality and stretched on for hundreds of pages and thousands of forum posts, and had ended up constituting the bulk of content on the abandoned website, and I had a great time doing it. On top of that, I’d post my fanfics to DeviantArt (I assume because Wattpad confused me), and I remember churning out at least a few of those in what was likely a very short phase of my life. At least one was kind of ripping off Blue Sky, which was a super popular Portal 2 fanfic at the time.
One day, Brianna sent a link my way with a message along the lines of: “Isn’t this your fanfic?”
In the early days of cringe culture, before we called it “cringe culture,” there were Tumblrs dedicated to shitty art and fanfic. They might still exist; I won’t bother checking. Brianna and I both looked through them sometimes for a laugh, because I believe cringe culture-type content satisfies an insecure mean girl instinct. While a lot of the shitty art blogs I looked at did include professional shitty art, like Rob Liefeld’s greatest hits or badly proportioned anime, lots of it was definitely from children (or, you know, people who just aren’t very skilled at art).
If you need any further evidence that a lot of these shitty fanfics were written by 13-year-olds, as a 13-year-old my shitty fanfic was posted on one of these blogs. Even worse, in retrospect, the people posting were probably also teenagers, because their critique of my fanfic was also shit. They ripped on one specific and deliberate stylistic choice instead of the lack of plot and poor structure.
Like any 13-year-old, I responded by nuking all of my writing from orbit. In fact, I might’ve nuked everything on my DeviantArt, and my Tumblr, and anywhere else my content lived. Nothing from this period survived.
It’s a bit silly in retrospect to say someone making fun of me once affected me for so long, but hey, we can’t control how things hurt us. I was already a bit of a basket case, having a tumultuous real life, so the internet was where I escaped to and I felt like I’d had a spotlight put on me. At once, I became convinced that I was simply not a writer.
This, I think, is why cringe culture (and being mean-spirited in general) backfires. I got a taste of my own medicine for laughing at the shitty work of kids, so I see this story as a bit of karmic justice. Being judgemental was reflected back onto me; it was a symptom of my own self-consciousness. And it rubs off on your friends, too. You could be ripping on someone in good fun with a friend and jab at a trait, or interest, or whatever you don’t know they share and hit them in the crossfire.
Obviously, don’t be a dick and rip on people for enjoying themselves at nobody else’s expense as a general rule, because that’s shitty. What’s wrong with you?
but i’m not a writer
Regardless of whether I deserved being self-conscious of my writing for my entire adolescence because I’d snicker at shitty DeviantArt bases, I was self-conscious. I still did creative writing for school and relished in it (I remember one assignment was to write a Frankenstein fanfic set after the end of the book, and I ended it with the monster falling into a glacier crevasse—why’d I do that?). But I didn’t do it on my own time for fun; I couldn’t bring myself to. Pet projects fell apart when I wasn’t capable of writing plotlines, and even as I developed Wisp, I was sure I had to lean on the quality of the art because the writing would be shit.
I carried it all the way through high school. It outlived friendships, including my friendship with Brianna, and I spent as long being a not-writer as I was a writer. In 2018, I went to college to study advertising, in a generalist program that teaches you all facets of the industry, from strategy to account management to creative. More than being a not-writer in my personal life, I kept on carrying that self-consciousness right into Copywriting 101. I was convinced I’d work on the design side of things when I graduated and broke into the industry. I said as much to my copywriting professor, that “I’m not a writer.”
I got middling grades in Copywriting 101. That actually isn’t that bad, because that prof has a reputation for being strict—for good reason! He was whipping the next generation of copywriters into shape. Turns out copywriting’s hard.
So I carried that self-consciousness, even in my “professional” work, into my second year of college. In a class on writing for radio taught by the same prof, on the first assignment of the year, I got my first very good mark from him on a :30 script for selling rubber bands, paperclips, and staples for Staples. It was funny! It was clever and strange; I had a paranoid Charlie Day-type doomsday prepper outlining the bizarre bunker defence mechanism he had assembled in a rapid-fire monologue.
I can’t help it, I’m a sucker for praise. With that A, I was hooked.
Suddenly I went from “I’m not a writer” to “I’m a fucking copywriter.” My scripts kicked ass! My concepts were in that sweet spot of insightful and strange! Not always, of course, because you’re always going to miss now and again, but I’d say I was one of the best copywriters in my class. And there was some stiff competition.
So then I got an internship as a copywriter with an agency, and then I graduated and was kept on (and got paid a whopping $36K a year for it), and then I moved from that to my current job where I’m still writing ads and getting paid for it. I’m a copywriter!
But, you know, I’m not a writer.
jumping a hurdle
There are a handful of reasons floating around in Somnol for why folks don’t write (creative or otherwise), and I’m pretty sure I know them intimately. It’s intimidating, because you look at a book series and you don’t even know how they began to pull that together. You’re self-conscious, because you had someone in your development that put your writing down.
In my case, I still get weird writing about these blog posts, because I wonder why I should be talking about myself to you. Why do you care? Do I have something to offer you, reader? I hope you find my jokes funny enough to keep reading, and I hope you get something out of this.
I’m an anxious beast (among other things). Most things make my stomach churn; telling somebody about my plans for the evening, driving to the grocery story, walking to get the mail, going to work, getting my hair cut. My chest hurts in the build-up to mundane shit I’ve done over and over, and when I notice I’m anxious, I get more anxious.
When I mentioned this to my therapist, her counterpoint was, “but you still do it.”
Huh, yeah. I do it anyway. What’s funny is, the second I crest that hill, the anxiety simmers down. It’s all anticipation, because I anticipate everything, and I take being anxious as a sign that I’m a fundamentally broken person which makes everything much worse. But I do it anyway, and my system settles. So I should probably be getting into the doing phase of things as fast as possible, so I don’t develop high blood pressure and have a stroke at 55.
My point is, as stupid as this sounds: I started writing because I just did it. That’s not very helpful, is it? I’m giving you a sports brand’s slogan as advice. No, I totally had a method to get there. I’m not a published author or a professional, and I can’t guarantee you I’m even a very good writer yet, but I have written.
So, here’s what I did:
started small
Even though I have no clue if it’d be financially viable, and I have no clue if anyone would give a shit, I do plan on turning Desertbound into a multi-part series spanning at least a few novels. Because this brain is itchy, man, and it’s inside my skull so the only way to scratch it is to write. But I didn’t sit down and go “I should really write a multi-part series,” because who does that? (Probably people who actually make money writing and know how to churn out profitable books.)
Desertbound started small as could be: the protagonist. An OC, who was just a design and a handful of character traits and me going “haha, imagine the silly scenarios he gets into” and posting him to my Toyhouse. In a Somnol group-world, no less, so I didn’t even come up with the magic system or the main settlements. Can you imagine writing several novels about your OCs? Well, you don’t have to. I didn’t. I thought of a couple more characters, all three of them being refurbished OCs from a failed pet project from a decade ago, who I thought would be cute if I put them all together again and imagined a few scenes and their dynamics.
Then I thought of why they’d be together, and there was the beginning of a plot. An end point, specifically, which I then worked backwards from. It was a bit of reverse-engineering, but using that plot, I pieced together character motivations, which character traits grew out of naturally, which informed motivations, and it all started feeding back into each other and developing further.
The plan was to write a short story. A quick and silly romp across the continent, some fun character interactions, and that’s it. The short story grew into a novella at 20K words; this was my first draft.
And honestly, if it stayed in its original novella form, it would’ve been fine! I was content with it, I think it was a decent bit of writing. It wasn’t Literature. I wasn’t setting out to write anything world-shattering, I had a fun and small idea and I went from there. But, folks in the group liked it, and I liked it, and then I had an idea: why not publish this thing?
Anyway, turns out novellas don’t sell, so Desertbound was due for some expanding. Everything I wrote was only meant to make it more Desertbound than it ever was. I identified the story’s theme present in the first draft and worked to keep it at the core of everything, I fleshed out characters in ways that feel delightful and exciting to me, I expanded on the world and did what I could to make it feel like a real adventure. I read Tolkien! Why the hell hadn’t I read Tolkien before?
In the end, I sextupled the word count. I’d never written so much in my life.
All the writing advice I’ve come across feels very correct to me. Start with reading, of course, and understand your genre (and other genres, because you should branch out). Make sure you understand the rules, too, the hero’s journey and literary devices. Make sure you know your theme—that’s the backbone of your story—and make sure it’s a compelling theme, and that it’s woven into every part of your story, and make sure you have compelling conflict and make sure you—
It’s a lot. But you’re not looking to publish a book right now, are you? So who cares what the rules are?
You can learn to draw by just drawing. Yes, it’s “correct” to learn to draw realistic anatomy before you learn to stylize and draw cartoons, but how many of us started off by drawing cartoons? If you’re a hobbyist, there’s no harm in not following the “correct” road to learning a skill. More than that, who cares if you do something and you’re not great at it? Tumblr blogs in 2013, that’s who. Fuck ’em.
In the same way, I’m learning to write as I write. I do more to learn, too, more on that below, but that’s work I chose to do to make my story more polished.
My stories are living and growing things. Desertbound was a germ before it was anything else. I ruminate on scenes, chewing them over and over even after I’ve written them, so I know them from all angles and can go back and revise. My characters are always running in a background process in my head, where I imagine their thoughts and feelings and the funniest way I could have them phrase things. When I revise, I see scenes as elastic and stretch and push and pull them until they’re just right—and sometimes a scene snaps off and it’s for the best that I discard it.
The best part is, you can call it quits any time. I could have said Desertbound was done at any point in the last four months, and I would’ve been right to. Right now, I’m holding it up to a high standard because I plan to self-publish and charge real human dollars for it, and you deserve good media, but you don’t have to do that. Just write, first!
threw hurdles out the window
Without telling you who I work for, the kind of job I do is one that can have a lot of downtime. It can also get hectic some days, but very often I’m waiting on an email from somebody so I can action my thing. Think standard desk job.
So, here’s the secret to how I wrote such an ungodly amount while working full time: I wrote whenever I had the chance (and whenever that overlapped with the desire to do it). This means I do my writing on Google Docs, which removes the hurdle of me being away from my PC for nine hours a day when I’m in the office. Now, when I’m on my lunch or waiting on an email, I can whip out my phone and tap out a few sentences I’d been rolling around in the back of my mind.
Of course, the formatting can get a bit messed up, and at this point Desertbound is such a large file size that it’s a bit slow on my phone, but the method got me through to finishing the book’s second draft.
When I am home, I found a couple things from writing on my PC: it’s not very comfortable, and I end up sequestered in my office for hours at a time, which isn’t great when you’ve got a long-term partner. So, I dusted off my old MacBook from my college days. If I feel like it, I put on a record and sit on my couch to write under a weighted blanket. Much cozier.
Much easier, too. Writing can be hard sometimes, you’re making and then solving fictional problems. Anything you can do to make it easier—carrying around a notebook, jotting ideas in a private Discord server, whatever—is worthwhile. Writing’s such an abstract thing that you really can do it anywhere, so do it everywhere. Unless you’re driving, I guess, but I still find myself lightly daydreaming in traffic.
kept it fun
As insane and obsessive as some of the above might read, more than anything I want to convey how fun this is to me. It’s scratching a deep, deep itch. If Desertbound didn’t occupy 90% of my brain, I simply would not write about it.
If you don’t want to write, don’t write. If you don’t have any ideas, ripping them out of yourself won’t do you any good. Nobody’s holding you at gunpoint, and you’re not a professional writer. If you are, why are you here? You’re more qualified to tell people how to write than I am.
So, if you have a little idea germinating and you think you want to write something for it, I implore you: have fun. It’s trite but it’s the most genuine advice I can give you. We’re all doing this for free (in the case of self-publishing, I’ll probably lose money on it), so what’s the point of making it feel like a job? The second you stop having fun, put it down. You’ll live longer.
You will, at some point, have writer’s block. Usually, when I hit writer’s block, I switch gears to work on something else and wait for it to pass. Sometimes, you need a little time to think through a piece of your story, and having it bubbling on the back-burner will suffice. Sometimes, you need to just skip past it and keep chugging down the track of your story and come back to it later. In that case, I do a little placeholder:
[WRITE MORE ABOUT WRITER’S BLOCK.]
Look, you can find way more advice about how to beat writer’s block on the internet. I’ll give you one more piece; if you’re well and truly stuck, take a break. Go play a video game (or, even better, read a book). If you’ve hit a block that never seems to end, you’re probably depressed or something. Go take a nice walk outside. (Yeah, yeah, “thanks, I’m cured,” we’re all a bit depressed, here. I’m not your psychiatrist.)
more to learn
After all that rambling and advising and so on, I have to tell you that I am an amateur. Maybe “novice” makes me sound less stupid. There’s still a long way to go to make my book ready to publish, including beta readers and hiring an editor, and I’m sure I’ll end up learning much more about writing then.
I’m also still reading. Of course I was a bookish kid, I’d read plenty for pleasure, but like a lot of folks I fell off in my teen years. It’s valuable to pull inspiration from everything, and I do, from music to movies to video games, but it’s very valuable to be familiar with the medium you’re working in. And I’m glad I did it, because while I liked the movies, I’d never gotten properly into LOTR before.
I do need to read more contemporary fiction. Desertbound is pretty plainly inspired by Tolkien and Pratchett, which I really like the feeling of, but you should know the market you’re heading into. If I don’t know what contemporary fantasy looks like, how will I subvert it, you know?
I’m also learning to write poetry, which wasn’t ever a thing I was into (except for a brief stint writing haikus as a 10-year-old). That’s absolutely taking a page from Tolkien, but in-character poetry and songs work too well when the narrator’s a bard. Show, don’t tell, and all that. So I’m getting a handle on metre, exploring devices used in poetry, and having fun with it. And now I’ve written poetry! Who would’ve thought?
Maybe that’s one last bit I’ll preach to you about before I hop off my soapbox: wherever your creative urges lead you, follow it. You’ll learn something new.
