Are you someone who started writing fiction as an adult?
January 2, 2021 5:02 PM Subscribe
Are you someone who started writing after years of wanting to but never actually doing it? What got you started?
Context: I write a lot for work, and I keep a blog on professional topics. But I've always wanted to write fiction. I did write short stories growing up, but when I reached adulthood, it's not something I kept up with.
I know the most important thing is to just start writing, but I'm hungry for stories from from people who were in a similar way but actually did start writing productively well into adulthood (say 30/35+). What got you over the hump? Were there strategies or techniques that you used to establish a writing habit and develop your craft?
I'm looking less for direct advice or how-to books to read than real-life examples, anecdotes, and personal experiences (your own, or others' that I can read).
Context: I write a lot for work, and I keep a blog on professional topics. But I've always wanted to write fiction. I did write short stories growing up, but when I reached adulthood, it's not something I kept up with.
I know the most important thing is to just start writing, but I'm hungry for stories from from people who were in a similar way but actually did start writing productively well into adulthood (say 30/35+). What got you over the hump? Were there strategies or techniques that you used to establish a writing habit and develop your craft?
I'm looking less for direct advice or how-to books to read than real-life examples, anecdotes, and personal experiences (your own, or others' that I can read).
For direct how-to advice, I find that has what worked for me is to write organically. Write a scene, think about the characters, then go back and forward in time to understand the scene. I find it best to write in bits and pieces then organize the idea into a whole.
posted by SPrintF at 5:25 PM on January 2, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by SPrintF at 5:25 PM on January 2, 2021 [4 favorites]
Seriously, fanfiction.
Also, Tim Clare's 100 Day Writing Challenge was really helpful for me, because it helped me get in the habit of sitting down each day, and it gave me some really good advice for managing the emotional challenges of writing for fun. I highly recommend it.
posted by meese at 6:29 PM on January 2, 2021 [1 favorite]
Also, Tim Clare's 100 Day Writing Challenge was really helpful for me, because it helped me get in the habit of sitting down each day, and it gave me some really good advice for managing the emotional challenges of writing for fun. I highly recommend it.
posted by meese at 6:29 PM on January 2, 2021 [1 favorite]
I am one such person. My impetus was NaNoWriMo 2020.
Previously, I had written two ten-minute plays , one of which was produced. I remember glaring HARD at one dope who refused to applaud. Well, maybe he’s dead now./
Anyway, the novel experience was eye-opening in that my characters didn’t give a rat’s ass about my plans for them, but went off on their own adventures! Previously, I had always assumed writers were full of shit when they mentioned such phenomena.
posted by BostonTerrier at 6:35 PM on January 2, 2021 [3 favorites]
Previously, I had written two ten-minute plays , one of which was produced. I remember glaring HARD at one dope who refused to applaud. Well, maybe he’s dead now./
Anyway, the novel experience was eye-opening in that my characters didn’t give a rat’s ass about my plans for them, but went off on their own adventures! Previously, I had always assumed writers were full of shit when they mentioned such phenomena.
posted by BostonTerrier at 6:35 PM on January 2, 2021 [3 favorites]
This is me.
I used to write as a teenager, but got all self conscious, and drifted away from it. In my mid thirties, an online friend sent me one of those "I'm tagging you to answer these questions in a blog post and tag 5 other people" things. One of the questions was "what is one thing you want to do before you die".
I didn't have to think about the answer at all, and it was also a complete surprise to me. I wanted to write a story other people would enjoy.
I was working full time as a multimedia lecturer at the time, writing course notes etc, but it had been decades since I even thought of writing fiction. I thought of myself as a visual artist. I decided to do something about this unexpected wish I had discovered.
I wrote a short story called "The Troll Princess" and that was the beginning of my transformation into a writer.
Over the next few months I wrote more short stories. My sister in law gave me a Kindle, and that made me aware of ebooks and the possibility of self publishing. After some half hearted attempts at getting published traditionally I realised how much freedom self publishing implied. It is essentially impossible to get traditionally published as a South African fantasy and Science Fiction writer, so self publishing was incredibly empowering.
I started writing full length books, fantasy and science fiction. Discovering this new side of me was an amazing experience, like finding a magical treasure chest. It still took me a couple of years to think of myself as a writer.
It's about 10 years later and I am about to publish my 8th book, and recently finished the first draft of another.
The best writing advice I have is to ignore any advice that makes you feel like writing is not for you. Everyone is different. What works for me is never to talk about a writing project until the first draft is done. It bleeds energy away that should go into the writing. I don't get feedback from anyone else until the first draft is done.
I pick up where I left off the previous writing session, just steam ahead, and don't rewrite until the first draft is done. Otherwise I would just rewrite and rewrite the first chapter and never move on.
I try to write the kind of book I would be delighted to discover in the library or second hand bookshop. A story that will engross the reader, and entertain, and make people care about the characters and want to know what happens next. Keeping that goal in mind helps me to stay motivated.
posted by Zumbador at 8:20 PM on January 2, 2021 [9 favorites]
I used to write as a teenager, but got all self conscious, and drifted away from it. In my mid thirties, an online friend sent me one of those "I'm tagging you to answer these questions in a blog post and tag 5 other people" things. One of the questions was "what is one thing you want to do before you die".
I didn't have to think about the answer at all, and it was also a complete surprise to me. I wanted to write a story other people would enjoy.
I was working full time as a multimedia lecturer at the time, writing course notes etc, but it had been decades since I even thought of writing fiction. I thought of myself as a visual artist. I decided to do something about this unexpected wish I had discovered.
I wrote a short story called "The Troll Princess" and that was the beginning of my transformation into a writer.
Over the next few months I wrote more short stories. My sister in law gave me a Kindle, and that made me aware of ebooks and the possibility of self publishing. After some half hearted attempts at getting published traditionally I realised how much freedom self publishing implied. It is essentially impossible to get traditionally published as a South African fantasy and Science Fiction writer, so self publishing was incredibly empowering.
I started writing full length books, fantasy and science fiction. Discovering this new side of me was an amazing experience, like finding a magical treasure chest. It still took me a couple of years to think of myself as a writer.
It's about 10 years later and I am about to publish my 8th book, and recently finished the first draft of another.
The best writing advice I have is to ignore any advice that makes you feel like writing is not for you. Everyone is different. What works for me is never to talk about a writing project until the first draft is done. It bleeds energy away that should go into the writing. I don't get feedback from anyone else until the first draft is done.
I pick up where I left off the previous writing session, just steam ahead, and don't rewrite until the first draft is done. Otherwise I would just rewrite and rewrite the first chapter and never move on.
I try to write the kind of book I would be delighted to discover in the library or second hand bookshop. A story that will engross the reader, and entertain, and make people care about the characters and want to know what happens next. Keeping that goal in mind helps me to stay motivated.
posted by Zumbador at 8:20 PM on January 2, 2021 [9 favorites]
I kept telling myself that I would write more in my free time over the years, but what really helped me was taking some writing classes for fiction (now they're online via Zoom) and also joining and creating writing groups with fellow writers from those classes that meet regularly (once a month or every other week) for feedback on each other's pieces. Being in a class with deadlines and prompts and I think most importantly, other people who are also taking their creative writing seriously, shifted my own perspective on how to treat my own writing.
As for strategies and techniques on how to establish a writing habit, try out a few different things. I used to try to tell myself to write every day, but then that didn't seem to work as well and I'd beat myself up for missing a day. Now I try to think of weekly output goals -- like writing 15 handwritten pages a week or something similar and not judging myself for the quality of what I've written.
Also doing NaNoWriMo was another helpful thing, especially going in with an outline. I had taken another online writing class right before this past year's NaNoWriMo and our instructor had us create an outline for our novel, and that led to me actually succeeding this year, where in past years I had given up half way through.
For me, taking classes and then becoming part of a supportive writing community (even if it's just a few people in a writing group), has really strengthened my own self-identity as a writer and given me valuable feedback and a sense that we're in this together. And then there's a good sense of accountability too. I know that I'm going to have to submit something new for workshop and feedback in a month, so I have to keep writing.
posted by bubble tea time at 7:56 AM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
As for strategies and techniques on how to establish a writing habit, try out a few different things. I used to try to tell myself to write every day, but then that didn't seem to work as well and I'd beat myself up for missing a day. Now I try to think of weekly output goals -- like writing 15 handwritten pages a week or something similar and not judging myself for the quality of what I've written.
Also doing NaNoWriMo was another helpful thing, especially going in with an outline. I had taken another online writing class right before this past year's NaNoWriMo and our instructor had us create an outline for our novel, and that led to me actually succeeding this year, where in past years I had given up half way through.
For me, taking classes and then becoming part of a supportive writing community (even if it's just a few people in a writing group), has really strengthened my own self-identity as a writer and given me valuable feedback and a sense that we're in this together. And then there's a good sense of accountability too. I know that I'm going to have to submit something new for workshop and feedback in a month, so I have to keep writing.
posted by bubble tea time at 7:56 AM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
I've always had stories in my head, often inspired by or in answer to media I've read, watched or played. I started writing the occasional fanfiction in my late 30s and early 40s because most of my friends were writers and I wanted to participate in the same exchanges they were doing. I discovered that I didn't really like writing in exchanges (though I love doing art in them). Eventually the pressure of the stories in my head got too much to resist and now I've written an original novella and am working on a novel.
What has helped me is that, since many of my friends are writers (both pro and amateur), I have a variety of working methods to look at, so I know that there is no One True Way. Some people have to sit down every day and pound out words. Others have to sit and let the story build in their head for days, weeks or months before they can sit down and have it pour out of them. I discovered that I'm closer to the latter: trying to sit down and work every day kills it dead for me, because I can't write until my subconscious produces something for me to say.
So my process, which started back in the days I was writing fanfiction, is basically to get a spark of a character, then to throw myself into research (for example, right now I'm reading about early modern warfare, and have previously read about renaissance Florence politics and watched videos of walkthroughs of Italian towns). Then I basically write a rough (very) outline, break it into chunks, and write a rough, rough drafty-ish Thing---pseudocode, basically--that says "Ok so in this chunk I need to do a, b and c and drop in x bit of information and foreshadow y," and include various chunks of description, dialogue, etc. Then I go back and write the actual draft. Then I go through and polish it up into something I'm not embarrassed to send to betas. It gets sent to betas, I revise it based on the comments. In the days I wrote fic, I posted it at that point. For the original novella I have, it's sitting there until I get the novel done, at which point I'll decide what I want to do with them.
posted by telophase at 7:09 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
What has helped me is that, since many of my friends are writers (both pro and amateur), I have a variety of working methods to look at, so I know that there is no One True Way. Some people have to sit down every day and pound out words. Others have to sit and let the story build in their head for days, weeks or months before they can sit down and have it pour out of them. I discovered that I'm closer to the latter: trying to sit down and work every day kills it dead for me, because I can't write until my subconscious produces something for me to say.
So my process, which started back in the days I was writing fanfiction, is basically to get a spark of a character, then to throw myself into research (for example, right now I'm reading about early modern warfare, and have previously read about renaissance Florence politics and watched videos of walkthroughs of Italian towns). Then I basically write a rough (very) outline, break it into chunks, and write a rough, rough drafty-ish Thing---pseudocode, basically--that says "Ok so in this chunk I need to do a, b and c and drop in x bit of information and foreshadow y," and include various chunks of description, dialogue, etc. Then I go back and write the actual draft. Then I go through and polish it up into something I'm not embarrassed to send to betas. It gets sent to betas, I revise it based on the comments. In the days I wrote fic, I posted it at that point. For the original novella I have, it's sitting there until I get the novel done, at which point I'll decide what I want to do with them.
posted by telophase at 7:09 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
So I started writing seriously as an adult, after being a precocious teenage writer who let it wither away after writing a lot in high school and my first few years at university. Various jobs, other hobbies etc all got in the way. However, I was also a wildly inconsistent writer for many years. This is something I've only really managed to resolve in the past two or three years.
The 'starter' for me was NaNoWriMo too, in 2005. At the time I was working a very demanding corporate job, and it felt like an absolute gargantuan effort to hit the 1,667 words a day average you need to 'win' NaNoWriMo by completing 50,000 words in thirty days. The book itself was dire (although it had its good points) and I committed to finishing the draft, topping it out at around 90,000 words. But the main benefit was showing me that I could write regularly if I tried and that a relatively small amount of regular effort added up in the long term.
I have played around with all kinds of variables over the years, sometimes to my own detriment. For a long time I was more focused on coming up with the perfect process than I was with actually finishing and doing something with my writing projects. For example, I've learned several things which are true for me.
I do far (far far far) better writing to a daily time commitment (I try to do an hour a day) with a soft word count target (I try to hit 1,000 words) than if I just had a hard word count target. I nearly always go over my target and committing time rather than words feels, to me, like a greater declaration of intent than a purely target driven approach. Word counts used to make me miserable, which was really silly as it was supposed to be a fun, creative thing to do.
I do better writing in the morning, and if I don't try to do anything else (like exercise) first. I've ritualised my mornings so I get washed and dressed and get my breakfast, then march upstairs to write. These habits are now an indivisible whole, so I don't have 2 or 3 opportunities each morning to talk myself out of writing - I make a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal and that's kind of part of the process. By the time I sit down, I'm already gaming out the next scene in my head and then I flow straight into it, after re-reading a couple of paragraphs.
Simple stuff too, like putting my phone on the other side of the room and putting a slideshow of relevant imagery on my secondary monitor (rather than, like, Metafilter or whatever). I use Phoenix Slideshow for this, it's excellent. You can just point it at a folder full of images (for me, a lot of sci-fi cityscapes and spacecraft) and off it goes.
I also track everything I write, which shows me that even when I miss many days in a row, or do a few days of low word counts, they still stack up. This past year was an immensely stressful year (planetwide, yeah, but also personally) including a job loss and a house move, with big stretches of multiple weeks without any writing at all. But I still managed to get well over 150,000 words written, often with days where I stared at my monitor for 45 minutes, then wrote 250 words. But you string enough of those together...
I recommend the book Atomic Habits as a really good guide to the mental shortcuts that get you over the typical points of resistance to creating a new, sustained habit. Once you get past the first dozen pages of regulation 'this will change your life' self-help sales pitch, it's a very clear and readable book.
posted by Happy Dave at 3:23 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
The 'starter' for me was NaNoWriMo too, in 2005. At the time I was working a very demanding corporate job, and it felt like an absolute gargantuan effort to hit the 1,667 words a day average you need to 'win' NaNoWriMo by completing 50,000 words in thirty days. The book itself was dire (although it had its good points) and I committed to finishing the draft, topping it out at around 90,000 words. But the main benefit was showing me that I could write regularly if I tried and that a relatively small amount of regular effort added up in the long term.
I have played around with all kinds of variables over the years, sometimes to my own detriment. For a long time I was more focused on coming up with the perfect process than I was with actually finishing and doing something with my writing projects. For example, I've learned several things which are true for me.
I do far (far far far) better writing to a daily time commitment (I try to do an hour a day) with a soft word count target (I try to hit 1,000 words) than if I just had a hard word count target. I nearly always go over my target and committing time rather than words feels, to me, like a greater declaration of intent than a purely target driven approach. Word counts used to make me miserable, which was really silly as it was supposed to be a fun, creative thing to do.
I do better writing in the morning, and if I don't try to do anything else (like exercise) first. I've ritualised my mornings so I get washed and dressed and get my breakfast, then march upstairs to write. These habits are now an indivisible whole, so I don't have 2 or 3 opportunities each morning to talk myself out of writing - I make a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal and that's kind of part of the process. By the time I sit down, I'm already gaming out the next scene in my head and then I flow straight into it, after re-reading a couple of paragraphs.
Simple stuff too, like putting my phone on the other side of the room and putting a slideshow of relevant imagery on my secondary monitor (rather than, like, Metafilter or whatever). I use Phoenix Slideshow for this, it's excellent. You can just point it at a folder full of images (for me, a lot of sci-fi cityscapes and spacecraft) and off it goes.
I also track everything I write, which shows me that even when I miss many days in a row, or do a few days of low word counts, they still stack up. This past year was an immensely stressful year (planetwide, yeah, but also personally) including a job loss and a house move, with big stretches of multiple weeks without any writing at all. But I still managed to get well over 150,000 words written, often with days where I stared at my monitor for 45 minutes, then wrote 250 words. But you string enough of those together...
I recommend the book Atomic Habits as a really good guide to the mental shortcuts that get you over the typical points of resistance to creating a new, sustained habit. Once you get past the first dozen pages of regulation 'this will change your life' self-help sales pitch, it's a very clear and readable book.
posted by Happy Dave at 3:23 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
I did NaNoWriMo too, but the first real nudge for me was taking a few classes at the local arts center (Pittsburgh Center for the Arts). It was there that I got face-to-face reactions to my work that showed me that maybe I was on to something.
Later I got into a group of writers who critiqued each others' work. This group is what made me an actual writer. All older beginner writers, they became trusted friends. (Online crits with strangers has never worked for me.) The best thing about this group was that we hired a leader, a professor at a local university. (Yeah, we paid him.) He knew how to lead a group, set assignments, give valuable feedback, ... everything.
That last bit would be my advice: find or create a group and hire someone great to lead it.
posted by booth at 8:01 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
Later I got into a group of writers who critiqued each others' work. This group is what made me an actual writer. All older beginner writers, they became trusted friends. (Online crits with strangers has never worked for me.) The best thing about this group was that we hired a leader, a professor at a local university. (Yeah, we paid him.) He knew how to lead a group, set assignments, give valuable feedback, ... everything.
That last bit would be my advice: find or create a group and hire someone great to lead it.
posted by booth at 8:01 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
I've always liked writing, but was usually too busy with day-jobs to make anything but poetry/song-lyrics, brief sketches, and grumpy-letters-to-the-editors.
In my early 40s a couple of things happened: I changed career/lifestyle so I wasn't as depressed/had more head-space, and I got some submissions accepted for part-time side-gigs to write non-fiction (book reviews & art journalism) not lucrative but fun writing times!
After a few years both journalist gigs ended at the same time (one journal folded and the other one got a new editor that didn't like my jazzy style). Aside from submitting a few reviews to places that didn't go far, I just switched over to start experimenting with short fiction. Like my non-fiction, it was conceptual, simply exploring where an idea or theme would go if I felt that it had some promise ("the factual depiction of imaginary realms")...
A few years later I had completed in my spare time a dozen short stories and a novella (a long short story that just followed what happened next to the protagonist for 3 more chapters). They weren't terrible stories, but they were quirky and not really commercial in nature, which is fine. The thing that I mostly didn't like is that I wasn't able to quite capture that rare essence & flow of the fiction of writers that I admired. If I'd honestly felt a destiny to pursue fiction as an art-form, I would have concentrated more and attended some writing workshops, but I wasn't really motivated to continue in that direction.
Then I got distracted with work and personal business, and eventually I didn't go back to writing fiction. Instead I shifted my interests back to music & song-lyrics and went with that mode of expression about narrative. I loaded my old novella onto Kobo for my friends to look at if they were interested.
I personally feel that the important thing for motivation in any art form is curiosity. Any interesting idea or concept that an artist is intrigued by or driven to explore in order to find out where it goes next... it just leads to the next thing...
(my cranky letters-to-the-editor phase just got submerged into the internets, of course)
posted by ovvl at 5:17 PM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
In my early 40s a couple of things happened: I changed career/lifestyle so I wasn't as depressed/had more head-space, and I got some submissions accepted for part-time side-gigs to write non-fiction (book reviews & art journalism) not lucrative but fun writing times!
After a few years both journalist gigs ended at the same time (one journal folded and the other one got a new editor that didn't like my jazzy style). Aside from submitting a few reviews to places that didn't go far, I just switched over to start experimenting with short fiction. Like my non-fiction, it was conceptual, simply exploring where an idea or theme would go if I felt that it had some promise ("the factual depiction of imaginary realms")...
A few years later I had completed in my spare time a dozen short stories and a novella (a long short story that just followed what happened next to the protagonist for 3 more chapters). They weren't terrible stories, but they were quirky and not really commercial in nature, which is fine. The thing that I mostly didn't like is that I wasn't able to quite capture that rare essence & flow of the fiction of writers that I admired. If I'd honestly felt a destiny to pursue fiction as an art-form, I would have concentrated more and attended some writing workshops, but I wasn't really motivated to continue in that direction.
Then I got distracted with work and personal business, and eventually I didn't go back to writing fiction. Instead I shifted my interests back to music & song-lyrics and went with that mode of expression about narrative. I loaded my old novella onto Kobo for my friends to look at if they were interested.
I personally feel that the important thing for motivation in any art form is curiosity. Any interesting idea or concept that an artist is intrigued by or driven to explore in order to find out where it goes next... it just leads to the next thing...
(my cranky letters-to-the-editor phase just got submerged into the internets, of course)
posted by ovvl at 5:17 PM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
It was that, enjoying the company of characters I liked, that finally got me writing. Today, it's no more than that, thinking about interesting personalities that I'd like and finding excuses to spend time with them.
posted by SPrintF at 5:21 PM on January 2, 2021 [5 favorites]