The best advice really is to just write. Write badly - purple prose, stilted conversations, rambling descriptions. Don’t delete it, pass go, take your $200, save all your garbage in a big folder. Look at how much you’ve made - it doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect, isn’t polished, it was practice. Every time you write you learn a little more, and find another piece of your voice.
“If you’re only going to write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist — because you’re going to have to make your word count today, and those words aren’t going to wait for you, whether you’re inspired or not. So you have to write when you’re not “inspired.” … And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year later, you’re going to look back and you’re not going to remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to be written.”
- Neil Gaiman
this made me realize i was literally just using inspiration as an excuse to procrastinate
me sitting here today thinking how much i don’t want to finish off the kidfic sequel bc wehhhhhhhh getting slapped in the face with this post
‘WRITE IT BADLY. Write it badly, write it badly, write it badly, write it badly. Stop what you’re doing, open a Word document, put a pencil on some paper, just get the idea out of your head. Let it be good later. Write it down now. Otherwise it will die in there.’
— Brandon Sanderson on overcoming writer’s block to create a first draft as a professional author (quoted in this tumblr post here)
‘Writing tip of the day: it is perfectly acceptable, when working on a scene that vexes you, to write “DUMBEST VERSION” along the top of the page and start from there. As I, a human who has been writing professionally for 25 years, just did. Give yourself permission to suck.‘
— John Rogers (on his twitter here)
