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< a question for the writers

~starbreaker

how did you get started with creative writing?

It wasn't by choice. I got put into an "elective" creative writing class in my last year of high school. I didn't want to be there; I still wanted to be a musician and never mind that American heavy metal bands had no use for an electric viola in the mid-1990s. But after a while I got it into my head that I would just go with it and fuck with the instructor, who had no use for any sort of genre fiction that wasn't modernist realism in the traditions of Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Mailer -- and never mind that their idea of "literature" was also genre fiction.

I ended up turning in as my final project a pulpy af fantasy story about a metalhead who puts heaven and hell alike to the sword because God decided that the day of Armageddon would be the day he finally got to see Iron Maiden. He had some help from the Lead Bodhisattva, who lent him a sword forged from antichristium, element 666.

It got me a F, which I probably deserved since it made The Eye of Argon look like The Book of the New Sun, but the instructor also added some commentary that pissed me off enough that I decided to keep writing partly to spite them, including the phrase, "If you ever publish anything I'll damned well eat it."

So, when I finally published a novel via a small press, I sent them a copy and a jar of Grey Poupon.

its not a lack of creativity or anything like that, my head is full of worlds and stories and all that fun stuff, it feels more like an inability to convert those thoughts from my brain into text.

Welcome to my life, even though I've been writing since I was 17.

have you any tips? is this something all writers feel sometimes or is it something that is less common? i want to share these stories but i can barely write 10 words about them.

I've got a blog post from 2021 that might help you. It's got a bunch of questions that I use to develop characters, and I start with the "bad guys".

"starbreaker.org: Questions For Your Cast"

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~detritus wrote:

based