First Post and Writing Process

Every writer has a different process when it comes to turning ideas into words and mine has definitely evolved and changed over my life. When I was a kid I would write into notebooks until my wrist hurt, ideas and stories that evolved every second. I never knew where a story was going when I first started writing it. The first time I remember ever plotting a story out was when a friend and I decided to write a story together in fifth grade. Obviously when you’re collaborating you can’t really do whatever you want as it has to kind of make sense. So together we sat down and planned out the general story, characters, and setting. After that we traded notebooks back and forth while we wrote chapter by chapter. 

Since then things have changed. The longest piece of work I’ve ever written was unfortunately a story I started in middle school and completed in early high school. It’s 58,000 words and still sitting in my Google Drive. At the time I was going through the regular adolescent mood swings so I would essentially open up the document whenever I was feeling particularly upset and just start writing. It was a love story of sorts between two characters who were deeply depressed. My friends at the time insisted I include them in it, so the story sort of evolved to also include all these wacky side characters going through whatever random plot my friends requested for their character. 

After completing that I played around with different story ideas, trying to find the next thing I was passionate about. I even went through a brief screenwriting phase where I realized I actually didn’t know the first thing about writing outside of prose. However, to my continued disappointment I still haven’t found the next big project that occupies my mind and calls me to just sit and write it. Sometimes I think my new writing process has something to do with that. 

In university I found writing especially difficult during my first year. I was on a fantasy romance kick and found dramatic sweeping declarations of love profound. But I didn’t think I was very good at writing that sort of thing. Overall, I found it majorly cliche and like I didn’t really have anything to say with my writing, I was just trying to hit a pretty one-liner like the ones that those Instagram accounts would repost. I also really liked vampires. I loved the idea of a vampiric romance, of two characters falling in and out of love over centuries of time. But I still couldn’t get that to work for me. Nothing from that first year was particularly well written or impressive. 

Second year was when I started to hit something better. I began to think a lot more about metaphors. This seems ridiculous but thinking about metaphors in a different sense really changed my perspective. When I was going through something in my personal life I started to think about what could better represent it in a more fantastical sense, and what the story behind that would be. I wrote two very short stories called Love Bites and Haunted. Love Bites was about a cemetery caretaker who becomes the victim of a ghoul wearing the mask of his deceased wife, and Haunted was about a recently divorced woman living in her ex's old home being haunted by a female spectre. This was the first time I started writing about monsters and creatures as stand-ins for things I was thinking about, dealing with, or just common issues. I started to think through a more gothic literary sense. 

Third year was when I started working on my personal project which became a vampiric story about age and the toxic self-care I saw online. I was having a particularly difficult time that year with cystic acne which may have also been the driving cause behind this story regarding beauty standards. I really enjoyed the project and thought it went well.

Now in my Master’s I am working on another monster story. This one is a bit more complicated and thought out, and so far I have written approximately 1,000 words. This is where I feel my new writing process gets in my way.

When I was a kid and writing for fun I would just open the document and start flying. I would put whatever I could think of and the next chapter was a mystery to everyone including myself. Now I break every scene down. I set the destination and all the stops and I essentially work to fill it in.

This works for me in the sense that I have a full understanding of my story. I know where I’m going and I feel confident in it. But actually writing it is so hard. I’m so scared of stepping out of order and screwing up my planned out narrative, and I’m especially scared of writing something bad. I’m so excited and passionate about my idea and a fear that I can’t do it justice is so persistent in my daily life. There’s more pressure now too. Beyond just it being a project for my Master’s degree, I have an audience of like-minded people. Other people who have worked hard at their writing and find themselves taking the program, and talented professors who have seen lots of writing. When I was younger my audience was other teenagers who weren’t interested in writing the same way I was, so obviously a lot of the stuff I did at the time was impressive. 

Now everyone is equally passionate and my peers are all extraordinarily talented. The Master’s program especially allows much more insight into everyone's project as it is essentially a group effort. We all share our ideas and our progress and we watch each other's stories form over time and provide feedback. Now while writing this blog post I find myself thinking about the lack of writing sitting in my Google Docs document titled ‘Untitled’. 

I don’t have a solution for this problem. I can make as many Pinterest boards and Spotify playlists as I want to try and get myself in the mood to write, but I really can’t bring myself to actually do it until I feel ready. I live in a world of my own creation where everything I write needs to come out perfect or I’m a failure. Which is obviously ridiculous. 

So that’s my current problem. I’ll probably write more posts about my project in more detail, how it’s going, and the other problems with it I’ll inevitably come across. So at the moment it’s the end of January, classes have yet to start back up again, and I am sitting at exactly 1,123 words. However, I finalized all three acts of the story earlier this week. So I am all planned out. Yay! Stay tuned.