A brief history.
Bored and inspired, I wrote my first novel when I was 15. It was Final Fantasy VII smashed together with Legend of Zelda and Star Wars. It was pretty bad.
I wrote a bunch of fanfiction and RP posts after that.
In 2007, I decided to write for real. I wrote another novel. I wrote it again. I wrote it again. I knew I had to get better, but I didn't know how, and I knew I wasn't using any of the intentional practice methods I had become so familiar with when I was in music and martial arts.
Writing for Dummies.
No, I didn't actually use "Writing for Dummies." I used "The Secrets" by Michael A. Stackpole.
Yeah, that one. The one that wrote all the Rogue Squadron books.
Back in the 00s, he had a newsletter called "The Secrets" that was all of his writing advice. I bought the back catalogs and then subscribed to the newer issues. I think the last one I got was volume 121. I don't know if he still makes them or not.
I read all 121 one of these things. It was great! It had all of the basics down on how to think of constructing a book, how to construct chapters and characters and worldbuilding. I still use his "blitzkrieg characterization" method and still adhere to his rule that a chapter should be between 2,500 and 3,000 words long (though sometimes I fudge it and go to 2,000.)
But as Uncle Iroh says, wisdom from only one source becomes stale. It was a great introduction to having an orderly way of approaching writing, but I knew I had to grow past it.
I can't remember the exact order, but I know after that I read The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, On Writing by Steven King, and then a bunch of articles by Ray Bradbury which had particular generalizations on how to write (read one essay, one short story, and one poem a day and write one short story a week.) I read the advice from Vonnegut (the 8 rules and his 6 story shapes.) I read a book about NaNoWriMo written by the creator(s?) of NaNoWriMo. I read portions of Hero of a Thousand Faces, but honestly that thing is DENSE.
I read pretty much every blog post I could find on writing advice back in the day. I absorbed all that was out there in the world and tried it all out. I tried the Snowflake Method. I tried the 30 Day Method. I tried the 5 Step Method.
But all this stuff is general. They're broadstrokes of how to do things, or ways to organize your thoughts. It doesn't really teach you how to directly improve on particular skills.
So I just started making my own up.
Practice in Front of An Audience
Andy J. Pizza's Creative Pep Talk talks a lot about practicing your craft in front of an audience. Of course, he didn't exist in that format back in the 00s, so I kinda stumbled into it. I found a place to practice.
A Naruto RP board.
Yep. Naruto.
It's been deleted, which is too bad because I had a lot of stuff written on there, but it was a good place to write a lot and have fun. It was prose-based, so no rules, no stats, etc. If there was a "real" battle, a judge would be assigned to determine if someone went too far in their writing of damage, etc.
As far as I know, though, I was the only one on there that was trying to write and publish books. Most were on there for fun, so I was a lot better than a lot of people. That meant I never had a shortage of people that wanted to write with me, but it also meant I had a lot of people asking me how to improve. But they didn't want Vonnegut's 8 rules, they wanted to know how to write their combat sequences more vividly or how to make more interesting characters. I didn't really know how, I just sort of did it.
So I had to systemize what I was doing so I could teach it to other people.
Teaching someone else is the best way to refine what you do. I wasn't even thinking of going into teaching yet, but I really enjoyed the process.
I did a video/stream a while back on Obvious + Anti-Obvious. This was invented from this time period, when I was trying to explain how to come up with more interesting RP characters.
I went through my Dropbox and I found a bunch of graphics I made to help people improve. I had a battle chart on how to write a battle when the enemy is stronger, weaker, or the same strength as you AND how to write it if the enemy is taking the battle seriously vs non-seriously.
I found a flow-chart I made on how to backwards plot.
I had a rule called "Always the Third Option" where whatever I was thinking of a particular plot options that the third one I made was the best one.
I also did the "52 week project," which is based on Bradbury's advice. I challenged everyone to write a short story based on a prompt every week. I can't remember how far I got - I think I got into the 30s? For some reason, my old Dropbox only has three saved on it. I wonder why I saved those three.
Concluding the Past
I've been working on this post for a few days now, going through all of my old notebooks, trying to find other drills I did. I can remember some, but I didn't keep very good records of stuff. Some of that is probably for the best - I need to be working on new things, not rehashing old ones. I will say that one of the biggest constants in my notebooks is the use of freewriting, which is probably something that merits its own post at some point.
In the meantime, though, I'm grateful for all the work I did in the past, and I all the work I've done to get here. I'm excited to see what my newest methods produce.