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I am worthless, I couldn't write a good article or draft to save my life
The ideas just won't come to me, I don't know where they're hiding. They used to come a long time ago but I was busy in other things, I never felt like writing then.
But today, I want to write, I'm desperate to create oodles of essays and articles about a topic, about anything which is useful. But the ideas have forsaken me as if I'm an alien or disgusting creature.
And I ask you, what is the secret of creating these mind blowing works of writing? How do you convince the inner angels or spirits or whoever that is to let more inspiration flow through your way?
The one thing I'm most afraid of in life is that it could end without me getting to write to my heart's content and desire. What do you suggest I do here?
Write about not having anything to write.
Ideas beget ideas. Having creative ideas is a combination of developed skill, experience, and priming yourself to be creative.
So pick any idea, and develop it a bit, see if that leads to more. Change up the format. Maybe play or develop a table top game scenario, or read one and stream of consciousness a side story, or write a diverging storyline. Or watch the news and write a story based on any topic that strikes your fancy.
As soon as something seems fun, run with it.
Thank you, those are useful ideas.
Most of my skill and experience lies in technical areas like programming and web development, there is very little scope to become creative here me thinks. Either that or I'm not creative enough to see the creativity in there!
What kind of a story though? I need something which should be unique and useful, and not already told about a zillion times. The news idea is appealing yeah. Can you suggest any sources for that? I'm aware of the usual like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc. but I'm not that interested in gadgets. I'm more into programming, logic, history, philosophy, liberal arts and such.
What do you mean by useful? I think when you are trying to develop creatively you just need reps in. You might write a dozen stories for every one that ends up being shared.
Write a story about someone with the b list super power of giving people writers block who uses it on authors who are rude to him at conventions. Or something completely different.
For news, do you like happy, or a broader view? You could write a series of imagined vignettes from the interviews of people going through the Darien gap, or something light-hearted.
I think the key is just to write something even if you think it sucks because that is how you get the faucet going, along with things like brainstorming and steam of consciousness. You rarely just have the idea for a great work. It is iterated over time.
There, you've put the finger on the problem! I'm being too much of a perfectionist here. Unless the idea stands the test of everything like usefulness, likeability, mass approval, etc., I have a habit of rejecting it straightway which isn't a good thing. Maybe I should take the idea and prepare a draft and then work on it to make it more palatable for the audience, is that a better strategy?
Brainstorming is yet another useful tool but again, I'm very much boxed mentally, perhaps by my environment and surroundings. There is something psychically preventing me from fully opening up with ideas and brainstorming limitlessly but I'm unable to put my finger on what that is.
This might be a "wherever you go, there you are" moment. I think you are just putting too much pressure on yourself. It's not about your external space, it's about your internal one and giving yourself permission to be silly, or to write something that sucks. You've got to embrace failure and keep going, not in some bleak grudge match fashion, but with humor. Every bad story is one developed idea to draw on later that will eventually yield a good story.
Thanks, I needed to hear that. I'm going to cultivate a proper writing strategy from now and this post will act like the inspirational shower thought or idea bank to pick from!
I was going to say same the same thing (but not as well). OP's post title seems like a prompt to me!
You've gotten a lot of good advice here thus far, but I want to touch on this. Nearly all books - and we're talking actual published literature, here - don't sell all that well. Most aren't really all that good.
So when you read critically acclaimed, mind-blowing literature, you've got to keep in mind that it is among the best writing in the world. I'm not telling you not to compare yourself to that, but if you do, you need to keep a sense of perspective or you'll go insane. You're basically asking "what is the secret to being Picasso."
More tactically, you can't sit down to write about "anything which is useful" - that topic is so broad that of course you can't think of anything. You need to have a specific thing to write about. Are you really good at something at work, and can write a better manual for how to do it? Did you tell your kids a bedtime story and want to put it to the page?
Whatever it is, once you pick, just start writing. It doesn't matter if it's shit. Writing is a skill like anything else: it takes practice.
Imagine that everything is talking to you all the time, and you've spent your whole life tuning out the noise because you were busy with other things. Your desk has a story, a single line of code has a story, people sitting around you in restaurants have stories, plants, animals, each piece of garbage in your trash can, a molecule of oxygen you've just inhaled, everything that exists has a rich history (and, with a little imagination, an emotional and intellectual life).
And if that view of the world fails to inspire, reread essays and works that you've enjoyed. Ask yourself where the writer may have found inspiration and how they realized it in words.
No offense intended, but are you sure you really want to write?
Don't be hard on yourself. Hell, you just wrote a post snapshotting your situation, history, desires and insecurities. That little work resonated with peoples feelings and it was enough to move them to take action and respond. You put a part of yourself out there because you wanted to, which is more than a lot of people can say. So keep that up.
When it comes to actually writing and developing ideas, there a lot of strategies and techniques to call on. It just requires time and practice to figure out what works for you. But like a lot of people say, the one thing that always works is to write as much as possible. My personal favorite technique is to just say what I see.
Discribe what people are doing, their appearance, thier expressions. Then go a step beyond and imagine their thoughts and motivations. Then paint a story around that. Doesn't need to be some ground breaking work of fiction or even have to be published. You're just training your brain to construct narratives.
Beyond that, try to difine what you want to say and figure out how you manifest those ideas. Some people speak out thier thoughts and make sure to record it. Other people use post-it's or white boards to organize thier thinking. Other people need prompts and templates to jump start their creativity.
I use idea "blocks" and have "bins" to sort out different story elements. In practice that's folders of settings, themes, plots and characters and I like to mix and match them. It works for me writing narrative for games or world building. I don't find it suitable for traditional text storytelling but I'm not particularly interested in that.
But I the end, just keep making thing. Publish it. Get feedback. Even if it's bad, it's still more than what most people do.
Just start writing anything. This is how I used to start papers in grad school when I had no idea where to start, even on really dry topics like international monetary systems. I would literally start off with random shit, e.g:
"Ugh why do I have to write this, this prof is such a hard ass, and international monetary systems are so tiring, I have to write about this thing (boring) and that thing (boringer!) just to make a point about this other thing. This one other other thing is kinda cool though, because...."
And then from there I'd have a reallllly shitty outline, but I could at least start researching one of the "boring" things, and then write about it after I felt comfortable enough with my understanding. Once you get a few paragraphs down about one topic, the others kind of fall into place, as in you know the sequence you want to go through in order to get to your end point....even if the initial topic you started on actually ends up right in the middle of the paper.
You mentioned programming, logic, and philosophy, maybe a fun topic would be what the internet will be like in 10 years after everything is completely enshittified. Is it really gonna just be a bunch of private VIP chat rooms that are invite only from in person meetings in meatspace? How would that be catalyzed safely in terms of programming/authentication? People used to do reddit meetups....now those don't happen so much because there are too many weirdos, would people be willing to go back to that just to gain access to a private chatroom/network?
It sounds to me that you have an inner critic that's stifling you. You said yourself you want to create "mind-blowing" works. That's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. Mind-blowing works of writing can take years to create. Cut yourself some slack.
As someone who has written and published a lot, my advice is to just sit down and let your fingers fly. Don't worry about what's coming out. Just write anything. Stream-of-conscious, even, if it helps you get words on the page. Whenever I write something that's not very good, I just tell myself "I'll fix it in post" and keep moving. If you're unfamiliar with the axiom, "fix it in post" comes from film-making and means that you'll figure out how to make something better in post-production. With writing, that's the editing process. You shoot as much as you can while filming, and then you stitch it together in a more cohesive way afterwards. So write, write, write, and then later on you can make it better.
I don't believe in writer's block. Writer's block is just the writer letting their inner critic rule. And once you realize that your inner critic is an idiot that's simply projecting non-existent judgment upon your process, you can start to see past it and get some real work done.
Just go. Write whatever is in your head right now and keep going. When your mind tells you anything - "this isn't right", "this sounds weird", etc - don't listen to that and just keep writing the words as they come to you. Doesn't matter if it's straight nonsense. It's not a piece of writing you'll be giving to anyone. There is no audience, so quit judging it like it's going to be that. Write freely, with as little constraint as you can manage, and don't stop for anything for about 10 minutes.
That's what I do to get out of a block moment. If I do that for about 10-ish minutes and it doesn't come together into anything I take a break, do something else, and try again later. Let your brain work underneath You, is the way I like to think about it. Its always stitching together information, stringing things together. So I let it rip for a bit and then wait for it to finish up some stitching, so to speak.
Get out of your home. take a walk or whatever. Inspiration is typically found outside.
Also, I can recommend having a routine. Have a fixed time of the day where you do nothing but writing. Two hours or so. No smartphone/internet. If possible, have a single room with a PC you use for nothing but writing.
To me, this is the easiest way to write; I don't have to think about whether I'm inspired or not, or if I actually want to write, or what I may do instead of writing. Also when the two hours are up, I don't have to bother with it anymore. So much less time wasted with being angsty.
Stick with me: ChatGPT.
The other day, I had to write some copy on short notice, late at night, that I did not want to write, and had no energy to write. Still, I have standards. I was reluctant to turn in garbage, as I often receive garbage from others and know well how disappointing it can be. I needed to turn something respectable around quickly and get to bed.
I fired up the ol' LLM and started forming my prompt. As you could predict, the results were not satisfying, so I kept refining the prompt to get rid of the things that I didn't want in the piece. After about 3 rounds of this I knew what I wanted to say and, thanks to ChatGPT, what I didn't want to say.
Shortly thereafter, I had something that I was not embarrassed to send out. It wasn't amazing, but I slept well that night. A win, all told.
My advice is this: try telling an LLM what you want to write about, then eliminate most of what it gives you back to find a thread worth developing. You'll have something you wrote and no one has to know your little secret.
Unless you tell everyone on Tildes.