A bit about writing for the aspiring writer.

Ok so I am a writer as I have mentioned before, I have even showed some brief samples of my work from time to time but do I think I am a good writer? Well that is a little hard to answer because the critic inside of me would love nothing more than to rip myself to shreads. Something I have heard time and time again is that critics merly tear apart that which they can not do, or another way its often put is those who cant teach. With this in mind I do not aim to teach anyone, I merly aim to give them a little food for thought. You see when I decided I wanted to be a writer there was no one much to talk to or nothing I could really read that I could relate to. The stuff written by people who had made it, people who had written books which had ended up in actual print I just couldnt relate to it for some reason maybe they just seemed to big to intimidating in a way. So as a guy who self publishes my own stuff through amazon and who keeps his own blog I thought maybe if I talked about how and why I write from time to time it might help someone else who wants to give it a go, so here goes....

Now the main starting point for writing anything from my point of view is to come up with an idea, it cant just be any idea though it needs to be an idea of the right size. Ok so the first thing your going to ask is what is the right size? Well the right size depends completly on what it is you want to do. If you want to write a short story then the idea can be a very basic tiny one as you dont need anything to complex as your not going to have the time and space to devote to disecting it, if your trying to write a huge novel then your proberbly going to need a bigger idea maybe with some smaller ideas which can serve as sub-plots. Of course if your writing a script the same questions can be asked what size does the idea need to be, are you planning on making a feature length or a short? The only real diffrence with films is you have to ask can I afford that? In a book you can keep the stories backdrop constantly changing with no worries about budget, you can be on a futuristic space station and then an alien planet and as long as you can provide enough written detail to flesh them out and make them feel real then there is no reason not to let your plot take your characters to these places. On the other hand if your writing a script can you or the person your intending to sell the idea to afford the amount and kind of sets that your including, and can you or they realistically do them justice. Of course you might instead be writing for a video game and then you need to stop and think about how much choice you are going to include, if a player is free to make decisions that will alter the outcome of a situation or the player is going to be able to have control over conersational choices then you will have to write extra dialogs and alternative outcomes, so you will need to think about how you can have all these diffrent branches which give at the very least the illusion of choice but still keep your central idea the main focal point.

So what kind of writing have I done? Well I have wrote 2 horror based novels, a lot of short horrror stories, I have also written some erotica and I have wrote a large number of reviews articles and oppinion pieces. So is it easy to get an idea and write? Well yes and no to be honest. I have a lot of ideas for stories and for blog posts but not all of these ideas see the light of day. For every idea I see through to completion there are at least another one or two ideas that I put on the shelf. Do I come back to any of them? A few of them I do, but then I also have ideas that I have sat on for years. Its not just ideas either I have entire files full of semi penned short stories a thousand words here or there that just seems to be going well when it runs head first in to a brick wall.

Long time readers will proberbly notice that I had this big idea of doing 150 SNES reviews an idea which started out strong and then stalled a good few times and is currently in limbo, well there is a reason for this and its the fact that when you take on a big project like that you will find that there are parts of it that you are very passionate about and then parts which are just a bit harder to manage, sometimes you have to push past these and sometimes you just have to take a break and wait for insperation to hit you again. Sometimes you might even have to stop and wonder why you have decided to do a certain something.

I will give you an example of an idea of mine which kind of died on its ass. I was stood waiting for a tram in the rain, now they have these LCD style displays which tell you where the next few trams are headed and how long they are going to be. Now 99% of the time the display is tottally clear but on this particular day the thing was just going nuts, numberss and letters where flashing and dissapearing and reapering and allsorts, I had never seen this happen before. For some reason my brain went to ghosts and I just thought hey wouldnt it be weird if that was a ghost doing that, if it was traveling though the electricity, maybe it would be someone who had been hit by the tram or a car near to that sign and part of them had somehow ended up in there and this was them tryng to communicate. I got home I wrote this down in a wordpad of ideas. Oh I will stop you now and tell you that I think its a very good idea to get either a note pad or a computer file and just write down every little idea you have in it for either a story or a blog post or well anything, then when your stuck for something to do you can kind of come back to this and look if you have anything sat there which will inspire you.

Ok So I think I will leave it there for now.... Basically my first tip would be think about what kind of things you want to write and then just take it naturally see what ideas come to you and think about what you could get out of the idea, never throw an idea away though even if it seems a little crazy or your not quiet sure what to do with it, still start keeping a log of any ideas you have cause you never know when you might want to take another look at one of them.