Advice From A Newbie Writer 8: Love your writing

 Love your writing

The people that are saying, "Well, duh" --good for you. Sure, we've all gone back and said, "Oh, this writing sucks." Congratulations, you've just leveled up. That's why writing is so amazing; you can see visible progress whenever you look back. You know how you've improved and in what areas. It's so rewarding in that sense and has one of the best feedbacks for improvement of any other area of work. You reach a point where you start finding less and less newbie mistakes in your work because you're learning, and your newer stuff is showing that. That's such an amazing feeling!

I actually started this whole Advice From a Newbie monster post because I was going back through a story I had written last October and found a pattern in the mistakes I was catching. I thought it might be useful to itemise these mistakes as well as go over some things I've seen with other newbie authors or with my work when I was really REALLY a newbie nine years ago. Even four years ago. Hey, even last October. We're never done improving.

One alarming thing I found was the existence of people that genuinely hated their work. While a little self-doubt and flexibility keeps you from turning into an arrogant asshole, I also know people who hate their writing. They can't look at it, they say terrible things about it. If you don't support your work, who will? Writing is like your child, it is born from you and represents so much of who you are, your thoughts, and how you see the world. (Now you can explain how that PWP is actually a deep philosophical analysis of geopolitical zeitgeist and the situation in the Middle East.)

If you say you hate hate hate your writing, it's self-harming and self-hating, and you should always love yourself. This was a pretty hard lesson for me to learn, and I'm not there yet either, but I'm trying. Now, I may still not be comfortable with who I am, but I love what I write. There's no other way writers can sit down during their valuable free time* and hammer away at their keyboards for little or no foreseeable gain.

 

I used to hide my writing, but now I proudly tell people that I write as a hobby. (When RL people ask to see my writing, however, I still say "haha what writing?" because however expressive I am on the interwebs, I am still a very secretive person in many ways in real life.) I write every day. I love that it's a part of me and represents a bit of my personality. This is part of the reason I work so hard at it. This is why you should work hard at it! I hope you've either learned something from these posts or you've disagreed with something. I just hope I've given you things to think about and perhaps to blog about as well. I wish you the very best in your literary endeavours.

 

 

* For me, this is at night when I should be sleeping. The Professor's Wife was all written between 1-5 in the morning, a little bit every day for 5 weeks. As a computer science major, this is also when I coded. I crashed hard.

 

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30 Days of Fanfiction Writing Meme

 Taken from angstbunny  . Yay.

1 – How did you first get into writing fanfic, and what was the first fandom you wrote for? What do you think it was about that fandom that pulled you in?

2 – Name the fandoms you've written in, and how much you've written in that fandom, and if you still write in it.

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