Any tips for creative writing besides 'write a lot'?

learn to think sideways.

being a successful writer is about finding your most efficient process to writing

the only way to discover that is to write
there are no short-cuts or quick fixes

B.I.C. - Butt In Chair
set some hours aside to only write, if you can't control yourself on your PC, get a classic typewriter, used ones are cheap af

that's it my dude, sink or swim

OK here's the secret. You have to drink cum and then your writing improves. Doesn't have to be your own but if you do this it'll turn you into a Joyce or Dosto or someone like that.
This is a big secret so take this down before those who want to keep the secret technique to themselves have my post deleted.

My band teacher ways said "practice doesnt make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect"

look man, here's some cold hard truth

if you spend over 24hours practicing, and you don't have something that hypes you or the people you show it to (even your mom, watch for fake mom hype) then you're probably not cut out

good enough? 24hrs of practice isn't hard to ask

There is no relation between being creative and writing.

You can write without being creative.

And

You can be creative without writing.

Write even more

who is this boomer consumer?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_writing

fuck ive been looking for this girl for ages what's her name

write about shit that matters to you

Read style manuals, reference books, and even how-tos on writing. Right now I am reading Steven Pinker's Sense of Style. t.b.h. it isn't telling me much I don't already know (I can just grammar check my shit on revision) and it's only interesting because Pinker is a psycholinguist so he comes at the issue scientifically, versus older dogmatic material like Strunk & White (even if he is a bit of a fedoric humanist memer).

The interesting thing he notes though is that he asked a bunch of successful authors what style manuals or reference materials they read, and most said "none". So does that mean great authors ignore all advice and write by Being Urself? Maybe Oscar Wilde is right and most things worth knowing can't be taught, but I'm skeptical. I think what Pinker's survey might illustrate is that people just ignore writing instruction because it's too crass, Real Authors just know what to do maaaan. But then you look at most published fiction and it's all shit, so it makes you wonder if the golden guys are just rare geniuses, or if people are being idiots by ignoring writing instruction and trying to reinvent the wheel. Pinker seems to think it's the latter, and I take that gamble because I have nothing to lose and I enjoy writing anyway. It's a better gamble than just hoping you are a savant.

It depends on what you'd want to write. If you want to train your writing like a skill, then do that, which would mean most of all: repetition, constantly checking your progress, ironing out your mistakes and weaknesses and so forth.

I would argue that this isn't entirely possible because at the heart of writing lies creativitiy and something that isn't just memory (muscle or otherwise). Treat it like prayer. Every evening, as a duty, write something that relates your own experience to a higher idea.

If you're not a savant, your writing is almost worthless anyways.

t. Ezra Pound

well ezra a person can either choose to just give up because pessimism says most writing is shit and so will yours be, or just do it because quitting is for faggots. the irony is that if actually good authors believed the stats they would never try. successful authors are people who don't give a shit about the odds, just be irrational and hope for the best. #yolo

you're a great mind, my friend

How do you guys name your characters?
I am finding this the hardest part in developing a character

>Vonnegut didn't do shit
He wrote about being a prisoner to the Germans that felt scared and helpless about the war, and he 100% did that. He didn't pretend to be an action hero and was actively against portraying soldiers in that light.

i go through random peoples friends list on fb until i find a name i like or someone who kinda looks like the initial image of the char in my head

>His background and nationality are left undisclosed and largely open to speculation. When writer Cormac McCarthy visited the set, the actors inquired about Chigurh's background and the symbolic significance of his name. McCarthy simply replied "I just thought it was a cool name."[2]

I was trying to figure out Anton Chigurh's background, turns out it's nothing. A cool name is probably more important than a meaningful name because how many people are actually going to try to find the significance behind it? Does it really matter much? Maybe you think of a cool name first, then as you are writing, the name itself makes some decisions for you. I always name my characters on the first page instead of giving them a placeholder. If you have a guy named Jack, maybe later in the story that was his grandpa's name who is named after some real life war hero. That general or whoever's story then influences the story's themes as you are writing. There, now your story has history and symbolism that can guide your creative process and generate the story itself in a way. Hopefully done in a non-contrived/cheesy way of course.

finish what you start

>you're not going to get that WWI/WWII experience that you crave
lol such a brainwash, it was shit back then too, but later everyone tells heroic stories to justify their time there.

I'm glad you woke up though

"Soldiering is 99% standing around and cleaning" has been a meme since antiquity, you aint saying anything new pal. The world wars were still remarkable in that the place you might be standing around in was a hellish nightmarescape filled with corpses and constant shelling. Contrast that with the conventional warfare previously, and the asymmetrical warfare after. The world wars were exceptional events. You take your shitpost back right now mister.

>fighting in a cohesive unit of racial kin
>fighting in a multiculti mishmash where your own race and history is demonized
WWII didn't have forced transgender acceptance training and women """soldiers""" fucking everyone in the barracks. Join now and you'll stand at attention alongside negresses taking orders from squatamalans. No, don't pretend for a second things are the same as they were. The only commonality is that we're still dying for Israel.

Write a lot.

I ain't saying anything new at all.

>The world wars were still remarkable in that the place you might be standing around in was a hellish nightmarescape filled with corpses and constant shelling.
Wow, so nice, I crave it so much.

Also, WW just seems special and worse because it took place in Europe and so you care. There is no war like each other, not there nor elsewhere.

You just want to die, but you don't want to die next to someone trans or something, is that it?

I just hope none of you, or me, ever have go to any war.

I thought you were saying that the world wars were just generic war #1,394,003 where people did jack shit and then later wrote about being heroes. But it seems that your actual point is that these authors tried to make the world wars appealing. They didn't though?

Your tactical nihilism has no power here

what the fuck does some sort of racial history have to do on your performance and how is it affected by being in the presence of other people with different levels of melanin?

>But that's such generic bullshit
Oh, sorry, did you want some special secret tip that makes you feel unique and gives you your heart's desire?

Nut up, faggot. If you don't write you won't be good. If you constantly write shit then read so you know what good writing looks and sounds like.

If you don't write because you're scared of writing badly, then you'll never have a chance to get good. Getting pissy with people who aren't neurotic cowards when they tell you how to git gud shows how much of a fuck up you are.

For you, my advice would be to give up any dream of being a good writer because you don't want to write, you want to have written (t. Pratchett, a dude with far more confidence, discipline, and drive than you will ever have).

You're onto something, but method and direction arises from reading and writing. You have to develop your own aesthetic laws that highlight what you find important in literature. These cannot be taught, they are highly subjective, highly personal, it's where style arises.

But again this can only come from reading and writing.

Yes clearly there is no inherent animosity or conflict between peoples of different races, and there are absolutely no differences aside from melanin content.

Well if you have writing a lot down, and reading.
Bare with me through the technical words, I'll point you in the right fire later.
I recommend something I'll call semiotic diveristy, which is dependent on prior knowledge of the signs, as well as semiotic density. basically it all depends on the connections you can make and the synergetics (sensu Haken) that emerge from those connections, which in turn act as scaffolding for the higher level processes of abstraction, reasoning, etc that allow for intentionally and the teleological act of creation.
Now this all runs on semiotics, so I recommend you study pierced theory of signs, and the biosemiotic literature, see that (Haken), complexity science and dynamic systems and networks
,before I get into that I'll explain by telling you how it works for me and let you decide if you want to read up. I have always been pretty creative, but I notice things that make me much more creative.
Not just learning but discovering something immediately sets me off and it feeds back with new discovery.
Semiotic diversty. Basically the signs available to you and their functional diversity (what can they mean), connectivity and interrelation (what do they mean in respect to each other)
These signs can be ideas, words, processes, tropes, or things. All are signs, specifically symbols. For my purpose for you i will use signs in the context of qualitative and analytical ecology, biodiversity science and ecosystem science have the machinery to explain this and I am familiar
\THE INTERESTING PART
Basically when I'm out. As I learn the vegetation , history, biology and ecology of the area. Trees cease to become trees, they are specific trees that have there own peculiarities , in relation to specific birds, insects, vegetation , the
Duck it, I'm bored sorry .

phenomenal space lost to roam, gotta get home one way up, climb the familiar stumble over stones, clumsy clairvoyance the path not traveled is shown. It's full of crooks and crannies, that lead you to the wilderness that is your home.

Okay now that was shit I know , but to be fair I only read dry analytical material and don't understand poetics grammar. It was also a very difficult topic i was trying to explain creatively.I barely got the just of it.
I'm creative i promise
Sorry for the post of little value, I was derailed

Absorb a variety of quality fiction/non-fiction books, films, ect... learn to respond to them and form your own opinions, and express them effectively.

Have a life away from those as well. Live.

Also, the most important to thing to note is that Reading and Writing are two sides of the same coin. They are reciprocal activities which will only be improved with a ton of practice.

pls respond who is this cock cabinet

Straight up sexism... sad.

I really can't comprehend the mental gymnastics /pol/tards have to go through to be completely incapable of discussing anything at all without relating it to whiteness
Do you just seethe every time you walk down the street and see a brown person? Is every day nothing but impotent anger for you?

Shelbea West

Honestly you're asking such a broad question that I know you don't even know if you want to write or not. Stop looking for permission, and come with some concrete questions.

This

write a lot more

seriously, you can't just consider a narrative as a series of points from one place to another. even minor characters should have their ambitions, and if you're not careful, the little bastards can take over the entire story.

Fuck this is whu I cant create a story

I get so fucking distracted by the order of information, like are the emotions or is the physical setting more important?

Depends on the aesthetic effect you are trying to create. Depends on the experience of the characters. Being overly literal and physically temporally rooted is the biggest mistake of the pleb writer. Literary storytelling is not bound by space or time and yet most people today end up doing little more than describing movies they play in their head.

>he fell for the join a war meme

kek

Analyze and Imitate.

Take your favourite writer and study how they write. What makes their writing so great? What do you notice that they do that makes them better than other writers?

Then you should try and imitate to the best of your ability your preferred writing style, write about mundane things like an apple for example, in order to strenghten your creativity. You could make a short story about Genesis, Roman and Greek Gods, apple farmers or something. Do this everyday to strengthen your ability to get in the writing flow more often.

Good luck with your writing!!

Pick an artistic medium that isn't outdated and dead

Never be so embarrassed to ask for criticism

Realize that aesthetics are subjective and arbitrary, and don't let people's criticism cramp your style and identity

Ask yourself "What do I wish more people understood?" and contrive a narrative that shows people this knowledge the same why your life showed you that knowledge, without telling them in so many words.

If you think your vocab is bad, use a thesaurus, just don't overdo it.

Use alliteration, assonance, consonance and other aesthetic devices to give your story style, but don't overdo it.

Be minimalistic if that's your thing.

Understand that you probably aren't going to get published. Just write for yourself until you know you have something special.

>Do you just seethe every time you walk down the street
Can't believe people forgot about these classic gems

>Never be so embarrassed to ask for criticism
where do you go for criticism? anytime i post work in one of the active critique threads on Veeky Forums i get ignored :c

I F U G G I N L O V E R E D H E A D S

Dan Harmon's Story Circle.

>Treat it like prayer
>write something that relates your own experience to a higher idea

Thank you

I fucking hate the "just write xd" thing

Yes of course its true, but the way it pushes in front of any and all technical or material advice ("overthinking") infuriates me

Its also pathetic how many in the writing field seem to require monumental encouragement to perform the hobby's most basic function. What other sub cultures are like this?

Its like telling a beginner weightlifter to "just lift xd" when really they need a solid routine, diet, to watch videos and develop proper form.

If anything, i think most people need to "just read". You can almost always trace poor writing ability back to poor reading habits. If you consider yourself a serious writer, you should be reading anything and everything. Theres mountains of writing waiting to be mined for technique, aesthetic and vocabilary for your benefit. Your like a general preparing for a battle - you should be fucking poring over the battle plans of old for the slightest scrap of advantage.

To your weightlifting metaphor: almost everyone wants to look good naked, significantly less want to stay on boring but big program for a couple of years. Most people's issue isn't finding out proper form, or diet info, which is all a simple google search away, but rather people lack determination, grit, and mental endurance. This is same for writers. Read and write everyday is BBB for writers. Sure you could focus on specific techniques like free indirect style or minimalism or w/e, but ultimately if you're a faggot who is on here asking how to get better it is because you lack the masculine virtues needed to succeed in any craft

Who dis?

Read a lot.