Writing - thou art a hearless BITCH!
It has to be said, I admire any writer capable of churning out their chapters faster than that Skirmisher you were trying to headshot with a Needle Rifle. (Anyone whom has attempted such a thing will understand this horrid anecdote...)

Allow me to put on my rose-coloured spectacles for a moment, I am after all a very nostalgic person. Back in those halcyon days of 2008-9 (the latter of which I consider to be the best year of all time), I was one of those people who could write absolutely anything and have it finished by the end of the week - every spare moment of my time was just writing whatever mindless shit came into my head. Do not judge me from this horrid example of my writing, please!...

Writing - thou art a hearless BITCH!
It has to be said, I admire any writer capable of churning out their chapters faster than that Skirmisher you were trying to headshot with a Needle Rifle. (Anyone whom has attempted such a thing will understand this horrid anecdote...)

Allow me to put on my rose-coloured spectacles for a moment, I am after all a very nostalgic person. Back in those halcyon days of 2008-9 (the latter of which I consider to be the best year of all time), I was one of those people who could write absolutely anything and have it finished by the end of the week - every spare moment of my time was just writing whatever mindless shit came into my head. Do not judge me from this horrid example of my writing, please! ;)

So yes, back in the day there was never any lack of inspiration. So many stories were left untold, so many questions unanswered, and I put myself under the illusion that I was the one who should be the one to answer those questions. But since then, I have discovered that once your writing skills have developed to a point where you can call yourself 'decent', you will never be happy with the work you've done. There will always be something more to add...

Before, I could round off a fan fiction and say, "YES! It's done! It's fucking awesome! I now look at something I write and start picking it part mercilessly, overcomplicating it with some mad new idea or other that just disrupts the balance of the rest of the story. Like any artist, I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a 'complete' piece of work, couple this with my perfectionist traits and you have a very large dilemma. I can no longer move any further past a prologue...

So what's my solution to this? Well, last summer I went back to some ideas I had been throwing around in 2007-9 and discovered that while what I wrote was awful a lot of the ideas had an interesting premise. These were things I could expand on and dedicate years to building upon, and I was right, I've since created a 30 page long document detailing an entire universe filled with interconnecting ideas, creations of things from characters to the names of the seasons/months/days. Nowhere have I had trouble thinking up a plot, it's all a product of this universe I've created, it has made me realise that when you're telling a story the only thing more important than the characters is the setting and the universe you've established. We are all a product of our time, this should be a heavy focus when writing to help form the basis of the characters you create.

So the moral of this story I suppose is twofold.

1) Ignorance is a virtue with art. You allow yourself to scrawl something down, thinking you're the best writer since Tolkien, and then have other people pick it apart for you to tell you you're shit.

2) Write shit. Write lots of shit because only through learning what you do wrong can you learn how to improve, but don't become your own worst critic because otherwise you'll never be happy with your work.

I hope you've managed to garner something from my inane ramblings, I'm thinking of doing this more often...