First of all, unless you're being paid to write things a certain way (ie. someone who writes tie-in fiction for franchises like Star Trek) or you're part of a cooperative storytelling group that has a master plan all set out (I don't know how strict or loose the DYOS material has been lately), create to please yourself. Your take on the material might not be someone else's take. If they like it, great. If not, they should have the courtesy to say why - in a constructive way. That's one of the rules of the Iron Pen competitions in A&E, btw. The readers are not required to like a story, but if they choose to offer feedback, it has to be constructive and courteous. "This sucks" is not acceptable. "I didn't like this because ______ and I think it could be improved by ________" is a much better way of critiquing someone's work (or of course "I like this because _______" is great, too).
All too often I've sat here while the clock ticks down to the start of NaNoWriMo and sometimes I haven't had a clue what I wanted to write. More Fighting Fantasy? More Hulzein Saga? Try a Star Trek story? It's helped to just sit back and let my thoughts go where they will, and sometimes an idea will just pop into my head and I'll go with that.
This year's Camp NaNoWriMo projects came about because of a series of games I've played over the years, about characters who work as park rangers and cruise ship employees (the same company puts out the Park Ranger, Cruise Director, and Christmas Wonderland games and there are about a dozen characters that cross over among them). Finally, after some conversations with some fellow gamers who noticed the same quirks I did and started speculating about what kind of in-game reasons there could be, I decided to write a story - partly to explain these odd things.
So next thing I know, I'm doing research about how national parks are run, fleshing out the scenes in the games, creating new characters and relationships among the original characters, and have been taking suggestions to explain why there's a pepperoni pizza sitting on top of an abandoned mine shaft in the first Park Ranger game. And I can't wait to try to figure out how the game takes place in Washington state but one of the scenes takes place in Jasper National Park, Alberta (the developers evidently didn't care that Canadian gamers would see the background of Maligne Lake and say, "Waitaminute...").
Where I'm going with this is that whatever you do should be fun for you, most of all. A few of the people over at Pond Friends forum have asked if my stories are available to read online, and I've told them no, not yet. I have a long way to go before things get to that point - they have to be finished and edited, and it's going to take at least a couple of years, at a conservative guesstimate. At least if I just do it during the three months of the year when NaNoWriMo is going on. But even if I never get to the point where they're ready to post, at least I've been having fun.
Exactly. I've seen all too many people who try to tackle NaNoWriMo start out with the best of intentions, but they crash and burn a few days in. They figure that "even if I don't do much during the week, I'll catch up on the weekend"... and when the weekend comes they get distracted, and on Monday they post a message to say they're dropping out.
The key is to make a plan and pace yourself. One of the main goals of NaNoWriMo (and this has been expanded to include comic books, so DYOS would qualify as a NaNoWriMo project) is to get participants in the habit of writing something every day. If you can at least get that far, the rest will follow later.
By making a plan and sticking to it, I've consistently met and exceeded my target goals for the past three years. This past July was a tough one; summer is definitely not the best time of year for me to sit here and think up creative stuff, but I just told myself, "You have to do at least 400 words today. They don't have to be good words, but you have to make at least that much progress."
By the end of the 30 days I'd exceeded the target goal by 5054 words. That's not a lot to some people (Synsensa and Luckymoose, I'm looking at you), but for me it's a result consistent with the past couple of years' worth of Camp NaNoWriMo contests. So now that I know I can do that, next year I'm going to make it a bit harder.
I have no patience with people who sneer at fanfic. Some of the best SF/F writers got their start with fanfic. Diane Duane did, and she's one of the best of the Original Series Star Trek pro novelists. Some well-known fantasy authors got their start writing Darkover fanfiction, branched out to short stories for professional anthologies, and then went on to novels.The Arts & Entertainment sub-forum here would be a more appropriate place for this
or http://ideasarelikestars.com/
You're basically are me 9 years ago.
The way I broke my writers block & got positive feedback was to do the one thing writing instructors rail against, I got into fan fiction. https://www.fanfiction.net/ I used-the-crutch of utilizing someone else's characters and settings. My first story was to take Casablanca and tell it from Yvette's point of view [she was being blackmailed by the Nazis into being a spy for them]. It took me quite awhile* to find the confidence & skills necessary to try something original. I still often fall back into writing parodies [which are exemptions to copyright protection].
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* "quite awhile" > e.g. 50,000 words of "Pirates of the Caribbean" fanfics.
There's nothing wrong with writing fanfic as long as you're aware that it's a hobby. Sure, some people write it and tweak it to the point where it can be published. Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfic (no, I haven't read it and have even less knowledge of Twilight). There's a TV series called Outlander that's based on a series of novels that were inspired by Diana Gabaldon's Doctor Who fantasies about the character of Jamie McCrimmon. I'm working my way through the novels and when I have time I pop over to fanfiction.net to see what new fanfic stories have been posted (they're based on the TV show).
The hardest part of any creative project is figuring out where to start.
