For me it was advice from Dan Harmon: “Don’t try to prove you’re a good writer, you’ll never write anything. Try to prove you’re a bad writer and you’ll write everything.” Not perfect advice but it really does help me write when I’m being overly critical of my ideas.
I am actually just writing an essay on this, I’m gonna nonchalantly past a couple of paragraphs relevant to the question.
Would it be proper advice if it wasn’t the always present: “Just start”?
It’s one of those simple but hard-to-follow rules that almost every aspect of everyday life things we try to get better at has. Just start is such a good piece of advice, because once you have written something down, you give yourself different reference points to think about under the shower, on the run, or at the store, and all of a sudden you come up with something new that further enriches your text. Its a collection of ideas that come at you randomly. The more often you think about a certain problem you want to write about, the deper you will go. Repeat this over a couple of iterations and you get a well-written collection of words.
What it also gives you is the space to think about these words, to think about the flow, narration, and intention. For the longest time I had a misperception that when you sit down to do something, it has to be done straight away. Some people are just such masterminds that they have a constant flow of good ideas. But then I heard someone famous say that “here’s a song that I worked on for a couple of months” and all of a sudden it made sense, that writing is a process, a chain of iterations.
This first iteration usually won’t be good because each paragraph is still an isolated piece on its own. Imagine the writing as being a color painting. The paragraphs don’t yet have a common color board, each is its own flavor and next to each other they don’t yet taste good. There is no color overflow from one idea to the next one. But when you reread it in a day or two, you can feel the flow of words without having to think too much about it. You are able to see different paragraphs carrying the same idea that can in different order have a much better sound or narration.
Don’t be afraid of bad writing because it is inevitable. But have a process that will improve it as the iterations happen. What I’m looking for when I am creating something is the unique aspect of my idea, something that makes the piece original & interesting. How to turn something boring, that has been said a million times into something interesting. It can be playfulness between sentences, the interlinking between seemingly different paragraphs, or a small ongoing joke through the text that makes it relatable.
Even this pasting over for this comment made the draft of the essay now completely different. I see the unnecessary sentences, and as I had to rephrase a couple of sentences, I see what narration might look better. Hope it makes sense!
This is how I did it. I didn’t even do a proper outline. I had been reading on Royal Road for a few months, and had a couple of ideas burbling in the back of my head. I eventually pulled some together and just started writing. 2k-ish word chapters, initially posting at three times a week (I’ve actually slowed down on the main story, but that’s so I can add additional material and work on other ideas too).
I had a sketch of a campaign setting that I realized this story would attach to very well, which gave me half a dozen deities for my world and a reason to keep expanding.
I’m now past 200k words/over 100 chapters, and no reason to stop. I am enjoying everything about this process. I’d never have been able to do it if I had spent too much timing planning and prepping and outlining. But my story is very character-driven, instead of plot-driven.