I love writing. I love making stories, telling them to whoever listens, writing them down and eventually stash them somewhere. Even though I'm not very good at it, it's something I enjoy. As a kid, I made up complex plots for all the outdoor plays (I don't know what the word is in English, but the ones where you get a bunch of kids together and whack each others with a wooden sword. If the same thing was made with adults, it'd be LARP)

My first writing venture was a fantasy story I wrote when I was 15. I never finished it, but I do have the raw draft somewhere. It was about a young man who rose up the ranks in the military, set in medieval fantasy. Kinda cliché.

And recently I've been getting the itch to write again. I usually "see" images in my head (no, not the insane ones), sort of like scenes from a movie, or a play. Usually I just skip them, but this latest one has been stuck in my head for ages, and maybe it's time to just write it down. Who knows what it ends up being like. Maybe it'll be the first one I actually finish.

Here's a tidbit of what I wrote down not long ago

"Magic corrupts. It devours, it makes you addicted. At first, you'll feel like a God, like the ruler of the universe. Nothing can stop you. Then you'll start seeing things, things that are not there. Or are they there? Maybe they're visions? Maybe they're apparitions from behind the veil?

After that you'll begin to hear voices. Voices that try to command you, teach you, guide you or even seduce you. At first, they're there only when you sleep. Soon they'll start to speak to you when you're awake. Ultimately they will overwhelm and take control of you.

There's no escape, everyone who dabbles in magic, dies.They are slowly taken over by being from somewhere behind the veil, behind the sky. Their bodies are used as vessels, a tool.

Magic is addicting, it will take over you. It cannot be defeated, it cannot be bargained with, it cannot be controlled. Or so the scholars say. What if...

...what if they lied?"

Indeed. What if? :)


It sounds like the beginnings of a fun story.

If you want a recommendation: Write. Write. Rewrite. Write some more. Enjoy it. Love it. Have fun with it. Share it.

Thanks for sharing!

My biggest flaw is that I often feel that what I write is either:

a) stupid
b) poorly written
c) a pile of clichés
d) all of the above

:D

Before the crushing weight of adult responsibilites hit me I used to write quite a bit. I had a few short stories as well as outlines and specific exerpts for longer ones. I had also tried writing a few out in script form as if for a film or play. I even tried my hand at graphic novels, but felt my artisitic style did not convey the right mood. I can't really post or link to anything I have done because it is almost all entirely hand written in spiral bound notebooks. But I can give you the basic gist of a few story ideas I had.

One of my early stories was called Badlands, it was about a tribal village living along a major waterway/river in a post apocolyptic world that is taken over by a band of heavily armed raiders. The raiders intend to establish an outpost and charge fees for safe passage between nearby pockets of budding civilization. There is no law or government, the only men of force outside of the raiders are the militias who defend the newly forming cities. The story focuses on a teenage villager who escaped the attack and is trying to find help in getting his village back.

There was another named Victory and the premise was that an alien force had taken over the earth and wiped out billions of people. It is written by the leader of the last known resitance group about to launch an all out suicide attack on the main alien compound. He doesn't expect to make it back from the battle, nor will any of his people, but he is writing out the history and reason behind what he is about to do on the off chance that there may still be human eyes left to read it later. In my mind there was a fully fleshed out companion story of who the writer is and how he got to this point, but none of it is ever revealed. Instead I made allusions as to the identity of the author by having him say things like "These people turned to me for guidance. Not for who I am though, they hoped my father has passed some of his wisdom on to me. I hated them for assuming upon me the mantle of leadership." I think it is important for characters to have a reason to exist out side of the story.

Recently I have been considering creating one of those Flash based Interactive Fiction/Visual Novel type of games to tell a story. This way I can have multiple story archs and plotlines along with dozens of different endings. It sounds like it would be quite fun. Plus I have had a base idea in the back of my head for a while but could never decide on which direction to take it in. It would be called Derelict and would be the story of the ships doctor on a deep space salvage team. It's a tough job but the pay is good. Then your crew finds a certain derelict ship on the edge of explored space and that is when things get... interesting.

I used to a little sorta kinda, have a couple iv kept to one day finish.
but the mood im in right now probably isnt the best to be able to eloquently explain i dabble. im by no means any good!

Let others decide that. As the author, you have a unique relationship to the material you produce, which makes it impossible to gauge its quality in the same way as a reader would. Usually authors _over_estimate the quality of their output, but the opposite is also true, more often than one might think.

I think it was Raymond Chandler who said something like: you need to write a million words of crap before you get to the good stuff.

I wrote my first novel/novella/thing when I was... about fifteen. I've been trying to rewrite it for the last... well, fifteen years, but I can't be bothered. The base novel was shit, but it does have some great ideas. The bits of the rewrite I've done thus far are considerably better.

I wrote my first proper fantasy novel/novella/thing when I was sixteen. Again, had some good ideas, but was pretty shit.

Since then, I've written odds and sods, and took part in the last two NaNoWriMos. Thanks to NaNo, I've got a couple of novels that I'm actually quite happy with, and although I have no intentions of doing much with them, I've got some decent comments from people I trust to be honest with me. And despite the flaws still in the novel, I discovered there are two things I'm good at: writing something funny, and pacing.

My point is: write because you enjoy it. It doesn't matter how stupid, poorly written, or cliché-ridden it is. If you write a lot, and more importantly read a lot, and can see the flaws in your own work, then you will improve.

And one day, you'll read something back and think "Shit, son, that's pretty damn good".

I write erotic Harry Potter fanfiction.

I kind of like writing, but I just can't commit myself to it, whether academic or fiction. Long essays and proper stories take ages to materialize, and I've practically given up on the latter.

That said, I do write the occasional page or two randomly. Lately it's been about D&D characters from our campaigns, scenarios that the characters supposedly find themselves outside the campaign (non-canon, since many of said characters are now dead). Such stories are ultimately useless, but lately I have used narrative fiction to establish a character in a relevant fashion: instead of overly explaining my latest character's background, I wrote a short story about events immediately before the campaign, and am in the process of creating a few letters that he sent to his twin brother (another player character) some fifteen years previously. I'm liking it a lot: writing is fun enough in its own right, and I think that the character is fleshing out rather well before he is introduced into the campaign, giving me a better idea of how to play.

shouldn't that be Happy Potter then?

As others said below (more or less): who cares? Just have fun doing it. I often get a little more pleasure from writing than playing an RPG. They both feel similar to me in many ways (not just when I'm writing fantasy).

Everyone who has read that trilogy of business-themed weirdrotica (I cannot think of its name for the life of me) has told me that it's filled with grammar and punctuation errors, it's poorly paced and poorly written. But they like the part that they like so much that they love it.

And cliches are awesome. I used cliches and expected allegory conclusions to give the reader some fun twists in The Darkest Wand. Cliches are cliches, but sometimes they're not done for so long that you want to see one. Or you expect to see one and it becomes something else.

Your writing up above wasn't from the fingertips of a prodigy, but I read the whole thing and it was fun. And that's rare. Like a snobby food critic, if I don't like it within a very short time, I spit it out and move on to something else.

There's far too much material to read in the world and far too little time to read it. So read something good. But your writing is rare. So share what you have and you may just please someone or excite their imagination just a little. In the end, that's about the best any author hopes to accomplish anyway. (besides unexpected billionaire fame)

I have sporadic bouts of wanting to write. They can last a few months, but eventually I start to get tired and the idea well starts to run dry and i'll drop it for other hobbies till the itch starts again. I used to write comic book scripts as a hobby, but then having to draw them was a massive time sink and I usually just left the stories in the script phase and never took them to the drawing one. I also wrote stories with a forum group I joined but eventually people there just stopped writing (me included). I've also joined a couple of play by post RPG's, have had a lot of fun on them, but as usual, the inspiration starts to wane and I run out of steam. There's one in particular I really enjoyed and I intend to go back to it at some point, but I'm not feeling all that 'write-y' at the moment.

I have a job that's not all that creative, but I do like doing creative stuff from time to time and writing is the cheapest form of doing that. Plus, it helps me a lot with learning new words in english. I guess these 'writing bouts' happen when i've had my fill of not doing anything creative for a while.

By the way, I write stories that lean a bit towards humor and I like creating characters. I can't do the serious, artistic writing for the life of me, though I've tried. Good prose doesn't come all that easy for me.

I'm kind of the same way.

When the urge hits to write something, it's because I can see it playing out in my head.

That said, I've never finished anything, but I've got a million different pieces, if I could just find some way to tie them all together somehow...

what if, bloody cliffhanger, i want more , i am liking it
what happens next

No.