I've heard it said that "there is no such thing as good writing, only good editing". I've never tried to write anything for publication, but I certainly do know the feeling of being halfway through writing something and already realizing it needs to be reworked. Inspiration by itself is never enough.

That's so true. A good idea or even a well-laid plan for a scene is only ever the first step. Actually writing it down and editing it time and time again until it actually fits is the real work that needs to go into it. But I just keep reminding myself that scrapping parts and reworking them better is simply a necessary step of the whole. Getting paralysed by trying to get it perfect the first time and never starting in the first place is worse than having to discrad parts of your previous work.

Trying to get it perfect the first time would be missing the point, I think. It's a living thing that grows and changes, and sometimes that means shedding its skin.

Hahahaha, meanwhile I see the inverse of that. Writing is fun. Just getting to come up with ideas and lose myself within paragraphs of words. Sure, I will have to drop them in the editing filter 3 or 4 times to ensure it can be comprehended but there's nothing like it.

Meanwhile I can't understand drawing. Sure I do lines and the basic 3 shapes with not much issues but having to also learn 3d shapes, perspectives, color theory, anatomy. I look at that and just see a mountain ahead of me in an attempt to climb. Mind you, I still want to learn it just like I want to learn writing but it feels like two different gears for them.

Also also, for the music packs I may say to look around at fanatical as well since they tend to drop music packs as well. I know there's a bigger database for royalty free music as well but sadly I don't know of it exactly.

With that said, just keep on keeping on!

Haha, yeah, at the end of the day it's mostly just a matter of practice. I don't really think one is inherently more difficult than the other, but I am of course much more practiced in drawing. I am sure it will get easier eventually. Just gotta keep at it and remember to have fun!

Fanatical is a really good tipp, thank you! I had no idea that existed, but it looks like just the thing I was looking for. Thank you very much!

Writing and drawing does look like they have the same difficulties, so I respect both of them.

Drawers have one benefit than writers, if drawers have the right tool, it can make corrections go easier and faster, but writers have to spend more time looking for corrections.

Yeah, I don't think one is inherently harder than the other. I was mostly talking from my own perspective here, being more practiced in drawing as well.

And yeah, digital art can make corrections quite easy if you know how to set up your layer structure and keep things nice and ordered. That is something of an advantage.

Art and story are such a good combination for transformations.

Y~up. Writing requires a lot of focus. And for me, mood is important as well. For instance, the past couple of weeks were completely unproductive for health reasons (physical, then mental).

I found that writing a lot of preparatory notes help a lot, as well as giving your work to friends for review/proofreading. I have the luck of having a couple acquaintances who give very good feedback.
Also, you should not hesitate to stop and redo what you are doing if you feel like it's getting nowhere.

Looking for art or other media for inspiration is a double-edged sword. Sometimes, you find something that helps a lot. Sometimes you get distracted. And sometimes, you feel like the other person did what you wanted to do, but better, so you become demotivated.

I'm sorry to hear that. i hope your health improves soon and you can get back to enjoying your hobbies.

Those are some good tipps though. I should definitely get better about sharing my progress with friends, especially the ones who aren't afraid to actually criticize what I write. Thanks for reminding me!

And yes, looking for inspiration is something I also need to do more actively. I gotta admit, as a fan of interactive media, most of my inspiration comes from video game writing, which is probably quite different to novels or other forms of stories.

Thanks. Health is already better. Motivation is slowly coming back, although that will probably come with a major rewrite of the story I am working on, as there are some aspects I have ended up being unsatisfied with.

Getting inspiration from video games is a good thing, if you do a VN. They usually use more concise narration and dialogue, because of the format.

One more piece of advice I can give you is: quantity does not always equate quality. Sometimes, too much detail, narration, or exposition is detrimental to your story's pace.
Giving too much exposition or writing too much dialogue is a fault I often commit myself.

I also feel like I should write less explicit and less detailed sex scenes, as they are the most difficult part, everytime. The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking that I can't beat visual media at this game anyway.

Part of the level of ease may be what you've had practice doing. You've probably spent hundreds
(if not thousands) of hours drawing, but may only have spent a fraction of that writing for the sake of writing. I believe that with practice, it gets easier to shift into the writing mindset. In addition, you may eventually find you don't require as specific an environment to work in.

A few random notes on how I work -
[*] While writing, there may be a plot point that I want to have occur at a particular place in the story. However, I may not have the time or be in a mood to write it. In those circumstances, I'll literally drop a bullet point (or few) into the story detailing what's supposed to be there. Complex notes may span multiple bullet points, either sequentially or nested.
[*] If there's a less structured sense of 'something needs to be here', I'll insert a <break> note as a reminder.
[*] If I want to leave a note to myself about something to fix later, I'll insert something like <fixme: Whatever> close to where the fix is needed so I don't forget it.
[*] If I decide that something needs to be rewritten, I'll surround it with <scrap> </scrap> tags. This allows for the content to be referenced and repurposed while the rewrite occurs.

Oh certainly! I don't really believe that drawing is inherently easier than writing. I am pretty sure it's all a matter of practice and that people who write more often will have an easier time of getting into work-mode.

And thank you for those tipps too. Since I have to write in python so my text can be interpreted by the game engine later on, there are actually a couple in-built functions to leave comments to yourself. I really just need to get into the habit of making better use of those. And since some of the scenes can take place in a different order (or not at all) depending on what the player is doing, it kind of requires a more free-form approach to scene structure already. I'll really consider making use of those tags you suggested though. Those seem really useful.

The 'big' idea behind the tags is just to have a structured way of leaving notes for yourself that you can quickly find while doing a final editing pass.

I took at quick glance at the Ren'Py language specification, just so I understood the context you're working in. (I think I actually glanced at it once upon a time in the context of the Occupational Hazards game development.) Given that you're working in a python dialect, I'd tend to suggest the use of comment markers (Hash tags) for notes. A plot point could be denoted with a hash tag followed by an asterisk. If nesting bullet points, just add additional asterisks for indentation. 2-3 empty comments vertically could provide a visual break marker. A fixme would be a hash tag followed by the word fixme, and a scrap section would just be commented out.

(The last couple suggestions mirror practices in the software industry, and depending on your text editor, it may actually highlight fixme notes for you)

Hah! It's true. I've tried both live streams and voice calls. I can't get any work done if I'm also needing to engage with my company at the same time. The writers mind needs a lot of brain power

Yeah, it certainly does. I have found some success with voice calls, but only if I made it clear beforehand that I was doing writing and just looking for some company, and to keep distractions to a minimum. It can work, but you certainly need to commit yourself to it a lot.

Yeah, do appreciate the large swath of text here going over the absolute struggle that is writing ; v ; . I know I'm once again going through that pain as I do every Sunday, the desire to want to write, but gauging the 'will' and the drive to do so. It's the whole reason I can stack up like what is now...30-40 + drawings? (thank you year of no productivity) and not just be able to 'knock them out' like your standard artist if you put your mind to it. 'Writers Block' is a thing but isn't as 'simple' as 'ohh no I can't think of an idea to write'. It's often ohh heck I have to dedicate so much effort to this I just straight up do not have the time to just sit and only do this to get it out, or even the energy to do so.

Why I've 'been on hiatus' the past few weeks myself while dealing with a move, and now acclimating to a new space. Even just that change has made it hard to want to jump on things, and even harder to warrant the energy to do so. It's a whole process, one that one only ever see's the final result.

And while drawing is equally a craft that 'only the final product is seen and not any of the hours that goes into it', drawing after a point can very easily lean on the skills that you've learned to simply 'do it' with whatever you want else keeping your mind engaged. It's very 'motor skill' focused, where as writing, even just going through the motions of a story you've done the outline of countless times, is an entirely massive project as it's never EXACTly the same type of thing. You aren't throwing up the anatomy then drawing out the curves and just doing that on auto pilot, one can't just 'set a scene' with a distraction in the background, you gotta actively envision the scene and fully pick out the details you want to express this time around, what in that scene is important to you, and what angle do you want to focus on? Are you an observer, a background character, a first person narrative that's taking it all in with the reader? There's a vast amount of things to go through and then adapt the style to, and even when you're done you often gotta at least give it one full read through to make sure it all feels like it 'flows' together and there isn't to much repeating to be noticed.

It's a process, one I do deeply enjoy as it's one of the few things in life these days that truly 'takes up my whole mind' and gets me lost in another world, of my own creation no less. But it's also drastically energy and time consuming, and even just one ten to fifteen minute read can take an hour+ to come together. It's a process, one that I do think is rewarding, but there's a reason 'good writing' is something that's VERY hard to come across especially in this day and age of the internet ; v ; .

(yippy on the progress though! Even if slow! Looking forward to the final product!)

I am so happy that over on Xyler's server we started the meme (and by now semi-serious) of "productive sunday". Cause it always seemed like every sunday so many people in our voice call would be coding, game daving, drawing, etc... But on further examination, it kind of makes sense. Weekdays just drain your energy at work, so you're lucky if you can even manage half an hour of creative work in the evening, saturdays are spent being fully spent from 5 consecutive days spent as cogs of the machine, and by sunday you're kind of recovered and ready to go... sometimes. It started out as a bit of a joke, but by now it's genuinely helpful and motivating. Just... not so much for writing, cause it's still a 4-8 person voice call...

But yeah, drawing by now is such an automatism for me. I don't really need to think much about composition, anatomy, lighting, etc. anymore. I got pretty routine processes for all of those by now, so people talking on teh side don't throw me off so much anymore. It probably also has something to do with how the brain processes language, but listening to / writing two seperate conversations at the same time simply doesn't work. Or at least for me it doesn't. So yeah, just gotta set aside the time and fully commit to it for now. Just gotta learn to do that more effectively.

And heck, it's good to hear you're still enjoying it despite the difficulty. I feel like that's part of the point though, things that you have to put time and effort into often end up being so much more rewarding in the end than the oh so prevalent instant gratification sources of our modern age. I am not riffing on those, I know I sure indulge i n them a fair ammount as well. I just think it's important to be cogniscent of that and keep a balance (sometimes by forcing yourself to).

(Weee, thank you! Heck, I am once again feature creeping myself way too much on this, but it's going somewhere at least. Please bap me with a rolled up newspaper every time I get the idea to add more to this project though!)

Yeahhh you basically hit the nail on the head. 'Productive Sundays' happen cause they are the only day of the week that is truly yours. You are recovered enough from the previous week, you CAN do whatever you want usually as you got whatever you needed to done the day before, and now it's time to just, go at it with whatever hours can be spared on your passions.
Like sure, there are some weeks where an hour can get slid in to do a short writing piece during the week, but that's only on rare occasions where the day itself hadn't drained all the energy to begin with. Most of the time, you just want to veg, and thus creativity and personal passion is relegated to Sunday, the one day a week we 'cogs o the machine' get to be ourselves.

I will say you do get better though, at least I feel I did. I know there's probably still errors that can be caught in my writing, but i know to me, at this point my 'first draft' I usually find quite appealing, and I usually just have to do a 'closing clean up proof read' where I edit out as much of the dyslexic mishaps as I can find and shift the wording of a few sentences or interactions here and there. But I've gotten to the point that I finish re-reading a piece of work that I've done and I go 'I just liked that', and that's been nice ; v ; . So I hope you can get to that point as well!

And I do agree, 'unfortunately' in life the stuff that's worth doing is never the easiest! No matter what society and big corporate companies want you to believe to suck all your money and time out of you ; v; . The 'free' stuff is for when the energy is low, you gotta make sure when the energy is high you still do the good things worth doing!

(and of courssse! I'll be sure to do that! And not encourage you to do more, and more, and moooore :3c )

Yup, as with most art forms it's one of those things that just tends to get easier the more you do it. Just happens that writing in particular can be pretty tricky, sometimes needing a confluence of mood and adequate mental mapping for whatever it is you're planning to do.
If you otherwise don't have any ideas, I actually would endorse just really quickly writing a scene about whatever, no matter how short or long, that way you can stumble into something you like, be it a character dynamic or some kind of action or whatever.

Yeah, I am sure that's true. I am not very practised in writing more the dialogue on a comic page, so this is all still quite new to me. It'll probably get easier with time.
I do have a full list of scenes that still need writing. Maybe that's the mistake here, I can always tell how much work there still is ahead of me.

Its been better than 30 years since I last tried my hand at drawing in any sort of even semi-serious way, so maybe I have no leg to stand on here. But I don't know that either one is necessarily easier or harder, so much as it's a matter of experience. Granted, even after writing seriously for half my life or more, I can't focus when a movie's playing or I'm out in public - unless it's a writer's group doing an exercise or something like that. But, most of the time, rough drafts tend to flow off my pen pretty freely and I frequently listen to music. With lyrics even! Though it does have to be music/songs I'm already familiar with, not new stuff where I'm tempted to stop and listen closely.

I'd imagine that, the more you write and the more comfortable you get with it, the more you'll be able to multi-task. You might still not wanna hang out in streams and things while doing it, but practice'll smooth some of it out anyway. And editing can be fun, in its way, too. I sometimes feel like that's where the stories become stories, and more than just a bunch of ideas I threw down on the page.

In any case, I'm really glad you're enjoying it, despite the slight teething troubles, and I hope it'll continue to be a lot of fun for you!

Oh yeah, I wasn't being entirely serious with drawing being so much easier. For me personally it is, but I know that's just because I am a lot more practised in it than writing. I am sure that many people feel it is the other way around. But yeah, that point about conversations or movies in the background is valid I think. I suppose it's something to do with how the brain processes language, I don't think it's made to really process two different texts at the same time.

And yeah, editing is definitely quite a bit of fun. I've come to realize that it involves a lot more than just spellchecking and ironing out some stylistic quirks, it's also there to make sure scenes connect properly, the tone is right, all the relevant info is conveyed, characters act in-character... and sometimes to come to terms with a scene better ending up scrapped entirely. I am still coming to terms with the fact that a first draft is almost never something you actually keep as it is. But it's still a necessary part of the whole process.

And yeah, I am certainly enjoying it. I just need to reflect upon some of the troubles it is giving me and find ways around them. But hey, that in itself is also quite a bit of fun.

I've never been a visual artist, so I can't compare. But yeah, writing can take a lot of focus sometimes, especially when you're just starting out. Of course, I think I can speak for my fellow writers when I say such sacrifices as are made, are made willingly for something we're passionate about. The same, I'm sure, as is true with every other form of art you could name. And some things take more focus than others, too. I can usually hang pretty loose when writing rough drafts. I still don't watch movies or chat with people while writing, but I do usually listen to music and lyrics don't generally bother me unless it's a section I'm really struggling with.

Editing can vary even more. If I have to re-write a significant part of the story, that can take as much focus as writing the rough drafts. Or even more, sometimes. But if I'm just checking it over to make sure my Ts are dotted and my Is are crossed, and I've caught all my typos, it's pretty much a breeze.

I'm happy you're enjoying your foray into writing, and it's awesome that it has given you a great appreciation for what goes into it. Having tried my hand at drawing from time to time, I still stand in awe of anyone who can do it, and make it look so easy, too! And I imagine it takes as much focus and discipline, in its way, as writing does, too. Maybe not in the same way, but you have to have a good eye for design and perspective and just how things go together, that goes far beyond casual observation. Everyone knows what a hand, or a fox, or a car looks like, but it takes a real understanding of the anatomy of them to draw them properly. So don't downplay your talents just because experience, talent and familiarity makes it seem easier to you.

Oh for certain those sacrifices are made willingly. Even if it is giving me a bit of trouble, I still enjoy doing it and exploring this new medium. Drawing is much the same, you also have to go through a lot of practise before you can do it easily. The only real difference I can think of is that writing requires you to process language as well, so conversations or lyrics are probably more distracting. Though I imagine that experienced writers can also blur those out a lot better. I am a very distractible individual...

Yeah, there are certainly different tiers of editing. Spell- and style checking is just one of them. I recently decided to redo the entire intro section of the story because I felt the tone was too goofy and that made it hard to establish any actual stakes later on. If the core of the story is more "you being punished really is kind of just a bureaucratic mishap" rather than "You are in prison because you actually may have done something actually bad" it just makes everything after that seem a lot less significant.

Oh yeah, I wasn't being entirely serious about drawing being so much easier than writing. From my personal perspective it is, but I am well aware that's not objectively true. I do remember all the difficult and sometimes painful years it took me to get to the point where I can now be quite confident in my own drawing skills and style. Even though I still can't draw hands... foxes maybe a bit more so. Especially the ones with tig ol' bitties... Wait, what were we talking about?

The best advice I can offer is make a bulletpoint list of what you want to write/draw and then you can dot the lines more freely connecting those points in the order, space, and pacing you want. I know some artists tend to get lost or lose interest in stories, both words and illustrations, once they've written/drawn the part they wanted to do that the rest feels like catch-up work and filling the lines.

Yeah, that's definitely a trap one can fall into. It is somewhat tempting to skip to "the good parts" and speed through all the necessary connective bits. I do have a list of scenes that I still need to write, but it could be a lot more detailed as to what needs to be conveyed during each individual one. Thank you for the tipps!

Concept: 7 sentences that define Who, Where, Why / How, Goal

Structuring: List chapters, write 5 sentences what should happen in each chapter / what its start and endpoints are.

Supportwork: Make a list of all places and characters. Add relationships. Later on, as you write or at the start, you can make the descriptions more elaborate ( suitable for art of persons & places ).

Start writing: Write the way you enjoy it the most:
Procedurally, i.e. as the book is read,
Highlights, i.e. all the important events first,
Personal Diary, i.e. follow one person first ( in case you have several persons ),
Logbook/Journal, i.e. write the sequences of when the characters arrive at new places or meet new characters for the first time.

I'm sure you're probably sick of unsolicited writing advice by this point, (or maybe you asked, I just woke up and only glanced at your journal here, heh)... so as a randy on the Internet with little writing experience themselves, how about some more? :D

One thing I've noticed from just consuming media as well as studying the subject of Writing Goodly is that it's a good idea to ask questions when a character makes a decision, be it who they choose to fuck or simply picking up a glass of water.

Ask yourself, is this decision informed by previous decisions? Have they made statements in line with what they're choosing to do now? Does this decision contradict previous decisions? Have I properly established why this character is here in this time and place making this decision? Does this decision affect anything I have planned in the future for this character? For other characters?

The more questions you can answer, the stronger your writing. And they don't always have to be answers you've already given your reader. Even a small mystery can be enticing, so long as when it's all said and done you've got your answers ready for the big reveal. Otherwise, if you can't, i.e.: it doesn't make sense after all the information you've provided has been gathered, than your reveal isn't going to be satisfying.

One good example of what I'm talking about being executed poorly is a show that just came out Star Wars The Acolyte. It's one of the first scenes and don't worry, you don't need to know anything about Star Wars to understand what's wrong.

In the scene, an assassin walks up to a Jedi in a crowded dive bar in the middle of the day with the goal of killing the Jedi. Now, already we have the problem of the time and place this assassin has chosen to... assassinate, but that's not what I wanted to highlight. After a brief exchange of dialogue, the assassin starts attacking the people that are sitting with the Jedi who does nothing as they get beat up.

And thus the error. Now, it's not impossible for a Jedi to be in this location, but Jedi are "the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy." Sitting at a dingy bar seems like something more nefariously minded people would be doing but, maybe she's there with friends, only, considering her inaction at the people sitting with her getting beat up, that's not it either, so why was she there? And this only gets worse when you realize that doesn't even matter, someone just walked into the building she's in and started kung fu fighting folks without provocation and a "guardian of peace and justice in the galaxy" stood around and did nothing. Whhhhyyyy???

It's possible later there might be context to better inform the scene but I'm not holding my breath 3 episodes in of a 8 episode season and as it stands it just doesn't make sense why the major characters of the scene are there and the actions they're taking don't add up.

So yeah, try not to do that.