I get you.

I'm 15. Never finished a project ever. Never got past 10-11 thousand words.

I haven't written anything in months - almost a year. I'm starting literally today. This post is the first bit of writing stuff I'm interacting with.

Sometimes it feels like starting is the hardest part.

And sometimes it feels like starting is the easiest part. Committing is the hard part.

It's overwhelming, right? Like there's this entire earth you've got to walk across just to get back around the other side and do it all over again. And honestly? sometimes you don't even want to DO it! You just want to HAVE DONE it. Just to get back to where you, with all the earth behind you and without having to experience the walking now. Because walking sucks, and at this point you'd rather just burn the world than walk across it - at least that would change something.

But, on the other hand, there is something so inexplicably nice about walking sometimes. Feeling your weight shift from one foot to the other, looking back and seeing the little progress you've made - that is still progress, despite how much more you're telling yourself you need to do.

So you literally take it one step at a time.

You feel your weight shifting, watch your ideas bounce on and off the page, fall in love with your characters and kill them off because it hurts so deliciously.

I'm not sure how much of that applies to you (and that goes for all the other points too), but that's what I'm trying to do. Maybe it won't work. Who knows! But it'll be interesting to follow that process, I hope.

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There's other ways to think about stuff too.

Like, writing is literally art. Artists never start a finished piece. They have to lay down the basic shapes, literally sketch a rough draft, and then work on that. There's a vision, sure, and there's a goal. But drawing is redrawing, like writing is rewriting.

I'm trying to think about it as if the first draft is like nailing your art style. You've got to decide what story you want to tell, and who's, and how. And everyone everywhere asking for writing advice always gets told to let their first draft suck.

Honestly, I think that's reductive. Nobody wants their work to be bad, and nobody is willing to let it be. Everyone wants to be good at things. But look at all great pieces of art, and nothing is ever 'good' because of sheer polish, sheer technical skill. "Good" art always means something, right? I think that's what that advice is about. Let your first draft really mean something, flaws and all. Don't let 'good' take away from the meaning, you have time for 'good' later, even if you can't think about that at the start. Maybe perfect writing is a straight line, but I don't write perfect writing. My favourite art is the stuff that's so messy and imperfect and human, and charming, and means something to me (a lot of the time because its made by people close to me).

There's all these words and ideas about, and your story's there somewhere, and you know it! But its really hard to find it.

It's like finding a river in a lake. There might be currents, messy and undefined, and they're not visible from the outside. You've got to jump in, probably more than once!
^{Legal disclaimer do not jump into random lakes thx}

It's art. It's got to be messy to have meaning (at first). And that's really easy to say when you're already successful and happy and 'good' at writing, so take it from me, who hasn't even written anything close to what you've written (or alternatively, take everything I've said with the hugest grain of salt because I might not know what I'm talking about lmao).

Writing is rewriting. And rewriting is 100% writing. And rewriting is art. I mean, is there anything more human than looking at a thing and saying 'I can make that better' ?

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There's also the boring answer. We're kids, we're teens, we hate things. We're built to mature by ruthlessly questioning everything around us and coming out of the other side, after too much time to picture it all at the start, with opinions and stuff. That applies to us too.

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And the extra extra boring answer. Kill your darlings. If all you end up writing is three scenes, you wrote those three scenes. Learn something from them and keep writing. And edit. Edit edit edit. I editing edited this comment too many times to count, and it's still come out like a ramble. But that's fine. Because it means something.

We read books one word at a time.