#was anyone else on quizilla.com in the early 2010s....does anyone else remember wwyffs......

[rollercoasterwords]

do you have any advice for someone who wants to start writing but is terrible and has never been good at it? or translating what’s in their head into words?

yeah my advice is to stop trying to write well and instead just try to have the most fun possible. standards of "good" and "bad" in writing are all entirely subjective anyway, and there's no god in the sky waiting to smite you if your writing doesn't meet their standards. if you're not where you want to be writing-wise, that's fine! writing is a skill just like anything else, and you'll only get better as you practice. and the best way to stay motivated to practice (imo) is to not put too much pressure on yourself to measure up to a certain standard and instead just try to have a fun time making up stories!

the other piece of advice i have is to read a lot of books, and try to read books from a variety of writers with different styles. maybe annotate a bit--underline or highlight the parts that you like, the sentences that really stick out to you. then go back and look at those sentences and think about why you like them--is it the word choice? the arrangement of sentence structure? is the writer doing something stylistically that surprised or intrigued you? the more you read, the more you'll begin to notice nuance amongst different writers' styles, and the better you'll get at recognizing what you might want to try implementing in your own writing.

writing is not a skill with a linear trajectory, where you start out at square zero and eventually reach the finish line of being A Good Writer and stop there. it's a skill that you develop over time and with practice, and that you continue to develop for as long as you do it. i genuinely think that the biggest block to most people who want to start writing but are too worried about the quality of their work is not skill, but that worry--the worry of not being "good enough." but who gives a shit if your writing is bad (<- again, totally subjective measure)! do you wanna know what the first story i ever shared on the internet was about? it was called "kidnapped by dragons" and it was about a girl who got kidnapped by four (later i added another one, so five) handsome men who could turn into dragons, and also she had secret magical powers and needed to save the world and there was a mermaid living in the lake in the garden who became her bestie (i was twelve). by my own (current) standards it was Not Good, and now i laugh about how cringey it was. but you know what? there were a handful of random tweens on quizilla.com who ate that shit up, and i had the time of my life writing and posting it, and that mattered so much more than any other measurement of quality. and it wasn't until i got older and started worrying about writing "high quality" work that i stopped sharing my writing and wrote less and less, because i was paralyzed by my own preoccupation with arbitrary standards.

so...yeah there's my advice lol. if you want to develop your writing, try to stop worrying about how good it is, pick something fun to write about, and just write. and when you need to get inspired, read some other writers and think about why you like the way they write!