Today I woke up and I felt inspired to create a world. I don’t get inspired a lot, so I knew that this was something special. For the longest time I’ve been interested in creating universes. Especially in fantasy writing. I used to read tons of fantasy books when I was a kid, and I admired many authors for creating amazing and complex worlds. My goal for any story is to create a world my readers can question, be fascinated in, and enjoy. This takes time and focus and a lot of planning. I want to start creating a base for the world first and then expand on the small details as I learn more about it. With that being said, I have so many thoughts and ideas that could potentially be a short story or whatever. But I also know that universes take a lot of effort to create and I’m also wondering if I have the ideas to flesh this out. Universes are cool but It’s kind of hard to maintain them and remember the small details about them. One thing I’ve learned about writing in general is to have an open mind about characters and universes. There have been many instances where I have created the groundwork for a character, and they didn’t have the traits they began with later in the story. I don’t think this is a bad thing because it teaches you that writing isn’t always a mind task. Sometimes you can be influenced by the world around you and an entirely different story is created. Some people can maintain their initial thoughts for a story, but for me it’s hard to get back to my previous ideas. For a while I was so burnt out with writing, I think this is because I was trying to adhere to something that didn’t work for me. I forgot that the best part about writing was to indulge in your process and experiences. Without this it’s hard to write something that you will enjoy. This is unrelated to the earlier topic, but me and a writer friend of mine were talking about being burnt out because of writing assignments. The problem was that we didn’t have enough time to enjoy other writing projects because we had to meet deadlines. Eventually I admitted that I was absolutely exhausted with work. I told her that I barely got any other work done aside from my assignments because I was so burnt out by the time I completed my work. This burn out would last until another assignment was due and I had to push through to meet that deadline. Luckily, she told me that she understood and experienced this as well. She said that writing became more like homework when she started taking classes, but what helped her was personal writing. She said that taking time to write something you enjoy can help you find the reason you wanted to pursue the craft. And y’all, this was pretty good advice. I was slightly inspired by her love and persistence for writing, but I also knew I needed help to get out of my dry patch. So, I pushed through and wrote a small paragraph about the moon. It was relieving and I was happy to be writing again, even if it was only a few sentences. This was about a month ago, and I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Also, I’ll post my fantasy universe draft when I finish it.
I love that you write about writing, lol. It’s almost like metacognition (the act of thinking about thinking, which only humans can do, interestingly enough.) I feel like there should be a word like “metascribtion” or “metascription.”
I can’t wait to see your fantasy draft! I definitely agree that doing personal projects can get you out of a writing slump. But also, thinking about the pieces that you write for assignments like personal projects helps me a lot with motivation!
I am so excited to see what worlds you create I am sure they will be amazing and I hope you can push through any burnouts and make amazing works!