Have you ever thought about giving up on writing?

[RightersBlock]

I don't think it's for me. All I can do is write Its and Bits of a story I have been working on ever since I was 16. I cant even finish let alone start a short story or micro fiction. I just find everything supremely frustrating and it makes me really angry how I have this constant endless desire to tell stories and I have all these ideas and themes that I want to explore but can't. When I sit down I just have feeling of disinterest, since I have no solid idea of what I want to write and almost anything that doesn't fall into my narrow frame of interest bores me to tears. I just find everything about writing so unpleasant and infuriating. I am creatively frustrated and exhausted. When I take a break from of it (which is a lot) I just cant stop thinking about it, yet when I try to sit down and do it nothing comes to mind. Thinking about irritates me as well because I have so many things I want to tell but I just don't know how to.

Anyway needed to vent. Sorry for the whiny thread. All this frustrations makes me want to quit and not ever attempt to tell a story like ever.

 

[Brian G Turner]

IMO try reading about storytelling structure and similar writing tools. An artist would struggle to paint without understanding how to use colours and a brush.

Maybe understanding how to unlock your creativity in a structured manner would help, hence the above suggestion?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

But, it might not be for you. That's okay, too. I once read an article about the power of being able to walk away - in our goals-obsessed world, we forget there's a power in that, too. And, sometimes, just by giving ourselves the right to not keep going we free ourselves and can decide what we do want to do - which might be what we're giving up, or something else. go easy on yourself.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

To answer your question: No matter how blocked I've been, I've never for a moment thought about giving up writing.

So I echo springs; it might not be for you. You might be better off directing that energy toward something you love, and that will be absolutely right for you. You say you have bits of stories you want to tell, themes and ideas you want to explore. Perhaps you have a talent in some other art form, or perhaps you might discover one. It is possible you might be table to tell those stories and express those ideas through other media.

Or maybe you could give yourself permission to be content telling those stories to yourself, and put that energy and desire into something completely different. Something you don't find boring or infuriating.

 

[J Riff]

16? Lots writers can't get off the ground till around age 50, if that's any help.

 

[Phyrebrat]

Hi RB,

I am creatively frustrated and exhausted. When I take a break from of it (which is a lot) I just cant stop thinking about it, yet when I try to sit down and do it nothing comes to mind. Thinking about irritates me as well because I have so many things I want to tell but I just don't know how to.

Just breeeeathe....the fact that you are here - that you took the effort to join a writing forum and share - is indicative of your desire to learn and improve. You can't expect to be a great writer straight off the bat, it takes time, and I'm sure the wide spectrum of ages amongst the members here will tell you as much.

Think about something that you are great at now; how were you when you first started doing it? I'll bet it took time to get as good as you are now. I suspect that you love writing so much that you just want to be able to do it, but I believe writing is the journey, not the destination.

If you have a way of downloading podcasts, do that - they're usually 5 - 30 mins long and so can be absorbed easily (plus make travel or the boring things in life pass so much quicker). I'd recommend checking out the following podcasts for advice:

1) Helping Writers Become Authors
2) The Writing Show
3) Writing Excuses
4) The Writing University Podcast

When I used to produce music about 10 years ago, I used to subscribe to a great monthly magazine called Sound on Sound. I remember reading an interview with Phil Collins and although I'm not a fan of his music, he said something that has stuck with me and I've applied it to all my creative endeavours; I'm paraphrasing but essentially he said that every day he would write ten songs in the morning with the ethos of 'Get it out.' Once those usually-duff ideas were cleared from his mind, it either made way for his better songs, or the process of getting them out/down on paper made gems out of one of them.

It's worth a try. And if your writer's block is getting in the way, why not write about that? Make that the conflict in your story.

HTH

pH

 

[hopewrites]

I quit for many many years befor I got started, for a lot of the reasons you mentioned above.
Then one day, while I was in the middle of a massive mind deconstruction, and looking at the shattered pieces of my life like glinting shards of jewel-toned glass cadging me in.
One of those shards was story-telling, and I decided "****** I may as well try. Worst that can happen is I fail so hard the universe decides to erase my existence for ever. And best case scenario I learn something about me"
I wasn't even aiming as high as "being good" at it.
And I did learn alot about being me. I gained insight into who I am. And by indulging my love of embellishment in writing, I found I needed to lie to my self less and less.

Have I thought about quitting since? Sure. Like everytime I pick up a WIP and it reads like its been washed through google translate back and forth till the ideas are so obscured by the language that they are lost. Or when I read some superb success of a friend that I feel, for that moment, I wont achieve.

But I know in my heart I'm not serious about quitting because 1) i gave up quitting and 2) its part of who I am.
I may not ever do it as well as I would like. But as long as im improving and/or being my best self -I count it success.

 

[tinkerdan]

I don't think about quiting; I started too late. I think about not having enough time to tell all the stories that have been rattling around in my head. The advantage I have now is that I don't have to rely on it to make money to feed me. There are numerous other advantages, but I do wish I'd stuck to it earlier and tried a bit harder. Still there might be something to say in that I was lacking a certain part of the voice that didn't come to me until I was about 55 and I found the right character to place within the story that had been knocking at my conscious and unconscious mind for years.

Someone else had been going through my older attempts and suggested I should try again and I sat down thinking about the story I was trying to write and realized that the part I was telling needed a better defined backstory to help explain the main character. So I sat and tried to understand that character and finally started writing out her thoughts as though she was writing a diary. It was that, which took off like a wildfire and drew me into the story that was trying to tell itself all that time.

It wasn't that I didn't have a story or plot and it wasn't that I couldn't tell the story. It was simply that I wasn't seeing the main character well enough to tell her story properly and she needed to be better defined before the story would make sense. It was her story not mine so when I found her the story nearly wrote itself because as you say you have all those ideas in your head.

My advice would be just start writing about someone who wants to fit into that story that you have rattling around in there. As soon as their life intersects with your mad images the fireworks are going to start. Then it's going to become mostly a matter of figuring out which of your darlings you need to kill to make it better.

But that won't be an issue until you start.

Keep writing - you shouldn't regret that and the only regret should be that there might not be enough time to tell all those stories in that marvelous bottle you call your mind.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I thought about quitting publishing for a while, after I received some particularly odious reviews - the sort that moves on from the book to the writer himself. But I never stopped writing.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Cosmic Geoff]

I gave up writing twice, each time for a period of almost 20 years. The first time, I wrote some stuff that was fun, and then some stuff that just didn't work. I struggled with a feeling that I ought to write, even though I couldn't, for some time before giving up.
The second time, I wrote stuff that was better, but I couldn't improve any further, so I gave up after a while.

I have wondered lately where I would have got to by now, if I had had available then the kind of quality critical help I've found in the past couple of years in the Chrons, Critique Circle and elsewhere. In the past, I did participate in various postal writers' circles and the like, but I don't recall it being of much systematic help in identifying my faults. (Or was it that I wasn't ready?)

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I didn't write much between the age of 18 and 40. I didn't miss it. But now I've started properly i can't see me stopping. And that's another thing - what you do now doesn't have to be what you do next year, or the next. It's just what you do now...

 

[Devon.Q.Ly]

Umm can't say that I've ever thought about giving it up, but then again I never really had any intention of become a writer either, it just kept nagging at me over the years. I have had problems where I was take extensively long breaks from writing months a time.

I'd highly recommend a writing group if you can find one. While this forum is awesome, having a group you can catch up with a regular basis I've found has been really good for the motivation side.

 

[FibonacciEddie]

I found writing about three years ago (I am in my early 40s now) and I cannot see myself stopping
but I acknowledge Springs' point, you don't know what comes next.

 

[FibonacciEddie]

Hi,

I thought about quitting publishing for a while, after I received some particularly odious reviews - the sort that moves on from the book to the writer himself. But I never stopped writing.

Cheers, Greg.

agreed. you have to do it for yourself.