Okay, serious topic!
Again, it will be quite personal, since it's easiest for me to write about something I have a personal relation to.
I have mentioned in my post about The Struggles Of An Amateur Artist that I really enjoy to draw.
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to publish my own story. Ideas came and went over maybe five - six years. I was getting excited about every idea I had, I spent days planning, developing characters and settings, names, creatures and so on. But I was young and I was steadily growing up, realizing that all these stories were not mature, too childish. I had spent too much time on drawing all the characters rather than writing and finding ideas and new scenes.
About two years ago I decided to completely throw away all these half-assed wanna-be fantasy ideas and change to the real world - more or less. I did keep some of the characters but made everything else differently.
I can't really say I matured a lot over the years, I consider myself very childish and naive for my age. But I did realize that, with my style of writing, stories about elves, dragons and magicians would seem rather..."silly". Besides, it's not like you can't write fantasy stories that take place in the real world.
So, like I said, I got rid of the fluffy girly stuff and changed to darker themed topics.
I still tried not to use a lot of fantasy...I guess I didn't quite manage that. I can't seem to get away from fantasy completely so I won't struggle anymore.
Over the years I also realized that writing wasn't a strong point of mine since I couln't quite connect all the ideas and scenes to one solid plot and had a hard time to describe the characters' actions.
So I completely changed to comics. It is way easier for me to draw everyting and then just add short descriptions, texts and speech bubbles.
BUUUUT I guess I can't change myself and therefore I didn't make a lot of plot progress since I'm always stuck at the same scenes, or I get better ideas so I have to redraw entire pages and so on...
So what I learned from all my "Procrastinating By Drawing" is, that it's probably not a good idea to just begin to write/draw and see what happens. Therefore I decided to make a little check-list:
1) Think about the plot before you even begin to write. Collect ideas.Take notes, lots of 'em!
2) Try to make your characters not too complex but also not too boring.
3) How long do you want your story to be? Find enough scenes and think about a way to connect them all.
4) What type of story is it and what audience is it for? Find an adequate language and writing style.
What I also thought abut is "Do I want to publish it?"
I think I'm too scared of running to a publisher right after finishing the plot. Too scared of a rejection, especially after having spent so much time on the characters and the plot. The whole story just became too precious to me and the thought of someone telling me it's not good enough would hurt...
Sooo, a biiiiig THANK YOU to the Internet!!! Webcomics and online stories are the perfect solution - in my opinion. So I'll try that one day, too. You can easily make a website or upload it somewhere. Than way you can collect feedback, you can find out if people like it and want you to continue it. And one day, you maybe have the courage to go to a publisher. And if none of them accept your idea, you still got the website ;D
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