Anonymous Asker · 2y
Salutations!
Are there any things that you've found to help you with writing/getting at the voice of a character? Also, have you ever felt self-conscious about posting anything and how did you deal with it? I've been working on writing more (both fanfic and original works), but a lot of the time upon giving it a second read I'm not super pleased with how it turned out, and all my motivation to continue it gets shunted into the shadow realm, and I delete it. Ideally this would not happen.
-Ronald Reagan
Hello! These are great questions!
My number one trick is to go back to the characters’ voicelines, especially when switching ships. If I’ve been working on Dottolone and want to pivot to Kaveh and Alhaitham, I’ll go to the conversation in the library. Hearing the words in the character’s voice makes a huge difference for me, but even just rereading them can be helpful!
All the time! There’s a vulnerability to sharing any kind of creative work online and sharing my writing feels especially personal to me. But I try to I treat self-consciousness the same way I treat impostor syndrome in my professional life: it’s always there but I’m aware that it’s there so I can catch it and work against it.
The first fic on my Ao3 was written over a year before I shared it and the only reason it’s even up is because my friends were relentless in trying to get me to post. But once that first piece was out there, it became a LOT easier to share my writing, so there’s something to be said for ripping off that bandaid.
- One of the things that happens with improvement is that, when you reread something on a second, third, or fourth pass, you start to look at it from the perspective of having more knowledge. It might not seem as good now as it did the last time you read it because you know you would do things differently now. But there’s no limit to how many stories you can tell. You can continue to revisit the work. Or you can jump into the next project armed with what you learned from that experience. (There’s also a great pleasure to be had in watching authors’ writing change over time if you read them over the course of many years.)
At the end of the day, I think we tend to be our harshest critics. I would NEVER say the things I think about my own pieces to my friends because I hold myself to ridiculous standards that I don’t apply to others. This is something I’m always working on. But it’s worth thinking: “would I be this critical of this piece if my friend had written it?”
This got long, but I guess my advice is to use the self-consciousness as a way to reflect on your writing—as a tool that can help you to think about how you can improve—but not to let that self-consciousness stop you from posting altogether.
