What have you written?

[Dragev]

As you probably know, I'm new here and don't really know you.
As someone who has never written anything I'd show to even my closest friends - for fear that their eyes might start to bleed and their brains melt out of their ears - I'd like to know about you: What you have written, if any of it has been published, how long you've been doing it etc..

 

[Chilari]

I've been writing for as long as I can remember. I've been writing with the hope/intent of doing it for a career at some point maybe since I was about 16, and first completed a first draft in early 2009, when I was 20. I've got one short story published in Mythic Scribes' in-house magazine, Myths Inscribed - a 3,300 word story of a magical/mental battle. I added things up one time and I reckon that since I was 16, I've written about 650,000 words of fiction in total, across two major novels (as in, I wrote more than 50k words on each), a few minor (the 30k word range) and dozens of abandoned starts (up to about 15k words), plus two fanfics of over 30k words each and a handful of shorter fanfics.

 

[Asterisk]

I began my dream of writing a novel when I was seven or eight years old. Since then, I've written about 150k of fiction, 120k of which is my WIP. I did win some writing contest in the last few years, but nothing fictional has really been published. I do write pop songs and released an album and single... Do journals count? Because I have written the story of my life in twelve notebooks since 2011. I'm a young teen, so I probably have a long writer's journey ahead of me.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I've been writing for about twenty years. I self publish and currently have about fifteen books out on the kindle etc.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I have one published story in a nonpaying magazine. I've also got a few contest entries, some stuff I'm trying to publish, one computer game (currently nonfunctional after a crash), and various stories on Literotica.

 

[Malik]

This turned out way longer than I thought it would, but it's relevant.

There's writing and there's writing. I write for others for money and I write for myself for fun.

I've been working on the same WIP, Dragon's Trail, as a hobby for 25 years, and just decided that it was finished -- the first book, anyway -- and submitted it to agents last week. I did submit a version of the novel about ten years ago and among dozens of rejection slips I got a really good bite: a major publishing house kept it for over a year, passing it around the office. Then they passed. I put it down for several years and haven't submitted it since -- at one point, no joke, I completely forgot about it -- and I've rewritten it twice completely since I rediscovered it, keeping only the bare bones of the story and a couple of the character names.

I write professionally, so I write every day. I don't write fantasy professionally, though. Yet.

I've probably written Dragon's Trail cover to cover at least ten times. Every few years, I would look at it, hate it, and redo it completely. I think -- think -- I've finally found my voice and my style. It only took about a million and a half words on paper. Ten rewrites, at least, at 120,000-150,000 words a pop.

On the positive side, I've spent decades designing the book's world, tearing apart things that make no sense and putting them back together so that it all functions. I have boxes full of notebooks and notepads on world design, dating clear back to 1988. The pile of notes alone would be as high as my desk. This to actualize an area slightly smaller than the five westernmost U.S. states.

The funny part is, from the first moment I started typing into a DOS-based version of WordPerfect in high school I figured that THIS WAS THE ONE. Then I'd get to the end, put it away for a few months, read a dozen books, then go back to it and hate it and do it all over again.

There's a lesson in there.

What I'm getting at, here, is that writing and writing and writing -- and rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting; and reading, and reading, and reading -- without showing anybody what you're working on, isn't a bad thing. As long as you don't quit.

Something else that will happen is that as you gain life experience, your outlook on things will change and your writing will make more sense. Since I started Dragon's Trail I've gone through the revelation of my true parentage, the demise of my business and a total bankruptcy, I built a house myself and then watched part of it burn down, a girl I truly loved and broke up with out of spite has become a wildly successful celebrity, and I've been critically wounded in a war, spending six months in a hospital surrounded by guys and girls missing arms and legs and faces. There have been bad things, too -- by which I mean things that haven't helped my writing.

This kind of stuff happens, and it changes your outlook. You realize that your characters' reactions to traumatic situations are in no way realistic and don't even make sense. You tear that **** down.

I used to gripe and moan that a new, "young" SF or fantasy writer was someone in his or her 40's or even 50's. It turns out, though, that it takes time to figure out how things work. And as all this stuff happens to you, you have to keep writing through it.

You also have to learn how to write, the nuts and bolts. Not high-school English. Advanced composition, creative writing, the art of deconstruction. Parallelism, symbolism, hidden meanings, irony. Philosophy, world history, and even structural and comparative linguistics. You have to love words. I'm reading 5-6 books at any one time and I can read a novel in an afternoon.

Learn some Latin, and some Greek, and learn why English works. Then learn another language well enough to read their literature. See how their great writers write. You've got to do this. It will blow your mind.

(EDIT: I see the OP is from France / Norway. I'm assuming that he's done this part, already. If so, he's way ahead in the game.)

If you're still writing "There cat sat on it's bed," or "for all intensive purposes," you've got so much work to do.

You have to know the rules before you can break them, and you've got to break the rules to make your writing stand out.

As far as other writing, I'm in the military and write papers and reports and give lectures as the main part of my job. I also do technical writing and consulting on the side; analytical writing and proposals, mostly. I had a chapter published in a nonfiction book on international diplomacy last month. I was part of an international think tank back in 2011 and I got to see how some of the smartest people in the world articulated their thoughts on paper. It was amazing to witness. It changed the way I write. Again.

And hey, maybe my writing still sucks after all this time. I've gotten three rejection letters in the past week, and my excerpt on this site has only gotten one reply, from one guy who thought one word was awesome.

No big deal, though. I can always write it again.

Write, dude. Just write.

 

[Ayaka Di'rutia]

I started writing novels when I was 10, and finished writing my first novel when I was 10-11 years old. It was a handwritten piece, a rip-off of the Andalite Chronicles by K.A. Applegate, but we all have to start somewhere, right? Since then I haven't stopped writing novels and other stories, and of course have deviated from being heavily influenced and drawn more to being inspired. I write mostly in the fantasy genre, although I've written sci-fi as well. I first published on Lulu in 2007, and have continued with Lulu since. I have yet to submit to a traditional publisher.