Write What You Love

Ever hear this little tidbit of advice everywhere on the internet? 🙂 I’ve seen it several times in regards to fiction novels, a great encouragement for authors who get bogged down by editing, rejections, bad reviews, or even when work in progress is torn apart by CPs. It’s natural to crawl in a hole and shield oneself against the negativity (or in my case sharpen a knife and sink my teeth into editing).

But… even I have days where I glare at my laptop and bury myself in Netflix shows. As I realign my year and writer goals, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this: write what you love. Then I stumbled upon an article by Joseph Finder and found a fantastic quote.

The most successful writers aren’t the most talented.

They’re the most stubborn.

If you ask my husband whether or not I’m stubborn, he’ll laugh and laugh and laugh. I’m not sure which of us is worse, but that’s a story for another day. It’s about loving the words I lay down, the whole that comes from within, and the final product I can grip in my hands. As I thought about all these things, I realized that while I’m still writing what I love, I’ve also left behind other pieces of my heart.

1. Role-Play Writing
I’ve been writing forum-based role-play stories for so many years that my characters span generations. I’m not sure it exactly crosses into the world of true fan fiction, but it’s set in another author’s universe. What I love about role-play is you’re up against other writers. You only get control of your character and the setting, and often times it turns into a game of who can trigger the other character’s anger and amp up the tension. Yet, it’s also a fantastic training ground for characterization, drafting a strong flow for your sentences, and holding your character’s power within the stress and limitations of the world they live in. i.e. No deus ex-machina to save the day.

2. RPG Guides
Call me a nerd, but I love drafting these things. While I’m not usually a list person, writing an outline and turning it into a guide-book is actually a lot of fun. It also really helps you polish up formatting and editing skills.

3. Role-Play Quests & Video Games
Years ago I got an opportunity to write some quests for a mobile game, and it was tons of fun. I even got to edit the grammar of existing quests and help make the global game a teensy bit stronger. If I ever get the chance, this is something I would LOVE to do again. Not for a small game though – one of the larger video game companies. Side-eyes CD Projekt Red. *cough*

4. Short Stories
This is something I haven’t dug into much, but I want to start. I’ve got two fully-functional universes my writing operates in and I’m exploring a third as well. While my main stories usually center around a handful of characters, every single one (even the coffee-stand guy) has their own history, wants and needs. I’ve been tossing around several short stories and I hope to start pulling some of them together soon.

5. Subtitle Editing
This is something new I’ve never considered before now. However, Netflix recently sucked me into a Turkish show, dubbed in Arabic and translated to English. It’s about 13th century warriors (right up my alley), and the English subtitles are hilarious (and often grammatically incorrect). Linear translation gets tricky, which I saw a lot of when I was working on websites translated into German, Japanese, Danish, Flemish, and a dozen other languages. But on this particular show, I saw english words like ‘awesome’ dropped into the subtitles, a word that didn’t exist until the 1900s. If you watch the show long enough, you understand the point coming across, but that doesn’t change the fact that both grammatical and cultural inaccuracies are rampant in the subtitles, as well as shifting the spelling of character names from one word to two words and back to one. Enough that it’s distracting, and I’m dying to pick at the subtitles and fix them. Anywho… with this, came a desire to try my hand at subtitle editing.

While I’ve discovered a lot of writing loves in the past few years (apart from SFF novels), the above are a few that have taken a strong hold recently. I’m going to dip my toe in each again if I get a chance, but for now I’d love to hear from others. What do you love to write?

Who knows… maybe I’ll find another love through your eyes. 🙂

FYI… I love the above photo by Comfreak. It gives such a strong statement to how bizarre and crazy fantasy writers can take their stories. Makes you think about whether you’d live inside a bubble, or under the jellyfish overlord? 😛