Strategic offering: Get someone whose opinion and emotional support you trust to nag you to write every day for multiple hours.
I had a lot of vague fictional story ideas where I would think of a concept, write a chapter about a concept, and then never have it go anywhere past Chapter 1 or 2. I was able to use the above to fix that.
Examples:
A woman is kidnapped wakes up in a prison for people with superpowers, but she doesn’t seem to have a superpower, at first.
Bulma from Dragonball Z is a lot like MOR Harry Potter.
Pinkie Pie ascends to Alicornism and institutes Transequinism.
A MMORPG from the perspective of an Artificially Intelligent Villian capable of leveling up and acting as a Player Character could.
And my wife has a great deal of fun having me be a DM, so I had been coming up with encounters and game worlds. In the most recent one, in a superhero campaign, I would often write out Monthly reports in Google Docs, about how these people had gone after these things, and Irradiated Bionic Aliens had been trying to invade these states. But these were just summaries.
I had had my latest writing Idea which was unlikely to go very far, which was “Hey, why don’t I put all 6 members of MLP in a D&D universe setting as humans. Pinkie Pie can be a Bard, Applejack can be a Ranger, Twilight Sparkle can be a Wizard, Rarity can be a Sorcerer, Fluttershy can be a Druid, and Rainbow Dash can be a Monk. I can have them go through Dungeons together and I can keep track of their progress.”
What actually got me to have 250 pages and almost 100,000 Words (as opposed to 7 Pages and not even 3,000 words, like some of my other ideas.) in what seems to have been just a few months was my wife saying:
“Oh, can I play?” after I was idly chatting with her about what bonus feats various Ponies could get.
So the 6 characters from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic universe, and Megan, a D&D universe native (And also another MLP reference from a previous generation) are questing and questing and questing, and so I was writing, and writing, and writing.
Because she was insisting on playing, or having me prepare another session, 5 days a week, like it was a second job which I did, because well, she’s my wife.
All because I had one person who I wanted to keep happy and who was having me write and write and write even when I really would rather not have been writing.
This does not mean I’m a GOOD writer, by any means. (Looking it over, the story needs a truly enormous amount of editing, at least in part because I’m typing it and DMing at the same time and in part because the quality and level of detail shifts rather substantially from page to page.) But that certainly got me way, way past the “Oh I have all these great ideas but I never seem to get them to chapter 3. Maybe later I’ll have the time!” phase of writing.
Also, I have to give credit to my wife in addition to forcing me to keep writing, sometimes she’ll follow along on her smartphone and edit as I type, fixing spelling errors or having me reword phrases when she has no idea who is speaking.
These days you can just use Beeminder to nag you to write every day. I’ve been doing this with my math blog ever since I noticed in March that I hadn’t written a substantive post since November.
You can even integrate both of these: Recently, if my wife nags me to do something, I set up an automated reminder for it. For instance, in the D&D setting specifically I have automated reminders of:
Use smaller dungeons.
Preroll random encounters.
Avoid boring intersections.
But I have other interpersonal reminders as well.
I used to use Beeminder for exercise and it worked, but my wife wasn’t into it and wanted me to stop because it was getting so focused on what I was Beeminding I was annoying her when I was saying things like
“Oh no, I have to spend time lifting weights once we get home from this party because I have no slack time today and I’ll fall of the yellow brick road if I don’t!”
But yes, Beeminder is certainly worth trying, for sure.
Strategic offering: Get someone whose opinion and emotional support you trust to nag you to write every day for multiple hours.
I had a lot of vague fictional story ideas where I would think of a concept, write a chapter about a concept, and then never have it go anywhere past Chapter 1 or 2. I was able to use the above to fix that.
Examples:
A woman is kidnapped wakes up in a prison for people with superpowers, but she doesn’t seem to have a superpower, at first.
Bulma from Dragonball Z is a lot like MOR Harry Potter.
Pinkie Pie ascends to Alicornism and institutes Transequinism.
A MMORPG from the perspective of an Artificially Intelligent Villian capable of leveling up and acting as a Player Character could.
And my wife has a great deal of fun having me be a DM, so I had been coming up with encounters and game worlds. In the most recent one, in a superhero campaign, I would often write out Monthly reports in Google Docs, about how these people had gone after these things, and Irradiated Bionic Aliens had been trying to invade these states. But these were just summaries.
I had had my latest writing Idea which was unlikely to go very far, which was “Hey, why don’t I put all 6 members of MLP in a D&D universe setting as humans. Pinkie Pie can be a Bard, Applejack can be a Ranger, Twilight Sparkle can be a Wizard, Rarity can be a Sorcerer, Fluttershy can be a Druid, and Rainbow Dash can be a Monk. I can have them go through Dungeons together and I can keep track of their progress.”
What actually got me to have 250 pages and almost 100,000 Words (as opposed to 7 Pages and not even 3,000 words, like some of my other ideas.) in what seems to have been just a few months was my wife saying:
“Oh, can I play?” after I was idly chatting with her about what bonus feats various Ponies could get.
So the 6 characters from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic universe, and Megan, a D&D universe native (And also another MLP reference from a previous generation) are questing and questing and questing, and so I was writing, and writing, and writing.
Because she was insisting on playing, or having me prepare another session, 5 days a week, like it was a second job which I did, because well, she’s my wife.
All because I had one person who I wanted to keep happy and who was having me write and write and write even when I really would rather not have been writing.
This does not mean I’m a GOOD writer, by any means. (Looking it over, the story needs a truly enormous amount of editing, at least in part because I’m typing it and DMing at the same time and in part because the quality and level of detail shifts rather substantially from page to page.) But that certainly got me way, way past the “Oh I have all these great ideas but I never seem to get them to chapter 3. Maybe later I’ll have the time!” phase of writing.
Also, I have to give credit to my wife in addition to forcing me to keep writing, sometimes she’ll follow along on her smartphone and edit as I type, fixing spelling errors or having me reword phrases when she has no idea who is speaking.
These days you can just use Beeminder to nag you to write every day. I’ve been doing this with my math blog ever since I noticed in March that I hadn’t written a substantive post since November.
You can even integrate both of these: Recently, if my wife nags me to do something, I set up an automated reminder for it. For instance, in the D&D setting specifically I have automated reminders of:
Use smaller dungeons. Preroll random encounters. Avoid boring intersections.
But I have other interpersonal reminders as well.
I used to use Beeminder for exercise and it worked, but my wife wasn’t into it and wanted me to stop because it was getting so focused on what I was Beeminding I was annoying her when I was saying things like
“Oh no, I have to spend time lifting weights once we get home from this party because I have no slack time today and I’ll fall of the yellow brick road if I don’t!”
But yes, Beeminder is certainly worth trying, for sure.
There are MMOs in which you can play a supervillain instead of a superhero...