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[Duke 2.0]

My nervousness about writing fanfiction makes it so that I can't write fanfiction.

Welp there's my whole attitude on drawing. Gotta practice sketching to improve. Gotta improve to make me feel good about my work. Gotta feel good about my work before I can get motivation. Gotta have motivation to sketch.

 I get the feeling I know what the rest of this is about myself. My best solution so far is to kinda realize how silly it is to fear mediocre habits of your craft. Get down and dirty in your practice. Make shallow characters built solely on stereotypes to move the plot forward. Have their interactions work akin to machines trying to imitate some awkward mating ritual. It's far worse to have nothing than to have some cruddy thing you can improve on.

 I just gotta follow my own advice

 @Max: Writers don't even write games, they just do glorified editing to whatever script a middle manager hands down to them.

[MaximumZero]

Programmers don't design games, writers design games.

Well, what the hell am I learning programming for, then?

Oh, wait. Delusions of becoming a game dev one man army like Toady.

[Max White]

Well yea, you need programming then, but you also need writing skills. If you want to do what Toady does, you will need lots of different skills, least of which is being pretty awesome on guitar.

@Max: Writers don't even write games, they just do glorified editing to whatever script a middle manager hands down to them.

Then one must ask, who designed games? Surly not the middle managers, they aren't qualified to do any more than look at market statistics and if they tried to design games based off that alone, the AAA market would be full of the same game with a different title, each time getting more and more bland... Oh.

[Descan]

That's why we have you, Max. To rock out.

[Max White]

If I bothered to make even half the games I have entire scripts for, the game market would buckle and break under my awesome. People would be like 'Who the fuck is Shigeru Miyamoto?' and I would just shrug.

EDIT: Oh man, looking over my docs now and feeling sad that these may never be things that are played by any human. Somnia and cultist, A.B.I.S.S, Windsong, void mage, NecrO, Bipolar, tecnomancer. Soo many lost relics of awesome, it would make a grown man drop to his knees and weep.

[MaximumZero]

Gee, Max, maybe I could get you to code up my P&P game, and we'll compilate on the guitar-work for it. I'm slowly teaching myself how to riff a little.

[Max White]

I wish I could guitar. Hell I wish I could music. Would make my life so much more simple. Can't do the one man studio thing if you suck at music.

[Vector]

Yeah.

I can't fuckin' write fanfic, because this happens every single time.  I really do feel far more comfortable writing my own characters.  I can go back and forth, and say "No, I'd like a little more of this here and a little bit less of that there."  I can introduce narrative conceits and screw around.  I want to write a character succumbing to her own miserable dying-dog ending and my own stupid dialogue.

I have really written hundreds of pages and spent thousands of hours writing original fiction.  I always worry that it's a bit too pretentious and stiff.  But you know what?  That's a hell of a lot better than constantly having to fact-check against both real life and canon and fanon and blah blah blah.

Also, I have midterms coming up and I hate my life.  I put in my 9 hours on not enough sleep and am trying to get better about being studious and serious and not feeling helpless... don't judge me ;_;

[MaximumZero]

Well, then, I will lay down an epic track of plink and plonk noises.

@NinjaVector: You could always write about me. It would probably be very difficult to make me as a character seem pretentious or stiff. I'd have no problem with that.

[JoshuaFH]

I always wanted to write entirely facetious fiction about my fellow Bay12'ers, but I was always afraid of the not-insignificant chance of a 'Dude that's creepy'.

For what it's worth, you can write about me as well. I wouldn't mind any precarious situation or disposition portrayed. I just fear that I'm too much of a faceless enigma, despite my old-timeyness.

[Descan]

Not much you could write about me.

"So... He's gay." "Yep." "Canadian, too." "Right." "Has a weird thing with wheelchairs?" "Yeah." "Why should we care about this guy?" "..."

[SalmonGod]

Also want to make video games.

Also terrified of writing, but for different reasons... For me, just thinking about it feels like an extreme vulnerability, like I'm making myself naked to the audience in this unique way.  Everything I write is somehow an exhibit of how I think and view the world, that can be easily picked apart.  I know I do it to authors that I read, and I would expect it to be done to myself.  When I write like here on a forum, I have lots of control over what I reveal about myself.  When I'm trying to describe a character's perspective in a story, every word reveals my own limitations in how well I understand the way people relate to the world.  When I write a female character, for instance, I'm really only projecting my own pre-conceived notions about women into a character (however well-intentioned) for actual women to shake their heads at

I know it's stupid, because the same is true for any writer.  The whole process feels so personal, I wonder how authors ever manage to share their work without feeling horribly insecure.  I think part of it is the self-awareness that my entire life has consisted of well above average levels of isolation and daily routine, compared to most successful writers I can think of, who are usually worldly as hell people with tons of crazy experiences under their belt.  I have a pretty decent academic awareness of how people operate, and squeeze deep conversations out of people all the time to figure out their deepest thoughts... but more ordinary social behaviors, rituals, and observations are really lost on me.  I've never even dated.

[Max White]

"So... He's gay." "Yep." "Canadian, too." "Right." "Has a weird thing with wheelchairs?" "Yeah." "Why should we care about this guy?" "..."

So basically you are Wallace Wells? I'm ok with that...

[JoshuaFH]

Also want to make video games.

Also terrified of writing, but for different reasons... For me, just thinking about it feels like an extreme vulnerability, like I'm making myself naked to the audience in this unique way.  Everything I write is somehow an exhibit of how I think and view the world, that can be easily picked apart.  I know I do it to authors that I read, and I would expect it to be done to myself.  When I write like here on a forum, I have lots of control over what I reveal about myself.  When I'm trying to describe a character's perspective in a story, every word reveals my own limitations in how well I understand the way people relate to the world.  When I write a female character, for instance, I'm really only projecting my own pre-conceived notions about women into a character (however well-intentioned) for actual women to shake their heads at

Pretty much my feelings exactly. Thanks Salmon.

[Descan]

"So... He's gay." "Yep." "Canadian, too." "Right." "Has a weird thing with wheelchairs?" "Yeah." "Why should we care about this guy?" "..."

So basically you are Wallace Wells? I'm ok with that...

I've never actually read Scott Pilgrim >->