Tysm!

Tysm!

Derin, you once said that posting consistently in a web series is very important for the growth of audience. But how do you keep yourself motivated to create stories on schedule? Whenever I try to do it, I just lose motivation and get stressed out or bored with my project

My answer is to have a big buffer. I aim to have a buffer of at least one year's worth of chapters. That way, I can take a month or two off every now and then to avoid burnout. It is also far, far less stressful. Not having a buffer is the most stressful thing a writer can do, do not do that.

So far as long-term sticking to projects goes, there's a few skills involved here and all of them involve a lot of practice. The first thing is what I call the Shiny New Fruit problem. This is something you see pretty much every newbie writer doing -- they get a great idea for a story, they know how it's gonna start, they have a cool premise and a twist that's gonna BLOW EVERYONE'S MIND, it'll be great! They start writing! Their first chapter is cool and unique and full of promise, and they get great feedback, and they move onto the second chapter and it's also great, and...

Quite quickly, they run out of "great chapters". Most of the time, the start of your story is low hanging fruit, so far as writing goes -- it's where you get to introduce all your cool concepts and you're not weighed down by anything established yet and all the Cool Stuff That's Gonna Happen is still in the future, it's your perfect imagined version of it and not the (usually worse) version that ends up on the page. Then you run out of low hanging fruit, and it gets slower and harder, and you have to do a lot more actual work and it doesn't feel so new and exciting any more, and a newbie writer thinks, "oh, this isn't as fun, the story feels more boring to write, that part didn't come out as well as I'd hoped -- this story must be bad". And sometimes they might give up right away. Or instead they might continue... but they're distracted, because solving the issue of how to get those two guys out of prison in chapter 6 just gave them the BEST idea for a different story, it's gonna be so much better, the characters are great and they can already feel the words pouring out of them and...

So they run off to pick the low-hanging fruit for their new story, and before they know it, they have nine unfinished stories on their hard drive and not a completed story to their name.

Every writer will get distracted and enthused about new ideas for projects. This isn't a newbie problem. The newbie problem is letting them tempt you away from the viable projects you're already working on so that nothing gets done. My solution to this is very simple -- I am not allowed to write my future projects until I finish my current one. This way, all that enthusiasm for the future project is transmuted into motivation for the current one -- I can write that cool story about a bug alien who adopts and astronaut but first I have to push through the slow part of this story and get this story finished. This has always worked really well for me.

The second reason that you might lose motivation for a story you're working on is that the story is indeed bad, or at least, the version of it incubating in your mind isn't ready yet. The problem with this is that every story feels bad when you're bored or frustrated with it, and it takes a lot of practice to tell the difference between a genuine dud idea and one that your brain is lying to you about because it wants to play computer games instead. My advice on these is to push through anyway -- it almost certainly isn't a dud idea, and if it is, you'll learn way more by completing it than abandoning it.

The third reason is burnout. Now, it's important to note that everyone is bored and frustrated with their stories sometimes. I got sick of writing space intrigue and took a month off to play Subnautica (I could afford to do this with no stress because of my massive chapter buffer), then came back when I felt like it -- that isn't burnout. I've procrastinated for weeks before because I'm up to a really complicated scene with a lot of emotional beats and new information and it's hard to write so I don't wanna -- that isn't burnout. Burnout is what you get when you don't manage these things properly for way too long and grind your brain to paste. I have a lot of tips for avoiding burnout, but they'd take a long time to explain, so all I'll say here is that learning to recognise and avoid burnout is a skill that you will gain with experience.

The fourth reason that people get bored and frustrated is that writing is a skill, and it's a lot harder to do than it looks. Writing when you're not in Full Inspiration Mode is exhausting. It's difficult. It almost always looked worse on the page than you expected; your favourite authors do so much better than this, why doesn't your work look like theirs? It's just words! You know words!

This one trips a lot of newbies up, because in Full Inspiration Mode, writing is easy. someone can have five chapters pour out of them in that mode, and then look at their page two days later and go, "huh, writing is so much harder today". then they'll call that "writer's block" (that is NOT writer's block) and decide to write again when they "feel inspired".

Do not do this. It's a trap. If you only write when you're inspired, you will not succeed as a writer. Take advantage of your periods of inspiration, obviously, but writers must learn to forge ahead without them, because they're going to get fewer and smaller as the low hanging fruit all get picked and you simply will not keep up with a schedule relying on them, whether it's a web serial update schedule or a deadline given to you by a publisher or simply the desire to have a manuscript ready to pitch to an agent before you die of old age. The world is full of people who are "writing a book" and have been doing so for thirty years with almost no progress. If you want to finish, you need to write when it's a bit tricky, when it's a bit boring, when you're not inspired at all and aren't entirely certain where things are going. Fortunately this, like everything else here, is a skill that is honed with practice.

So, yeah. That's my advice. Have a chapter buffer, the bigger the better. Make sure that your writing pace is faster than your publication pace. Avoid these quitting/stopping pitfalls. That's pretty much it.