Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment

Had to try to pick swimming back up for the first time in 10 years ;)

> I guess I'm going to have to start a new company to get more out of my own efforts

Same conclusion here, being loyal to companies has gotten me nowhere. I know people for whom it worked but they are not the majority (of my acquaintances at least).

> Sure beats the boredom so many senior citizens get even if they have overflowing retirement funds.

I'll never be bored. I have things that I wanted to work on ever since I was 16 year old and now at 42 I still haven't taken the time and energy to do them -- I really can't find proper time and when I finally do I am exhausted (but I am working on the health as well which should give me much more bandwidth).

If I can be granted a wish it'd be "please let me be as rich as I need to be and please let me be dying of boredom, I'll handle it!".

Sympathies for your situation. It's a sad fact that when we get drained of our energy and motivation we actually have to muster even more of them so we can pull through by inventing our own income / business. It's a very bitter irony, one I have grown to gradually accept and not rebel against.

Having said that, I have helped other people (mostly family members) self-publish their books and it is very doable, depending on what your goals are. In those cases, we were never aiming to make money, so we were more than happy with the results we got.

Actually, I do write in a screenplay-like format sometimes. I call it "sketching" but there's probably a more formal name for it. Dialogue and action beats, and nothing else. It works well when I'm able to hear the characters in my head and I need to get their words down before I forget. Though there is a bit of a risk when you expand this into full scene, that your scenes tend to be very dialogue heavy. That's something I'm still working on.

More specific advice is a bit hard to give without knowing where you are. Are you stuck on getting any words out on the page at all? Or are you writing the opening to your story over and over because it never feels right? Or something else?

My experience was the first time I sat down to really write something, it felt horrible. I think I got about 50 words on the page after about an hour. It really was pretty discouraging, and of course the writing was bad too. I'm honestly not sure how I got through this phase. I think I just slogged through it because I cared enough about the story to keep going even though it sucked.

One thing that may have helped is that I keep a journal. The rule for my journal is "never write anything boring". I am very inconsistent about it, but it gave me a space, before I really had the fiction writing thing down, to at least practice getting words on the page. I've been putting down about 100 pages a year for the last 10-ish years, and I realized belatedly that in a way this was my writing practice. I may not have written 10 fiction books, but I wrote their equivalent (at least by word count) in my journal.

Reading helps too. I had stopped for a long time, and picking it back up has helped me really figure out what I want to be writing (usually because I have knee-jerk reactions to what I read, and that tells me something about how it's affecting me).

There's quote I encountered recently that really aligns with my philosophy of writing: "the first draft is telling yourself the story, latter drafts are telling the story you want readers to read" (Farah Heron, but she might have gotten it from somewhere else). What this means is that it's ok for the first draft to not be something anyone else is going to want to read. The most important thing is that you like what you're writing. For me, writing has become a better-than-reading experience. I read a fair amount of books these days, but because my tastes are particular, it's rare for me to find anyone who is writing exactly what I want.... but I can write it myself.

Hope something in here helps you out, and if there's anything else you want to ask, feel free to shoot me an email (find my contact info from my profile).

Where it starts for me is the feeling when you get to the end of a good book, and you keep telling yourself stories (about the characters, the world, the situations, etc.). That's how I feel when I'm writing, except instead of applying it to some other book, I apply it to my own worlds. But the basic impulse is the same.

I don't outline, in the sense of writing a bulleted list of plot points that I fill in. Honestly, I have never been able to do this and I don't understand how anyone else does either, despite having read some books about how people supposedly do so. I tried the Snowflake method too, and that didn't work for me either.

The hardest part, I think, is getting started. Unfortunately, I didn't take a lot of notes during this time, but I did a bunch of noodling around. I wrote a bunch of stuff that didn't stick: characters, situations, places. I even tried some different storytelling styles.

Once I had characters and a world that felt right, I spent about 5 years rewriting the opening of the book over and over. This part sucked because no matter what I did, it always felt wrong.

Eventually I threw in the towel on that. But rather than tossing the project entirely, I had the idea of writing a prequel. This was actually brilliant, because it sidesteps the process of generating the characters and world from scratch (part of what takes so long in the first place, especially as a first timer). So it was much easier for me to create situations that I knew would drive the characters to interesting places. Somehow, this clicked for me and I basically wrote the first draft start to finish in a single pass.

At least for my first book, I found I didn't need to outline. Because I knew where the characters would be going (I had already written the opening of the "real" book to death), I wasn't too afraid of getting lost. In practice, how things worked out was that I spent the time between writing sessions coming up with what would happen in the next chapter. So it wasn't literally seat-of-the-pants writing, because usually I knew what would happen a chapter or two ahead, but I wasn't planning the entire book out all at once either.

Hope that helps in some form, at least to kickstart ideas. And happy to answer any questions (can find my contact info via profile).