So, I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months. Most of my writing is done on a 10 year-old laptop I dug out of the closet while I wait for my kid to finish sports practice. Today, the hard-drive died. (Thankfully I have a cloud backup.)
Now, without a laptop, I have nothing to continue working on. I can’t afford a new laptop. Just glad I didn’t lose all my work.
Imma pause you right there. I’m in the middle of writing a dissertation and from the bottom of my heart struggling to find the words- fuck you. 175k in 6 months? I have good days writing 175 words. Fuck you. I wrote a scifi book that is around 75k words and it took about a year to get the draft done.
Have you tried writing on a 10 year old laptop?
That’s the secret
It’s much easier to write your own version of a copyrighted material than to creatively write on your own. My work is fanfiction based on someone else’s ideas. Yours is all you and I envy that.
I always found fanfic easier to write because someone else did huge amounts of world building for me! I don’t have to describe say, Luffy’s powers because the person reading it ideally watched or read One Piece and knows stuff! Same with prestablished relationships.
175k is still insane! Best I did was 50k for nanowrimo like a decade ago for the Garrett Investigates fandom.
That’s part of the reason I wrote mine with mostly original or remixed characters, so I could explore things Oda didn’t while still playing in his world. There’s a tremendous freedom and responsibility in fanfiction if you’re trying to honor the original. If not for my kid acting as a sounding board, I would have quit long ago.
Writing is hard, i written three novels each about 80k words. Two novels at 100k that are total crap. Also have 4 short stories, and that’s not mentioning the 20 novels I need to finish.
Writing well is hard.
Writing is easy, there’s nothing to it. You just sit at the typewriter and bleed. -ernest hemingway