By Royal McGraw

Royal McGraw has written professionally for film, television, comics, and games for over 20 years. He led development on the mobile smash hit Choices: Stories You Play and currently serves as CEO of Candlelight Games.

Welcome! This is the 13th installment of a multi-part series intended to provide you with quick and actionable adjustments that you can make to your own writing process to improve your storytelling.

In the previous Candle Craft, we covered Fractal Storytelling, which explains that every writing lesson we’ve covered in this series applies at each level of writing – outlining, act structure, scenes, dialog… they’re all the same!

Hopefully, you found the idea freeing. Instead of learning dozens of rules for each and every situation you find yourself in, you now have a few general tools that always apply. Or put another way… good writing is good writing, however you slice it.

Which also means there is no “wrong place” to start. The only mistake is not starting at all. Today, we’re going to discuss how to get started.

Just Do It

The conventional – and correct – guidance on how to get good at writing is to just start doing it. But for some people, they hear this and they think you might as well have asked them to jump over the moon. They have fear. They have doubts. What if they write something and – gasp! – it’s not good?

I’m sorry to break this to you, but the first thing that you write will not be very good. That’s not failure. It’s process.

Our culture spends a lot of time celebrating the overnight success. In reality, those don’t exist. While you weren’t paying attention, those overnight successes were grinding away quietly.

How to Get Good at Pull-ups

Most people can’t do a pull-up, and most people who can do a pull-up can only do a few of them. If you ask an expert trainer how to get good at doing pull-ups, they will tell you something very unhelpful. They will say, “Start doing pull-ups.” Sure, a trainer might suggest auxiliary exercises like curls, grip work, weight loss, and so on. But at some point, none of that matters. You still have to face the bar.

You learn to do pull-ups by doing pull-ups.

You stare at the bar. You hang from the bar. You try and fail to pull yourself up – first just tensing your muscles, and then rising upwards a millimeter or two, and then over time, you awkwardly raise yourself higher and higher…

The process of learning to do a pull-up is failing to do a pull-up over and over and over again for a long time. Writing is like pull-ups.

Love Is All You Need

So far, I expect everything I’ve written has been a little dispiriting. I’ve said what you write first won’t be good. I’ve compared writing to pull-ups, and who actually likes doing pull-ups?

But I don’t mean to be dispiriting! I used the example of a pull-up because it’s simple. It’s just a bar. Anyone can understand a pull-up. Most people still can’t do one.

To answer my own question, the people who actually like doing pull-ups are the ones who figured out how to love some portion of the process.

Now, they don’t necessarily love all of the process. Maybe they love chatting with other people at the gym. Maybe they love the feeling of getting on a treadmill afterwards and shaking their muscles loose. But they love some part of it – and that’s all it takes.

Write What You Love

I’m sure you’ve heard someone say, “write what you know,” but I think it’s far more important to write what you love.

If you’re going to sit down and write something, make damn sure that you love – at minimum – some small part of what you’re writing. Make sure the act of writing itself puts a smile on your face. Make sure that it delights you. Have fun! Play!

When you begin writing, the single most important thing you can do is give yourself a reason to want to sit down and write again. That’s it. That’s your only job. Loving even a small part of the process is what turns an idle dream into a lifelong vocation.

TIP #10: Write what you love.

Make sure that whenever you sit down to write, you love some portion of what you are writing. Your most important job is to give yourself a reason to come back to write more next time.

Going Forward

Thank you for following along with Candle Craft! Looking ahead, Candle Craft will step away from its “10 Tips” structure and toward something more freeform. I plan to cover a few articles that have crossed my path and also dive into some reader questions.

So this is where I ask you a favor. If you have been enjoying this series, please send your questions to info@candlelight.games. I’ll do my best to answer the most frequently asked and most interesting submissions in future installments of Candle Craft.

Thank you again… and happy writing!

Candle Craft 14: How to Start Writing