Every once in a while someone will ask me for advice I have on writing fiction, and perhaps some of what I say here will be of use:
-the most important part is to do it consistently: an hour every weekday, 3 or 4 on days off for 2 - 3 years. after that it will begin to make sense for you to think critically or structurally about anything you produce. enjoy it in the meantime, try a lot of stuff.
-never worry about quality in a first draft, just charge in, get words in the document. all the work is done when you go back to tidy up, editing is infinitely preferable to writing
-whenever you finish something take a few months away from it then go back and re-draft. nothing is really itself until it's been written 3 times
-two phrases from Anne Enright that are always in my head: 'the first sixteen years are the hardest' / 'success and failure are twin illusions which keep you from the work'
-start with short stories, they're easier to publish (though there were a lot more journals with open submissions policies when I started than now)
-find people also seriously committed writing to share stuff with. this is the second most important one
-read and think widely; don't read books about how to write
-concentrate on books by dead authors. don’t read anything the algorithm pushes on you. I say this is in the spirit of: anyone reading this is not going to be interested in working within the broad mass of homogenising commercially-oriented Literary Fiction, which is becoming more one-eye-to-the-Netflix-adaptation every year. if expression is valuable to you in itself there's centuries worth of out of print books which are harder to come by, harder to read, and will take you places you haven’t been before, all these will condition muscles which are vital I think.
I am currently failing at my last piece of advice, which is: don't get discouraged / find gratification in the work.
I'm not sure what's up here. I've always been very motivated to write, and still am very invested in learning languages, reading widely, but lately the motivation to write fiction has begun to atrophy. The bones of 80k words of notes I have towards an alternate-history Troubles novel, a series of verb endings in a fictional Franco-Hibernian language to be utilised in a Thirty-Years War / United Irishmen book, have suddenly become no longer my problem. I do not think discouragement is the right word for it, my rate of publication since starting just under 10 years ago is more or less linear, but something's off.
It could be a question of inputs. The fiction I rate the highest - Serge, Mantel, Weiss, O'Faoláin - have only come into my awareness in the past 4 years. In such an atmosphere the feeling of ‘Fuck that’s dreadful I could do better than that’ - that referring to the latest Booker winner - doesn’t thrive so much, the relative weakness of your attempt at a sprawling historical work shot through with revolutionary melancholia will be far more tangible.
It could be a changing disposition. Very suddenly the felt difference between writing criticism, and fiction has become much more pronounced, like pumping air into a ruptured tube. It might have been alright if it was the nineties and I could invent autofiction but as currently practiced it feels as though I’d be moving away from rigour rather than towards it. I'm not one to quote Zizek, but there was a post he had on here about how truth is to be found beyond ourselves, looking inwards will just turn up a load of old shit. Much like this post.