Really good advice, and something to aspire to. Like you I don't want to write what others tell me to. And, from experience, I can tell you that it does indeed suck the fun out of writing. I did a PhD and so had to write 100K words. Now that was super valuable in one sense because I learned how to write something long (with patience) and how to structure a big document (plan it, write it, replan it), but boy did it make me not want to write, or read, for fun for a couple of years.
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Thanks and I agree with you, @sunjata . 100k words is not easy, kudos to you for that accomplishment! Writing your first piece of long-fiction is beyond taxing but rewires your brain in ways people can't imagine. After the first novel the second one is coming along with so much less effort. I can grasp big picture concepts much easier than before as well.
Thanks, I'll check out your other stuff on the writing process too, it looks useful. I have a novel that I'm working on and definitely see some parallels with writing a piece of long non-fiction, but it's also a lot more unwieldy and a lot of it is just "missing" in a way that my academic stuff never was - so, yeah, definitely a learning process.
I'm going to use Steemit as an outlet for shorter stuff, which I think is good practice for plotting, and might turn into something bigger along the way (e.g., the piece of episodic pulp fiction that I've been working on is really exciting me right now and I've put my other writing projects aside to work on that).
@sunjata , blogging can be a VERY useful tool in building your skillset. I'm releasing excerpts of chapters of my new book on meditation here on Steemit as articles and then further revising them based on reader feedback. This is making the book so much better than it would have plus I'm making money from the excerpts. This is worked so extremely well that I'm going to do this with my next novel also.