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.
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
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.
Have you tried writing on a 10 year old laptop?
That’s the secret
Expressing admiration at other people’s achievements is good, but you don’t need to diminish your own through comparison. Writing is a bloody difficult endeavour, regardless of the specific context. OP has mentioned that in their view, it’s easier to write lots when you’re basing it off of an established work, but even beyond that, different styles of writing have different objectives.
Completing the draft of a book in a year is an impressive achievement that you should feel proud of, and I think we should use our shared understanding of how difficult it is to make something to build up ourselves and other creators.