Methods for Writing Fiction

There's really no trick to it, if you want to write then write. But I find cigarettes help too.

 

Look around nanowrimo.org
It's a pretty cool event once a year for writing but it's also a great resource for writing tips and encouragement/inspiration.

 

Yeah, do nanowrimo next november. I do it every year and it's helped me immensely.

Also here's a list of rants from a random person about fantasy writing. It gets snarky and angry at times, but there's lots of good advice in here, plus the rants tend to give me tons of ideas for elements to put in my stories. Also lots of entertaining ranting and raving about what not to do, and how to do things that would usually suck well.
Limyaael's Fantasy Rants:
Limyaael's Rants: Master List (All Rants)

I try not to write typical, formulaic stuff. When I don't know what to do, I think of a really common archetype story that I've seen and read a thousand times, say:
An orphaned teenage boy discovers a strange object/place/person/superpowers, and then must go on a quest. over the quest he learns to fight, learns about himself, deals with danger, grows up, defeats some evil and probably falls in love.
then I take one or more elements of the story and change it. What if the entire story takes place in one city? What if he thinks he has superpowers, but turns out not to? What if the strange man who found the chosen one and must train him is the main character, not the kid? What if he gets together with his love at the begining instead of at the end, and they break up during the story? What if he stumbles across evidence during his quest that what he's doing is wrong or might make things worse--will he change his mind or plow forward? What if he's not a teenager, but a single father with a young daughter?

Some of these might be bad stories, others could be cool. Sometimes these thought experiments don't yield me a main plot line, but instead I get a secondary charachter out of them that appears in another story.

 

I find with writing fiction if you start employing rules (like they teach you in school, i.e. beginning, middle, end) it gets boring and you lose your creativity. All I do, all I've ever done, is thought of a basic idea, and put pen to paper and let it create itself.

Writing really is an amazing hobby dude, you won't reget starting it if you have a creative mind.

 

Definitely. It doesn't matter if the book you read is a huge pile of horse shit. That will improve your thought process and writing style. Read, read, read. It builds skills and inspires in the strangest ways. Don't restrict yourself either - read classic literature, fiction, non-fiction, poetry...Everything.