I have been trying to get into writing short stories as a hobby. I have a couple of good ideas. But I tend to struggle when actually putting my thoughts to words.

Some issues I struggle with are as follows:

  • Inability to settle on the right words: I’ll write something and think that what I wrote could be written better or differently and then I keep on writing and deleting and rephrasing with different words. Thus making very slow progress.

  • Problems with continuity: I might think up a somewhat long plot line. But I have to write the whole thing in one go because if I don’t then my brain will splinter the story into multiple possible story branches when I stop and I am unable to choose the path to follow.

  • Lose interest in continuing if I take a break: If I stop writing mid way and take a break from writing for an extended period of time, I am unable to find the motivation to resume. Mostly because trying to catchup with the story up to that point feels hard. I have this same tendency with video games as well where I don’t feel like picking up a game after an extended period of absence.

So is anyone here who does writing as either a hobby or professionally? If so how do you cope with your condition?

What I’ve found that works for me is to just make up the story as I go without much planning. The issue with this is approach I’ve found is that it’s hard to find a conclusion to end the story.

  • deathmetal27@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    I was dabbling in local llms recently using Ollama to generate stories from prompts. It’s fine but not something I’d consider something original like how I’d write.

    But I guess it’s better than nothing if I get stuck.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Ollama is really terrible, especially since it uses chat mode by default and a 2048 context.

      If you run a better pretrain with a “notepad” UI like Mikupad, it’s like night and day. It follows your writing style because that’s the context it has to go on.

      If you’re interested, tell me your hardware config and I can recommend something specific, but generally you’re going to want to run ik_llama.cpp with a big MoE base model, like GLM Air base. Use something like Q6/Q5.1 cache quantization, enable the hadamard option, and then tune the GPU layer count until it fills your vram.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Well of course. If you give it a short prompt, and it generates a story, that isn’t going to be anything of value. But if you give it long prompts and have it give you ten different sets of three sentences that could follow, you have a goid shot that one of those either fits what you were thinking but couldn’t get in words, or will stimulate a better sentence in your mind. It can be a block breaker. Don’t ask it for whole stories, just sentences or paragraphs. Or even just to reword some thing you wrote if you don’t like how it flowed.