Damon Knight, in Creating Short Fiction, talks about four stages of development for writers. (He acknowledges that there are stages beyond four, but after that point they don’t need help.)
1. Narcissistic daydreamer. Think “Mary Sue author-self-insertion fanfic”. The way to get out of this stage is to imagine how some other character feels about the author self-insertion/idealisation.
2. Trivial writer. Stories are half-formed, with beginnings and ends but no middles (where the plot and characters would develop). The characters are tokens, placeholders. There are no complications; it’s just a bunch of things that happen.
3. Writer with technical issues. We now have complete stories, but there are problems with plot structure and characterisation. The plots are poorly constructed, and the characters are puppets. Nobody cares what happens to them, and what happens to them sometimes makes little sense.
4. Competent writer. You’ve learned how to solve the technical issues at least well enough that people will buy your stories.
Knight (who taught writing for decades) observes that people who start writing later in life, at least early 30s, often manage to skip stage 1, and sometimes also stage 2.
The way out of stages 3 and 4 is by learning technique. You can do this by yourself through trial and error, or you can take instruction.
#shortfiction