Writing Ramble: Why Writers Get Complacement and Lazy

I was reading someone's stories, one more recent, and one a few years back. I'm like, "Well these aren't much different." So I go back to their first story. Eight years. Eight years, the person hasn't improved. Maybe marginally. 

Greetings, mutants. 

I would like to talk today about writer complacency. This occurs when a writer has reached a plateau. They aren't getting better. Maybe technically they've picked up some stuff about grammar, but nothing about theory or craft. You might be like, "Okay, well how does this occur?"

Well there is a vaccine to this infectious disease, and that is to always be learning. You are never the master, you are always the student. 

You need to seek to challenge yourself. Your viewpoints. What you know.

I remember, when I was doing fanfiction writing, how often people would say something like, "You gotta make sure that character isn't a Mary-Sue and give them lots of traits." 

Well that's a one-dimensional approach to making characters. Then you get a bit better and you learn characters need motivations and goals. Then you get better and you learn they need a character arc of growth. Then you learn about how their traits must interconnect, right. And then you learn about psychology. You learn about how that character is linked to worldbuilding. You learn how that character is linked to plot. You learn how that character is linked to theme.

There are a million different things to learn about a character, such as presentation, or making side-characters with subplots that comment on the main character's story. 

And one more thing is you need to leave your comfort zone. If you keep writing the same types of plots or using the same elements or the same characters, you're done! You've already wrote a story, and you keep retelling that same story, because you're done. You've run out of thoughts.

If you keep writing about action adventures where they explore the Crack of Uranus, you're not learning. And if all your characters are sassy "marvel dialogue" characters, and you always got that sexist jerk, the naive dumb one who's learning, the action heroine, and the smart jock, you're not learning. 

Keep learning, keep writing.