Important lessons of writing

I’ve been writing for about 20 years now, but I’ve been reading my whole life (my mom hooked me on books since birth).
I always admired authors (Nora Roberts, for example) who manage to publish more than a book a year and I always wondered how they do it.

I started writing fanfiction, because there weren’t many (if at all) City Hunter fanfiction available all those years back. There still aren’t loads and I have no idea why. Is it because people who enjoy the anime and manga are satisfied with the story (and the ending of the manga)? Is it because, as someone wrote in a comment on this site, that CH fanfic is hard to write? Or is it simply because it’s not an interesting topic?

I’m one of those that, though loves the original manga, isn’t satisfied with the ending. At all! And I loathe what Hojo did in Angel Heart. I also find CH fanfiction incredibly easy to write from the story point of view (there are so many ideas floating around my head and my computer files), what’s hard is putting it into a semblance of a coherent story/plot and I find it super hard to finish all my fanfics, because I put so much time and effort in crafting the plot and don’t want to “leave” the fiction world just yet.

When I started writing all those years ago, the first two (quite long fics) literally poured out of me. Later, when I started writing What Men Want (17 years ago), the story also flowed quite freely, until it didn’t. And until it finally stopped completely.
When I restarted writing it 11 years later (in 2018), I decided to (finally) write an outline of the story up to the last chapter.
They were mere bullet points, nothing more, but the outline helped me immensely toward the end, when, with the ending near, I again didn’t want to leave Ryo and Kaori and procrastinated instead of finishing the fic.

In the end, though it took quite an effort, I followed the outline and, 17 years after starting it, finally finished What Men Want.
The accomplishment was followed by a cathartic cry-athon. Half happy tears because it was finally over, half sad tears because it was over.

This morning, I woke up with an added bounce in my step, because I have another story to finish. Homecoming awaits. And yes, I do have an outline of it as well. We’ll see how it goes. I’m really itching to write it, because, judging by the aforementioned outline, I’m over the half-way mark.

See, it’s never to late to learn something. It took me 20 years, but I finally learned a very important lesson of writing. Probably the lesson.

Lesson #1: Outline is key.
It saves your butt, when you’re stuck and still want to push through. Because even if what you wrote is crap, as long as you follow the outline, it still makes sense. And crap writing can be fixed later in the day or week, if you adhere to

Lesson #2: With the right soundtrack, anything is possible.

(And nothing beats CH anime soundtrack for writing City Hunter fanfiction to.)