I can't sleep lol okay so here is the struggles I have as a writer.
I have been at this three years and I have been learning as much as I can. I went from being this "unknowing bright eyed this is going to be fun and easy and my story is going to be interesting and unique." To "Wow I don't know how to write an intersting story, why is this so difficult, how much for a page?! I don't know how to story board, my knowledge on things is a lot smaller than I remembered." Of course I also have weekly break downs and panic attacks and my depression and bipolar moodswings kept making me contemplate quiting because I am terrible and no one likes my stuff.
in the begining I knew litterally nothing about the medium. I watched anime all my life and played table tops and read manga ocassionally so I thought "this looks easy, I have so much knowledge, let's do this!"
I did not want to do novels because I did not and still do not know how to write perfectly in english. I ignored my middleschool and highschool english courses and only did enough to pass. I originally started out by writing out blocks of text making a single page one paragraph with maybe 3 or 4 periods. it was a nightmare.
I slowly developed my writing skills to something that is more tolerable but nowhere near perfect. I have spend hours every day studying and learning to take my skills to the next level. But I still felt like I was faking it. I would show people my stories and they would like them and some would demand that it get made into comics lol but I still felt like my stories were bland and missing something but I was not sure what it was. Then about 6 months back I started studying philosophy and psycology and I realized that the ideas I was trying to build into my stories were lacking because I did not understand enough of those subjects. I needed to learn more about why people do things and why people act in certain manners and so much more and I needed to know more about myself and what kind of messages I am trying to tell insted of the generic good vs evil messages I needed to work on internal conflict and combat on multiple levels not just brute force.
Another thing I kept trying but quitting on was drawing. My god drawing it tough. I started and stopped quite a few times in the past but it was not until these last few months where I really started taking it serious. The philosophy courses helped with that surprisingly. I am spending a lot of money on artists and trust me they deserve more than what I am paying them. But the bottom line is I need to earn money back to make this studio successful and if I can learn to draw and produce my own content then I can do just that. at this moment I am spending about 400$ a month on my two series.
plus any extra AD art or art not associated with the pages themselves. which could be another 100-200$ a month.
I am at the point where I have no money for free time activities because it is all going into this company. In the three years I have done this I have spent close to 20,000$ which is absurd. I have made no returns on any of that because I did not know what I was doing and I was being stubborn and lazy and not learning to do any art myself.
2018 begins my 5 year plan to make this dream of mine a reality and its off to a good start. I am taking things more seriously I am becoming more active with my fan base I am relesing content every week to start and maintain a weekly schedule. I am also begining to take the courses that I have serious. this year is about building the foundation to support the rapid growth that will come at the start of 2019 without having it crush me like it did in the past.
Patience was also the biggest struggle for me. When I first started I was spending so much money that I was litterally starving myself for weeks because I spend my food money on pages. I had this notion that I needed to create weekly chapters to maintain an audience and become popular. I wore myself out physically and mentally stressing over the idea that I needed to maintain some sort of unnatural speed. a few months before 2018 started I set up my five year game plan and it forces me to produce only 1 page a week for both series and no more. Even if I manage to work more hours and earn more money I cannot break the 1 page a week promise or else the plan will slowly unravel in the wrong direction. I hate the snails pace my series is being released on right now but I know each year that page count will go up as I begin to grow my studio.
I have a lot of mistakes I have made since starting this road of becoming a creator and I know I might not become super popular in the future but I know that with enough hard work I can make these series pay for themselves. its not farfetched but it all depends on how hard im willing to work to make it happen. Like my favorite anime says
"Those who don't give up no matter how many walls they run into,Those are the ones who will make their dreams come true." -Mashiro Moritaka- Bakuman.