February 15 update.
I've been writing more, as you can see. I will say that writing conversations seems to feel fairly natural to me. I would argue that the conversations are not very natural. But it's good to get something onto the page. And it's fine if characters are not particularly differentiated from myself yet. It's a process.
My expectations for myself as regards writing are kind of weird. My natural impulse is to expect my fiction to be good on the basis of a few facts that, while true, do not logically imply that I should be skilled at writing fiction:
I'm in my mid-thirties. This is laughable, but this is one. The idea seems to be that I've taken in enough media to know good from bad. Which may or may not be the case, but that does not correlate to skill at producing good writing.
I've read a lot and written a fair bit. This is true, but a lot of that is non-fiction. So I might be alright at unpacking or structuring an argument, but I really have very little experience devising and depicting meaningful characters or situations.
I don't think there's a number three. Lol.
So the expectations are unreasonable. But at a deeper level, I think the desire is also unreasonable. I don't think I should want to write something good right now. That's like wanting to fly a plane right now. I could do it by pure accident, but it's not likely to be an intent I can pursue.
A nice thing about learning Tekken over the past year is that it's given me a useful framework for how I should go about developing these very open-ended skills. Well... I hope it's useful. It's likely not groundbreaking. But it's what I've internalized, so it's a framework.
Feels funny to mention it without digging into it. But there's not much to it. Start with small fundamentals and take time developing them. Add more only as I can handle. Work things in creatively, but with intentionality. I know a story is not a fight, but the lack of an adversary makes some things easier. That said, the openness of the blank page makes other things much harder.