I miss writing essays.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
28 points (100.0% liked)
Casual Conversation
3482 readers
44 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible.
- Avoid controversial topics (e.g. politics or societal debates).
- Stay calm: Don’t post angry or to vent or complain. We are a place where everyone can forget about their everyday or not so everyday worries for a moment. Venting, complaining, or posting from a place of anger or resentment doesn't fit the atmosphere we try to foster at all. Feel free to post those on !goodoffmychest@lemmy.world
- Keep it clean and SFW
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc.
Casual conversation communities:
- !casualuk@feddit.uk
- !casualeurope@piefed.social
- !forumlibre@jlai.lu
- !batepapo@lemmy.eco.br
- !esp@lemm.ee
Related discussion-focused communities
- !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
- !askmenover30@lemm.ee
- !dads@feddit.uk
- !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk
- !movies@piefed.social
- !television@piefed.social
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You didn't need to worry too much about the dyslexia. Writers fuck up all the time. That's what proofreaders and editors are for.
Anyway if writing doesn't work out, you could draw, paint, or hell do collage or something.
Drawing stick figures on note paper counts as creativity. Hell, XKCD has an entire long-running comic out of just stick figures.
If you have a phone with a camera you can try playing with taking photos, and editing those in creative ways as well.
At the end of the day, though, everyone starts somewhere and being “great” at something is irrelevant as long as you enjoy what you’re doing. Practice can help you get better, but being creative is mainly about having a fun activity that makes you happy.
If a book or game seems too big and daunting (cuz yeah of course those are huge commitments!), you could always shoot for something smaller in scale. Like short poetry or short stories for writing, or maybe a small Minecraft mod to get your feet wet with the development side of things (or whatever moddable game you currently enjoy).
I'm not good at either, so I can't help much further than that. But hopefully starting small seems more doable?
Starbound might be a good call for modding. Minecraft uses Java while Starbound uses LUA, and from my experience, LUA is far more human-readable, which could help mitigate @grumpy404@piefed.zip's dyslexia-related issues.
In line with your description, I'd say the hardest part of a journey is the first step. And having focus issues myself (likely not dyslexia though), I'd say it's possible to find means to circumvent, mitigate or even use as stepping stones such limitations.
But on the easiest option, I'd suggest drawing, specially short comics. Xkcd is a bunch of stickmen going through silly science situations, One-Punch Man started as very crude doodles, and Sarah Scribbles' earlier comics are... a thing. But in all cases, they either improved, worked out despite how basic or crude they were, or even worked out because of such.
Recently made a baby board book about colors. Each page just had a collage of magazine images representing a different color. You can make a book with beautiful imagery And very little (or no) writing for babies/children.
- Poetry, since it's writing but less than a book
- Photography (and that's no shade, i love it, but it has levels and can definitely be the simplest thing to get into)
- For textiles? Knitting
Cooking is also pretty creative and food is something you need to do to survive.
As for cooking, it could also be worth videos of the process or other pertinent elements, as well as blog posts.
Why stop yourself from writing? First drafts can be as messy as you want, you’re telling the story to yourself and finding what works. Any problems with spelling or formatting (or pacing, characters, plot, etc) can be worked on further drafts if you feel like sharing it with the world, and autocorrect is good enough to get most of the easy issues anyway.
You don’t even need a computer! You can write long form if you feel like it ✍️ there’s no limits! Write poetry, prose, manifestos, whatever floats your boat
By chance do you know of any good spell checker software's? i know grammerly is a thing but that costs money at a certain point, and i know most software's and browsers usally have one.
Whats weird is i used to write short story's when i was a kid but eventually just lost that spark, i may want to try again to write? My goal is to someday make something i can share with others, im unsure why i want that but i just do.
As for spell checking, Microsoft Word, at least when it was more akin to a product, was pretty good at that. There's also LLMs if you don't have a problem with them, though I strongly suggest asking multiple ones just in case the one you ask decides to have a fever dream.
As for why wanting to make something, reminds me of the Ancient Greeks, which afaik thought immortality came from being remembered. Dunno if it'd be your case, but I find it an interesting line of thought.
Many popular writing experts say to write messy. You want to get the ideas out, even if they're ugly and imperfect, and go back later to fix the mistakes. Same can be said I suppose for any art. It's what Bob Ross used to talk about in painting. Music, you can't experiment and find what works without making some noise.
Poetry is short and simple, really releases all your emotions
(Examples: !ocpoetry@piefed.social)
Or short stories
Or sometimes I work on my memoir (which I constantly find myself procrastinating on lol) and try to paint the scene with words... and like just writing and proofreading really takes me back though the "memory-time-machine" and I feel that moment, remember the happiness of that moment.
Any creative work qualifies? Music is pretty approachable. You can learn a few basic theory things to get ideas, or just play around with random notes to see what sounds good. Don't have to be any good, you can get LMMS or another midi editor/tracker and write it without skill at an instrument.
For writing prose in particular, maybe short stories would be easiest? Just because they aren't so long. Still takes creativity for ideas tho.
Idk, I think an important perspective is to remember it doesn't have to be good (assuming you're doing this for fun or learning, not as a job right away). Just create. Then, you'll look at what you made and see how it sucks and get ideas for what to do differently next round. You mention not having the skills, but you can just try to do all things and see how it goes.
or just play around with random notes to see what sounds good
FFVII's One-Winged Angel intensifies
Apparently Nobuo Uematsu made it a few segments at a time, putting them together as they seemed fit.
I'm sure many disagree with me, but I consider lofi electronica to be the music equivalent of "splash some paint on a canvas and call it abstract art". It can be pretty chill to listen to, but making it doesn't require much talent.
Abstract art. Whatever you want can “represent” whatever thought or feeling you say it does.
I’m not saying that the work of abstract artists isn’t creative. My point is that most people can’t tell the difference between a Jackson Pollock work and the results of giving a toddler unsupervised access to the paint cabinet.