"What's the point of trying to write good stories, when people find shit more compelling?" · 6:37pm Jul 23rd, 2014
Earlier today, Bad Horse posted about the systemic dropoff of views between the first and second chapters of a story, and in the process the aforementioned question came up. I answered it in more words than a blog comment probably justified.
What's the point of trying to write good stories, when people find shit more compelling?
You can waste years of your life agonizing over this immutable reality, or you can take a page out of the colloquially termed shit-peddlers's book and just enjoy writing for the sake of it. Doing anything else is counterproductive at best, but more likely just a miserable way to go about your life, because on a mechanical level writing is a plodding, repetitive, thankless task that's perpetually undervalued and rarely commercially viable. On an artistic level, it can be used to say great things in small ways, small things in great ways, or stupid, silly things in stupid, silly ways, and all of those options are fine. The only sticking point is that we have the same predilection for intellectual feedback loops as anyone else does, with the added bonus of being too outwardly focused to keep track of what's going on at the other end of the proverbial microscope we're viewing the world through.
And all that translates into a cycle of thinking that it's never good enough because nobody's reading it because it's not populist dreck because you want it to be more than that because that's what all the famous writers did because they were innately talented and no one else is because they don't understand how the world works like you do because all they care about is money and fame because they don't value the art form because it doesn't bother them that sometimes they write duds or make mistakes or just exploit their audience for easy views because clearly they're shallow because they don't lie awake at night agonizing over the fact that nothing they write is ever good enough.
Fuck that noise. Grass will be green, birds will fly, politicians will lie, and people will have shitty taste. These are things conventional wisdom says you can't change, and conventional wisdom is 100% right for 99% of people. The 1% consists of those who know that the only thing in the world you can change is how you react to it. Write for other people, and they'll define your success. Write for yourself, and you will. There are seven billion people on the planet. There's only one you.
Be you, man. The rest is feedback.
So what you're saying is everyone has subjectively shit taste, so just worry about yourself.
Especially this guy ----> 2309565
*eyes that story*
It's got less than 200 views after five months. Who cares if he's retaining 93% of that? :P
I followed you for this.
2309587 As did I
Yes, angsting over bad taste is silly. But not caring whether people like what you write is equally silly.
I don't write for myself. I think up stories for myself. But I've already got them more clearly in my head than I can set them down on paper. No need for me to write them down just so I can enjoy them. Writing "for yourself" is pointless. Heading over to fimfiction to publish them afterwards, doubly so.
Say you play baseball. Are you playing baseball "for yourself"? Do you not care whether you win? Do you not care about the other people on your team? If so, you're not really playing baseball.
Writing may be a game, a thing done for pleasure. But it's a social game. And I happen to think it can be more serious than a game, more like friendship, or love. Not caring what readers think = "wham, bam, thank you, ma'am!"
Me griping that lots of readers don't want good stories is one extreme. You replying that it doesn't matter is another. Each extreme is half of the truth.
2309596 I think it depends on each person though. You find you desire feedback, but whose to say there isn't an author who is purely writing for their own enjoyment and doesn't care what others think?
Both extremes can be valid, as can a middle ground.
There are. Like Emily Dickinson. But they don't publish their stories on the web.
2309638 I used the baseball analogy to show that doing something for your own enjoyment doesn't mean doing it by yourself, for yourself. People enjoy other people.
Writing is a social activity, and readers are an essential part of it. Writing for yourself is to normal writing as solitaire is to playing other card games. I won't say it's wrong, but I regard it more as pathological than as something to aspire to.
2309714
In addition to what John's being saying, don't take any of this as me saying I don't take any stock in whether what I write is well-received. Anyone who knows me can tell you--as I could as well--that I'm hypercompetitive to a fault, over everything from sports to video games to especially writing. My perspective that I've explained here isn't what prevents me from investing a great deal of time and effort into figuring out how to make it into the featured box and bring in new followers, nor from being disappointed if a story of mine bombs among my readers or (on a more timely note) doesn't win a contest it's entered in. What it does do is allow me to pick myself up afterwards, focus on what I can personally fix or improve on, and keep plugging away at more stories and ideas without a previous one's failure clogging up my head.
In a single trite phrase, all I'm really saying is, "Mind over matter."
2309752 I can agree with that.
Because insulting the readership and the stories they enjoyed are shit and so are the authors who wrote them is a great way to convince people to appreciate their work more by comparison.
While I'd leave out the part that implies people will have shit taste regardless of how much you complain so you should bite the bullet and just write what you like, this pretty much reads like a lot of the stuff on this subject I've spent years posting around EQD and Fimfiction.
2309596 and to whomever it may concern:
You do know that as time goes by, newer and newer people join this site on a near daily basis and most are younger and younger readers and writers, right? Lumping everyone with sweeping blanket statements of "You liked that story? Well, you're taste is shit. You're shit. And so is the writer who wrote that shit." that makes people not want to have much of anything to do with such self-entitled statements.
Frustrated with lack of followers and views? Who told your dumbasses to make Fimfic your first and only place to publish your work? DA, Fanfiction.net, having a nice facebook or twitter can help signal boost your stuff a lot. Make friends with other authors big AND small and promote each others stuff, you know help one out and they help you back. Be fucking sociable and not so damn irritable all the time.
And yes, angsty posts like that and callous statements will make you lose some followers sometimes. Many will just ignore the blogs and just stay for the stories. But not every story is going to keep pleasing the same people who followed you for past story. You have ACTUAL competition for attention here. Not to mention new story and story updates hardly last long on the front page by the time many likely get home, so you might always missed a chance to snag a follower who may have liked the type of story you wrote.
Shits all RNG down here. And many people, as proven for years, have short attention spans or just don't have time for long stories. Others want BIG chapters and a long story. Shit is called DIVERSITY. Different tastes for different folks. Many take it seriously, many more will likely favorite a clop of the day sporting some AppleDash or whatever over something well written and comical, BECAUSE HORNY TEENS.
Sometimes, may be hard to believe, many people will just find your stories and the subject matters to be shit and just move on to the next potential time waster.
Appreciate what you got. Especially the ones who bother to waste time to leave comments on your stories and stuff. Show them they aren't just a bunch of numbers to you that you aren't happy with because someone's http://www.fimfiction.net/story/176738/the-flirt may have gone a bit viral during its release. Hell, even I don't know why I kept it faved. I know why I faved it, just not why I kept it since I didn't like the rest of the chapters. Still, it is what it is. At least you don't limit yourself to one genre and stuff. That's always respectable.
You could control every single story that ever gets into a feature box, eqd, whatever that new ficvault is called, and the site fic recommendations and popular lists. And I can assure you, people will still seek out and find other writers that cater to their tastes. Or, just give up on a dying medium since no one hardly reads anymore. Most who own kindle and such are well over their 20's and it's gotten to such a desperate state that they now allow hobbyist writers to publish their own works.
Don't make something that's seen as the lesser form of all art mediums even less enjoyable for those long time readers (most having mastered the art of avoiding drama llamas anyways) and new readers by attempting to alienate their tastes in fiction. The important shit is that they chose to read anything at all on this site. And maybe —maybe— one day they'll stumble across your works and —maybe— toss you some feedback and some likes & favs.
TL;DR: "Less bitching, more writing!"
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(I don't think you people know how well you have it considering the lack of interest most people show towards fanfiction.)
I find great truth in you words, good sir. I tip my hat and raise my glass of water to your wisdom.
2309596
Uh, as someone who plays intramural baseball, there are plenty of people who play baseball completely for fun without caring about the score or, sometimes, their team. Because the thing is, people can do stuff for fun and not really care if it's good or not. Just as the blog post said, getting in a fit over people liking things you define as "shit" (in a completely subjective opinion, I might add) is just silly when you should try to have fun first and worry about everyone else second.
2310307 Aquaman is taking my words out of context and making it sound like I'm dismissing vast numbers of fiction as "shit", like the usual griping about the featured box.
No; I was specifically complaining about a strange phenomenon that happens with extremely bad stories. Very few many-chapter stories here are finished by more than 60% of the readers who started them. The exceptions are not good stories, but extremely bad stories. I don't mean "featured-box clop bad"; I mean this bad.
It isn't surprising that people downvote these stories. What's surprising is that they FINISH THEM. 89% of the readers of that awful story read thru to the last chapter. That's unheard of for a merely great story.
Which means the downvotes aren't "bad" at all. They're just part of the experience. The readers want to hate something intensely. They are so thrilled by the experience of hating these stories that they have to keep reading.
And this suggests weird, disturbing answers to the question of why people read. Which in turn raises questions about why we write, and whether the way I write is worth the trouble.
2310335
Uhhhh, you do realize the total word count on the whole story is 1,000 spread over three chapters, right? It would take me about three or four minutes to read that if I wanted to. Shockingly, most people probably read to the end because it took up none of their time, whereas there is no way in hell they would have if the story was 50k words long and spread across 10 chapters. If you can find better examples, then great, but that's a bad example for a hypothesis.
Whoa, so much stuff going on and most of it is going through one ear and out the other. Perhaps due to indifference. Or lack of understanding. Or sleep deprivation. Either way, good show with all the comments.
I think people value a stories message and characters more than the actual writing quality, which I think is short sighted.