Let Me Tell You What's Been Going On · 7:19pm Aug 19th, 2012
Here's a generic sad image to set the tone of this blog post.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a bad humor fic that doubled by amount of followers, to around 160. I must admit, it was quite flattering that a cheap story I churned out in a few days got me more attention than stories I put more work into.
So, with the influx of new followers, who follow me presumably to be alerted when I post a new piece of writing, I must say:
I haven't written anything since.
Warning: moping begins now.
I have no imagination. On Hoofin' It, I got helped from two people who have better ideas than I do. The ending wasn't my idea either. And now, when I think of a story I want to write, it stays like that: just an idea. Because I have no imagination to fill in the minute details a story requires. Making things interesting. Pacing. Dancing around an idea, rather than just being blunt with it. For example, I wanted to attempt a Rarity x Octavia shipfic (because honestly, they're probably made for each other) but I just can't stop myself from thinking of how awful it would probably be. It would be too fast paced, cheesy, boring... because I don't know how to make a story interesting. I need other people to help me with ideas, sadly.
I'll try to write, and become so discouraged with the result that I become stressed and end up quitting. Because I can't seem to fully grasp the idea that no story is perfect, that all stories can theoretically be improved. My concern is that my stories would be missing TOO MUCH. I have ideas, but I fear doing my ideas disservice, and (I hate to admit it) but I don't have the passion to fight through it. It's so much easier to go on youtube and get a cheap laugh than struggle through something that might end up being terrible.
It's the worst possible combination, that of Twilight and Rainbow Dash. Everything has to be perfect, and I'm afraid of failure. If it isn't perfect, it's a failure, so I don't even try. But I WANT to have the passion. I want to WANT to write, if that makes any sense. I wish I could transfer my talents and passion. For example, I love playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). I've been playing it for 8 years, and I still love it. Here is some shameless self-promotion of my skills (it's me dancing to Nightmare Night by Toaster Guy).
[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ4xNc3Eyps]
And another, more difficult song:
[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWrF0MxPgPo]
Pretty good, right?
Now why can't I transfer my love for DDR to writing? I mean, it sounds completely absurd... but if I want to love something, why shouldn't I be able to?
I won't make excuses for myself. It's laziness. A big part of it. Struggling isn't fun, especially when the payoff isn't clear or immediate.
And yet... I feel like I still have some passion deep down. I just need to get in the right mindset. The one I'm in now, which is "Whatever you write will be terrible" is not the right one.
So I haven't given up yet. I'm still reading a bit, to try and learn all I can, and I do have an idea similar to "The Light Goes Out" by Always AskingForAttention. Hopefully, I'll get over myself and write it down, and be able to make it interesting.
I know this blog post comes off as whiny and moping, but it is a really mental hurdle I am facing. Do you think I want to feel this way? Of course not. But the mind is a tricky demon. In the meantime, I'll keep fighting it.
Again, thanks to everyone who is watching and supporting me.
I believe the answer is obvious. Write a dancefic!
Dude, I know what you feel. Honestly, when I wrote Ponies of the Five Rings I had the feeling that noone was going to read it... And what would you know? People are asking for more! Writing something that you like is really worth it, even if you think that noone would read it at first.
As for your issue, I understand you. It's hard to sit in front of the laptop/keyboard and start writing down everything. My advice as a reviewer and writer? Make drafts. Lots of them. Shuffle possibilites, what you want to happen. Need ideas? Dammit, you always have us there in #fic. I'm sure that we can give you some advice every now and then if you need some help. In a nutshell, everything sums up in "Want to get better as a writer? Then write, madafacka!" If you have and like it, write about it! No regrets! Like writing shipping? Go for it! Are you a more adventure lover? Go for it!
I know that making a story thrilling is hard, but there's too many cool people that will gladly help if you ask for it.
297864 dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/Vinyl_Scratch_lolface.png
It seems to be that you are currently in thrall to an acute case of Magnum Opus Dissonance. Or, well, similar enough.
Warning: Counter-moping begins now!
You have no imagination? Horseapples. So what if you got help from people? Find my a writer who isn't going to pre-readers, and editors, and shamelessly cribbing ideas from other sources; you take all of these things, filter them through your lens, and that's your writing. Regardless of the source of the idea, you're the one that put it together in the end (and put it out for people to see, something I still have yet to do).
As for the structural concerns with stories (the minute details, making things interesting, pacing, being subtle with ideas rather than beating the reader over the head...), well...these are legitimate concerns. And there's a reason for that - because every writer needs to learn these. I've read plenty of stories here on FimFic that had great concepts, good characterization...but had no pacing, and hit me over the head with a main idea three paragraphs in, resolving it only a page later. But this does not invalidate a story; these are the furniture, the carpets and paints that go into a house after the structure is solid. These are polish, and only to be agonized over as such. I myself very much sympathize with this in particular, as I demand a certain minimum of detail and pacing in my own work...which has led to over three dozen half-finished ideas gathering dust for years on end.
Now for a little aside: Raritavia ship? Do want. Has anyone else even done that yet? If so I haven't seen it, and now it needs to happen. Because you're right - they are probably made for each other.
Back to counter-moping!
If you need other people to help with ideas and polish? That's perfectly fine. To quote Miyamoto Musashi (who obviously expected his book about swordsmanship to be helpful in regard to writing ponyfic, amirite): It is a very rare person who can attain mastery of a thing by themselves. Most people need teachers; and by extension, one can go to colleagues (or co-conspirators!).
As for trying to write, and becoming discouraged and quitting, I'll tell you what a professional novelist I adore told me when I asked him: even if you feel like you're writing crap, write it anyway, because at least you have something on the page. To take that further, maybe that crap will eventually morph into diamonds two pages in, and/or maybe you come back to it the next day and see every way to make it work you couldn't at the time. Or maybe it was crap - but at least you wrote it out, so now it's out of your mind to make room for good.
The only disservice you do to your ideas is to tell them they aren't good enough to be tried. 'Tis better to have written crap, than not to have written at all. And yes, it is easier to do something else that occupies your immediate attention; I did that for three years. Only in these past few weeks have I begun writing again, and it has been magnificent, so much like the triumphant sun rising after a howling tempest.
Twilight Sparkle is a perfectionist, bordering diagnosable, but at the end of the day she knows she has someone to go to for help - be it her friends, or her teacher. Rainbow Dash is afraid to fail, but only rarely does this manage to stop her from trying - and those times when it does, again, she has ponies to turn to for help. And there's nothing wrong with that; none of us is as strong as all of us together.
So take hold of that passion. Take up pen and slash broad strokes into the forboding stare of the blank page, or alternately, squeeze the trigger on that machine-gun rat-tat-tat of furiously tapping keys, eating the space on a digital screen with the hunger of memories yearning to be known.
And as for DDR...were you always this good at it? Or did you just persevere through times of adversity - like all the great examples, big and small, of the best of mankind?
I wouldn't call it laziness per se, but rather...a stumbling moment on the mountain path. And to turn the cheese to eleven, I'm going to quote Alfred, from Nolan's Batman: "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up again."
So reach inward to that simmering passion, as it awaits that clarion call to noble battle with weapons mightier than the sword, and let it wash over you, and resound through you, until you feel it up to your very eyes, and breathe deep of glorious worlds yet to be.
...Well, this has ended up a lot longer...and a little more poetic than I expected. But I'm like that lately. For that matter...terrible, terrible Lord of the Rings author-puns are in my head...oh hell, why not.
Write for wrath, write for ruin...and the red dawn!
Ignoring editing and WIP chapters, the last time I wrote and completed something was Write-Off #4, back on June 18th. (Of course, that took weeks of on-and-off editing before I finally published it, and I've totally been nursing this one WIP chapter in the meantime. I swear!) Point being, don't force it. Eventually, some emotion— inspiration, frustration, gleeful stupidity, etc—will give you motivation to bang on the keyboard. But forcing yourself to write Just Because is typically a recipe for disaster. As you can see from my smarmy interjection a few sentences ago, even I have trouble following my own advice.
The other aspect is to not be afraid of failure. So your shipfic may suck—so what? You already have a few ideas of your potential weaknesses. Getting some reviews on /fic/ will either confirm or negate those suspicions. From there, you can either seek to improve the existing fic, or consider that fic a learning experience, and improve on the next attempt. So, you can learn from failure, but not unless you write that first attempt.
297887
First of all, thank you very much for the encouragement. Because I'm a complete sap, I'm tearing up right now. To have someone believe you and support you... it is a wonderful feeling. In a related note, out of 31 people you are following, you are following ME, along with authors like Device Heretic, Varanus, Cloudy Skies, Butterscotch Sundae, Skywriter, Thanqol, Vargas, and AbsoluteAnonymous? I am absolutely flattered.
Your advice is a step in the right direction. I just wish I didn't have to reach out to the community for support, rather than being able to grit my teeth and deal with it. I would say my problem isn't that I need help from other people; it's that I require too MUCH help. And the thing with imagination is, I try too hard, if that makes sense. To come up with something that fits the story is challenging. A longer story, especially if it is subtle, requires more details, as I said. Now, if it's tough for me to come up with ONE detail, and then realize I have to do that to infinity... yeah, it's tough. I pretty much canceled my RD fic about her deciding on whether or not to leave Ponyville because I had no idea where to go next, or how to make it interesting, what to make happen... because I basically wrote it without thinking, without any planning. And now it's dead in the water.
And another thing with relying on other people is: ideas just aren't fun by myself. A huge part of what I like about fanfic writing is the social element. Take that away, and it just seems boring. And I wish I could do more on my own, to make it fun on my own. I like having other people help me outline and such. Is this okay because I'm still learning? Or am I just treating other people as a crutch?
Honestly, the imagination and passion part is why I'm envious of other writers, even if they are bad. Even if another author wrote a 100K fic that was completely shitty, I still envy that person because he or she had the drive to write that much without caring about the consequences. For some horrible reason, I've always had the mindset of "If you can't do something well, don't bother." It goes back to fear of failure. And it's not necessarily that I don't think I can improve my work. It's more that I'm afraid that my work will be poor, no matter how much work I put into it, I just won't "get" it. I had an idea a few months ago that I really liked, and worked on for a month... and it was still shit after revising a ton. If you want to see a train wreck, go read "First Dawn" on my story page. Go ahead, I dare you. I worked and worked and worked, and thought about it, yet it was still bad after so much effort.
I'll have to cut this off for now. If only I could analyze and write stories as well as I am at analyzing at my own thoughts. Perhaps I'll continue later. Moping is such delightful fun, after all. There's just so much going on here, and writing it all down does help me collect my feelings.
Thank you again for your support. Honestly, it means a lot to me.
Well, its nice to know I'm not the only 'procrastinating perfectionist' out there (a phrase I coined for myself a while back). The usual dialouge in my head when it comes to any project is: "If its worth doing, its worth doing perfectly; though, doing something perfectly is hard and tedious, thus its not worth doing." I can't claim that I've found the miracle cure to how over-come this mentality, but I have found some techniques to help make it easier to deal with.
Going off of my own experience, I'm highly critical of my own work, my ability, and my talent. I set a high bar which I usually never achieve. When I do finish something, I think about all the corners that I cut instead of what I managed to accomplish. When I do something, it has to be 100% perfect the first time. When I write, I write as if its the final work, editing and tweeking as I go. From my experience, such an approach is guarenteed to make one's life miserable and one's self-esteem non-existant. If any of this sounds familar, here are some friendly suggestions:
(1) Simon_oSullivan's comment (297871) is right, the best thing you can do is simply write many drafts. Don't critique and/or belittle what you put down, just write down your train of thought. Don't try to make every sentence, word-choice, and/or idea perfect the first time; in my opinion, such an approach ends up taking a lot longer in the end. There will be a time for editing and polishing later; just get the overarching ideas onto the page; get the bones set first, and add the meat later.
(2) Find yourself some friends that you can trust to give you an honest, fair, and constructive opinion on your progress (not just the final work). I, personally, have come not to trust my own opinion of my work because I know it is highly-critical; instead, I seek out the opinion of a few trusted friends. More often than not, what I though was complete garbage turned out to be wonderful work that simply needed some polishing. Such feedback helps to change the way you view and approach your work. Not to mention, I have come to realize that many of my favourite writers on FIMFiction have pre-readers that provide just this service.
I might be wrong, but one thought I have as to why you might find it easier putting time into DDR than your writing is that DDR provides instantaneous feedback regarding your progress; as you play, it tells you when your doing well, or horrible, and you can track your progress as you perform. There is no second guessing as to the level of your achievement. I think asking a few friends to read your work at regular intervals as you progress through it can provide such feedback to encourage you to continue instead of being stuck continually second-guessing your work.
I don't want to sound like I'm being a hardass, but if you could objectively read your stories and then go through and read a few random selections from the FimFic archives, you'd probably pull your head out of your ass PDQ.
1) No one is depending on your writing schedule. You never promised anyone anything on a deadline, and frankly, it doesn't matter. A few people might be whiny little shites, but they don't matter.
2) Your work is badass. Sometimes, it isn't all about having all the answers ahead of time. I'm amazed by how things can develop without the author's input as the story progresses, and being able to integrate other people's good ideas is just as hard and just as much of a skill as coming up with it yourself.
3) I know how hard it is to come up with ideas. Personally, I struggle with constantly pushing myself to not fall into the same trite storylines as everyone else and their dog, and frankly, there's not much left over after that.
4) Why can't you transfer your passion for one pasttime into another? Why should you? You do both for different reasons, I would assume. Creativity doesn't work like other hobbies. I can turn on TF2 and do a pretty damn good job of wasting n00bs at any time, on any day, but creativity comes when it comes. You can foster it by always writing in the same location (mine's at work... prolly not the best idea), or by doing it at the same time each day. Your brain can be hardwired to think creatively when these conditions are met, but true inspiration can't be forced. It's a bastard, and I've felt it's grind as well.
Remember: your output is not indicative of your talent. Hell, how long have we all been waiting for Half Life 3 now? dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/Luna_lolface.png You are a fine writer, and all it's gonna take is one chapter of a new idea for you to turn your feelings around. Until then, you can NOT worry about pleasing people, or having some kind of stress-inducing deadline on yourself.
297951
Also, the best writing (IMHO) is collaborative. There was a recurring scene in the first season of "Castle" that I really loved, when the eponymous writer is playing poker with several other bestselling fiction authors, and they're basically tearing his stories apart and trying to find better ways to write them. That's really how it goes, and how it should go (again, IMHO).
If it's any consolation, I only read "Hoofin' It" after I read "Fine Tuning", because that fic was too amazing not to check for other awesome stories.
...
I am confident that you will overcome your troubles and well as continue to write such excellent stories.
297951
And I'm very particular about who I follow, indeed even the stories I star as favorites have to be distinguished. At the risk of sounding a touch snooty, you wouldn't be on that list if your writing hadn't earned the spot (...that sounded far less conceited in my head, I swear).
Now then:
Challenge Accepted.
And now I will pass terrible judgement upon it!
...It's pretty good.
There was one point in the beginning of the first part where I noticed that you had a habit of only using simple sentences, when you could use conjunctions to maybe improve flow a little; now that's could change, not should or must; and I should mention that I'm a university trained linguist, and accordingly I've been picking apart english grammar for years. That first bit was the only such place.
The rest of the story was fine. I was never thrown out of immersion by errors, or bad pacing, or...you know, let's change tack here. It had good pacing, it had good characterization, there was enough side detail to fill out the story without drowning in minutia, and it was a great premise: young Celestia faced with her first crisis, the first time she needs her real power - screwing it up and nearly breaking as she realizes the true weight of her crown, and that it's not all going to be golden thrones and honey toast and street quartets?
And rather than hitting the reader over the head with generic tragedy or campy, preachy dialogue, it was raw, and honest, and otherwise damn well executed.
In short: if that's your trainwreck? You be doin' just fine.
Now, while Hoofin' It was clever and hilarious, and got oodles of attention for its quirky nudge-nudge humor as those sort of stories tend to do, what put you onto my watch list was Overthinking It, which was terrible, and beautiful, and heartwrenching, and triumphant, and pitch perfect Twilight Sparkle punishing herself with obsession to the point of torture over her regrets in being too afraid to ever speak her heart. I absolutely adore it (and there is too little TwiShy). For that matter, I kind of want to record a reading of it.
So! You got any other trainwrecks for me to read?
This may be far less helpful than Sunchaser's brilliant inspirational tirade up there, but I'd like to offer the services of Thirty Minute Ponies, a flash-fiction blog I help run. A story prompt every day, 30-minute time limit (with a 6-hour window for submissions). Some of our regular participants, as well as I personally, find that flash fiction is excellent practice in developing ideas, as well as a way to develop tools for getting ideas in the first place. For me, the time constraints make it easier to write things, because I know that it's a short sprint and I'm done, with no need to worry about long-term planning or any of that jazz. It's simply a way for me to get words out every day, which is, as Sunchaser mentioned, Pretty Much The Trick.
Your mileage may vary, but I've found TMP very helpful for ending my creative slumps. So, there it is.
308695
Well, thank you :) I will certainly check that out, as well as read some entries to see what they do. Writing without reservations would be nice. Although, getting over the mindset of "It has to be good" will take some training. I will assume that no one is going to get mad if I turn in mediocre entries for a few days, perhaps weeks in a row? My concerns about why I'd have mediocre entries are detailed below.
Actually, I just read one of the recent entries, a TwiPie fic that starts with Twilight reading a book about rocks. The amount of detail in the scene/story was amazing, and I am well aware that detail in scenes is a skill that I am lacking. I'll do some more reading on my own to try to see what other writers do, but in the mean time, I suppose I'll ask you: what's the best way to flesh out a scene and add these details from mundane events? I mean, in the story I read, the simple idea "Twilight reads a book on rock farms" got stretched out and went into TwiPie shipping. The expansion of a simple idea is a skill I desperately need to work on. What's the best way to draw things out like this in a scene without it seeming forced/boring?
Thanks again for your help.
308855 For me, when I have the nub of an idea, some concept or scene I want to use, I'll start by asking myself "how does that happen?" And generally when I'm thinking that, it's bigger-picture stuff, overall-shape-of-the-story kind of things.
When it comes time to illustrate scenes, the low-level, nitty-gritty stuff, I tend to think of things in terms of setting a stage for a play. The only props you want on stage at a play are things that are going to be directly relevant to the action, because the audience's focus should be on the actors, not on the elaborately-dressed set. Also, I keep in mind that because text is two-dimensional, I can only show the reader one thing at a time, and therefore I need to show them only things that matter.
So I take a minimalist approach to deciding what goes into a particular scene: if a prop, or an action, or a line of dialogue is something that the reader needs to see, then in it goes. If it is not a thing that the reader needs to see, then it doesn't get in.
So, with all that said, you might be thinking that it sounds like I hardly wind up writing anything in a scene. The way I counteract that and fill my stories is by having things going on that I'm trying to show the reader. I tend to think about my characters' arcs. Kurt Vonnegut famously said "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water." I don't always succeed in that, but it's a thing I keep in mind. Even in a short 30-minute flash fiction, there are still character arcs. So my scenes are informed by the bigger-picture planning I do, where I think about what reason my characters have to be in the story. Not in a meta sense, but like, "I need someone to be excited at Twilight. I'll use Pinkie! But why Pinkie? Why not Dash? Maybe it's Pinkie because <insert reason here>." And then, more often than not, whatever that reason is will tell me something about what Pinkie wants in that story, and suggest what her character arc can be. And then, when I'm writing that story, one of the things I'll be doing is using Pinkie's dialogue and actions to show the reader that character arc.
So, basically, I guess my advice boils down to "use more moving parts to make your stories richer, but choose your moving parts with care." Hopefully that's a bit helpful. : )
308855 I liked your TMP story yesterday, that was well-handled. : ) I hope it was fun for you, and that we'll see more of you in the future.
310517
Thanks! But I still felt a little discouraged when I saw the other entries. They had so much more imagination than mine :( and written in only 30 minutes, with good pacing and everything? I had to make a mad dash with mine, no time to slow down or think, and the writing quality suffered for it. I really hope my creativity improves as I keep writing them. But I'm still feeling a bit of stress. Stupid mind.
310953 It's all good. Nobody starts as an expert. It's all about doing work to keep climbing that learning curve.
And keep in mind that we have always intended the 30 minute time limit as writing time, not thinking/planning time. Feel free to take your time to get things lined up in your head before you start writing. : )