Breaking My Own Rules (The Lost Stories)

TL;DR - This year I'm going to be releasing some stories that I had previously discarded and experimenting with a broader range of story concepts.

Over the years, I've given myself a number of rules for how to produce work here on FiMFiction. It's a mental checklist, not a formal document, but I refer back to it regularly. They act as a form of quality control to filter out bad ideas. I aspire for all of my stories to have a 4:1 likes to dislikes ratio (80% likes). Of my first 4 stories here, 2 did not reach this bar. To me, that was unnacceptable.

The solution, I felt, was to further restrict myself. When someone gave me a piece of criticism on a story, I would conciously or subciously add a new rule to my list. Things like "Never write a short story that isn't self-contained" or "Never write for more than one multi-chapter project at a time" or "Never write a story without knowing the end." I thought these things were helping me, and I could try to justify them by pointing to the 6 straight stories that have met my bar for success. Yet I wonder about the cost of putting myself in more and more chains...

Looking back, I noticed that while I released 4 stories in my first year, I've averaged only 2 stories a year for every year after that. So restricting myself in this way has cut my production in half. This shouldn't surprise me, but it does bother me. And I have dozens of ideas, including several almost complete stories, sitting on my harddrive (or even just unpublished here) that I have refused to work on because they break one or more of these rules.

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to do away with most of these self-imposed rules. There are some basic principles that I think are still good, and those three are the only ones I'm leaving:

1. Never write a story that could work outside the fandom. - In other words, if I could replace the names of the characters with names of other characters, either original or from other fandoms, and replace all the pony-isms with normal terms or other jagon, and the story would be functionally identical, I won't write it. (This also rules out ponifications.) The piece must be, in some fashion, a commentary specifically on this show or this fandom.
2. Never write a story that I, personally, would not want to read. - I am not a mind reader, and stereotypes, assumptions, and educated guesses are not things I want to base creative works on. If a story is something I want to read, then at least I have some evidence that a real brony would like it.
3. Never write a story based on a popular concept. - Meaning that if everyone is writing a particular kind of story, there's no reason for me to add to the noise. A go-to example would be all the "Would It Matter If..." stories that dominated this site for a few months a couple years back.

But all of my other rules are going out the window.

This means that I'll be dusting off discarded stories, some of which are effectively already written. You can expect a new story coming out tomorrow with the working title of "Relationship Advice" about EQG Rainbow Dash asking Sunset Shimmer about her relationship with Flash. It was sort of a deleted-scene from "The Phone Competition" that morphed into a seperate story idea that I then let go because it broke my rules. (If you are wondering, the main rules it broke were "Never write another story that requires a rating above Everyone" and "Never write another story featuring a widely disliked character.")

And, if these stories fail to make the mark, then at least, perhaps, the creative work will help get me out of my writing funk and allow me to finally finish "The Phone Competition" (the latter chapters, of which, were also being held back by my rules, such as "Never have a well-liked character do something that might be unlikable") .

Thank you all for your patience, and I look forward to seeing your reaction to my figurative cutting room floor. I know the criticism for some of these is probably going to be harsh, and I'll obviously still read the critiques and try to learn from them, but I don't want Fear of Failure to by my primary motivation for not doing something.

After all, if I am to improve as a writer, I need to be open to feedback, and no one is giving me feedback on stories I keep to myself. Hopefully, 2018 is a more productive year for my writing.