Learning to Embrace Your Successes · 2:56am Jul 23rd, 2018
So, full confession, I have a lot of “Fimfic Famous” friends. I won’t list them because, well, that would be weird, and rude, but I have a lot of people I chat with with (some) regularly who are fairly successful and popular on this website. I have a lot of different interactions with them, but one that has occurred with an alarming amount of regularity is something along these lines;
Them: “My work/standing/ability is garbage.”
Me: > staring pointedly at the massively huge piles of followers/likes/offers to sire children
There is a bit of a trend I’ve noticed among even the most successful authors on the site to suffer cripplingly low self esteem which, okay, they’re almost all between the ages of 14-35, cripplingly low self-esteem is basically a gimmie for that age range, but they tend to constantly undercut or ignore their success and dwell on perceived failures on their part.
Then one day I was chewing over this recurrent problem and had a thought to myself; Nyronus, you silly wicket, you used to be the most nail-bitingly neurotic motherfucker this side of Tumblr, how the fuck did you chill out?
I thought about it for a while, and I came to one thing I think ultimately helped me, because let’s make no bones here, a few years ago I was that author. I’d put out a smash hit that spent a week in the feature bar, racked up 750+ upvotes while there, and all I could think about was the mean comments. Now a fic of mine doesn’t even make it into the feature bar and doesn’t break 70+ upvotes even after a year and my biggest reaction is to just shrug and go “Damn. Well, glad someone liked it, better luck next time!”
The thing I came upon, that I think helped press me to a more healthy state of mind regarding this whole colorful horse roller coaster we call Fimfic was this: I learned to embrace my successes.
Now, what do I mean by that?
We focus a lot on failure in the culture over here in the states. Besides just the barbaric punishments we meet out for failure as a matter of course (it’s wonderful growing up with your caretakers telling you you’re going to die in a gutter and it will be entirely your own fault because you failed a middle school course!), we also focus on them in our art as a chance to “learn” and “grow.” We also shame and attack people if we perceived them as not being sufficiently ashamed of their (sometimes even straight up assumed) failings. At the most extreme, confidence is equated with straight up evil. I think that perhaps this over-focus on failure is, partly at least, responsible for creating a culture of neurosis (especially that whole “your entire future depends on how you score in a 200 year out of date schooling system designed by a sociopath to make fanatically loyal war slaves for a greater German empire” thing. That shit needs to go), and we’ve forgotten that, especially when it comes to learning and growing, success is an important aspect too.
Without knowing what you’ve been successful at, even if you overcome crippling fear and doubt, you just don’t know where to start building to improve. Not to mention that having a tangible idea of your accomplishments is something that can help ward off and diminish those crippling feelings of worthlessness and doubt, and I do mean crippling. I see great writers in this community languishing, unable to write their beautiful stories because they seen no point because, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, their work is worthless and no one really likes them.
Frankly, it’s tragic.
So, acknowledging your success can both give you direction in which to take your work, and help get out of the habit of diminishing yourself, but, to understand how to embrace success, we need to have a little talk about what success means.
One thing I think I need to make clear is success is contextual. Success is both success at something, and given it is success at something in a chaotic system, there are going to be limitations. What that means is the success is success at meeeting some specific goal or standard, and that there are factors outside of your own ability that can influence success, especially when you measure it in how your work plays out in a larger scenario. As an example - Germany had the best tanks in World War II, hands down. Tougher, faster, meaner, and with better crews, but it ultimately didn’t matter when it came time for them to try and win the war because they were outnumbered 50 to 1 by the Americans alone. All the Panzer Elite and King Tigers in the world aren’t going to carry the day when each one has a twenty M4 Shermans pressed into their rear, and just as many T-84s at the front and sides.
So, specific jargon and colorful military comparisons aside, what this means is that success needs to be measured both in what you actually accomplished and what factors outside of your effort could have influenced the outcome. For the a more relevant example, let’s take as an example everyone’s favorite site feature: the feature bar!
There is a lot that can go into what gets featured and what doesn’t. There is, of course, the ever present specter of follower count. There’s also time - certain times of day can almost guarantee a moderately eye catching story gets features, vs. other times when you have to pray for your preexisting fan base and general marketability to body press through the deluge of content you have to compete with.
There’s also just the zeitgeist to consider - different things will be more likely to succeed at getting into the bar as characters, archetypes, concepts, and memes become the Next Big Thing, and certain things will basically never make it big. I remember the dark ages of “Luna acts dumb around modern tech” fics instantly hitting the bar and getting 1K+ plus votes, and that was a far less troubling experience than the kinds of things that were getting insta-featured when you had mature viewing on during that era.
What getting featured means has also massively changed over time - back at the dawn of of Fimfiction, any fic that hit the bar was 1) going to get massive upvotes 2) be in there for a week 3) All but guarantee the career of the author as a successful one on the site. Now fics flit in and out in half an hour with 17 upvotes and authors with 3000+ followers can put out fics that barely get a hundred upvotes. There’s a lot going on here, with a lot of variables to keep track of, many of which can sink your aspirations out the gate; which basically boils down to - if your fic doesn’t get featured, or meet an upvote margin, or whatever arbitrary bar of success you set, ask yourself why, and if it really reflects on you as an author.
No one may have read your dark war story starring only OCs set in a vision of Equestria that has almost no connection to the show, because, well, it had nothing in it they were looking for, but that doesn’t mean what you wrote was worthless or even a bad story. Hell, if it got over a hundred upvotes and almost no downvotes, you actually did good, all things considered.
Of course, not all failure is just the whims of a volatile meme-happy attention market. Sometimes you screwed up, and you know it. Maybe the fic was even a big hit despite being, as far as you’re concerned, hot fucking garbage served on a platter of fail garnished with your own hubris. Does that mean that the whole endeavor is to be written off and cast into the Pit of Eternal Shame? Not really. Success is, as I stated, success at something, and while the overall project may be a maelstrom of bad choices, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t make noteworthy accomplishments in some regards. Maybe a bit of dialogue was super snappy even if the rest of the fic was dull. Maybe there was one moment you felt nailed your theme even if the fic took way too long to get there. Yes, your fic sucks overall, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t find something worth repeating or expanding upon in there. Something to genuinely be proud of.
Success means you accomplished a specific task, and it means considering the whole context of the situation you were working with. Embracing your success means knowing what you did right despite the odds, slip-ups, and impossibilities.
Of course, I don’t just feel this is a useful tool for reducing the sheer tonnage of bitten nails every time you log onto this site. I honestly think this is actually a useful tool for life, and I came to that conclusion while considering writing this piece of a few months ago.
So, we’re going to talk a bit about my mental health history. It’s not pretty. I’ll spare you the worst details, but, fair warning.
So, as some of you who read last year’s Bronycon retrospective may know, I spent a long time wanting to kill myself. To the point where I’d see innocuous things and instantly start considering their utility in putting an end to my miserable, worthless existence. Things got even worse from there at one point, and this carried on for a year.
It still happens sometimes when conditions are right, but at this point, I generally let those thoughts roll off my back, and then largely forget about them. How did I go from compulsively trying to judge if a passing banister could hold my body weight hung from a rope to just treating it like a passing fugue state? Well, one night, a friend was moving away. This friend had been a serious pillar for me through my darkest hours. I was dropping them off after hanging out with them for what may have ended up being my last time in a long time. We were talking and I forget what exactly prompted it, but the question if things would be okay came up, and I had an epiphany.
I’d been to some bad places. Places so bad my therapist basically pleaded with me to start taking pills despite my insistence otherwise after I saw what they did to people close to me, but you know what?
I didn’t do it.
The episode always broke, and I carried on, went to bed, and went to work in the morning without a break in rhythm. I had stared into the abyss, and though it had brought me low, bowed me under its weight, and made me suffer, I never broke. I had faced my demons and survived.
I realized then and there I didn’t have to be afraid anymore, because despite all the fucked up, awful shit I’d felt and even sometimes done or considered doing, I hadn’t faltered. I had nothing to be afraid of.
So I told my friend that I felt like things were probably gonna be okay.
And, here I am, four years later and still kicking.
Knowing that I had that well of strength despite all the awful stuff gave me the confidence to resist and carry on. I still thought about killing myself. A lot. But not with the same frequency and intensity, and without the same level of exhaustion and anxiety afterward. Knowing that I had succeeded and could yet succeed in this endeavor broke the power the ordeal had over me.
Now, winding back out of my own sob story, much like embracing my success there wasn’t an instant cure all for my problems, it won’t be for yours. Compulsive self-doubt and recrimination like that takes years to unlearn, but this lets you start somewhere. So, I plead with you, go back over your old failures. Ask yourself what about them really failed, and more importantly, what about them worked. Keep that in mind as you move forward, and slowly, eventually, it will get easier. Learn from your failures, but embrace your success, and use it as a bedrock to build toward the future.
I want to thank you all for reading this, and if you felt it was useful to hear, please, spread the word. That said, in the interest of leading by example, as a postscript to this post, I am going to go through all the stories I consider to be failures and point out at least one thing about them I felt was a positive. If that's not your cup of tea, glad you all took the time to read this far, and it is my hope that at least some of you take something useful out of it moving forward.
And hey, even if I screwed something up here, hopefully, there was something in it that was worth it for all of us.
And now, in chronological order, something positive to take away from the duds among my own vitae-
This story was an attempt by me to try and put a very weird mental breakdown I had one day to paper. It also comes off as the most cliche of cliche Pre-NMM Luna Angst snippets one could imagine. This one is probably one of the hardest ones to find something positive with because the story’s grossest offense is… it’s bland. Too short to get much meat, too meandering to be punchy, too odd to be palatable, too normal to stand out. It was my first attempt to deliberately put some of my own baggage into my art (the fact that that happened during Average Day was completely by accident), and I certainly got better at that as I went along.
So, I guess if I had to say something positive about this story is that it was good that I tried this. That does feel like a bit of a cop-out answer, but it’s the most honest one I can give. I wet my toes in exploring this kind of stuff in fiction, and is it stuffy, dry, weird, and kind of blasie? Yeah, but everyone has to start somewhere.
This story was a bit of a rollercoaster to publish. At the last minute my best pre-reader contacted to me out of the blue to 180 on all his praise for it, but didn’t explain why he felt it was terrible all of a sudden, leaving my confused and frustrated. Impatient, I just went to publish anyway because I hadn’t gotten a clear answer from him - and boy, was he right. Not only did the fic bomb, but it attracted some of the most vapid, pointless, trolling, and in at least one case, bigoted commentary I had received. There is a reason this fic has deleted comments on it.
I still to this day don’t know what’s wrong with this story, just that something is wrong. For me though, there are two things about it I’m kind of proud of. One is that I managed, as far as I can tell, to package and lay out a lot of the confusion and anxiety I felt about finding out I was asexual into the fic even if it flubbed. The second is… some people got it. Some people read it and felt it spoke to them and their experiences… and that’s cool. My story meant something to somebody, so it wasn’t an entire waste of time.
This is probably the story I had most on my mind when I wrote this blog. You know you’ve written a winner when your most insightful and reliable pre-reader comes back to you and tells you he thinks the story has potential, you just need to completely change the cast, setting, most of the plot, and the theme.
There was a good reason he said that though. As I went over in the author’s notes of the fic, this story is basically a kind of generic gay angst story pretending to be an emotionally charged drama about romantic negligence, and I feel the way the story’s energy just goes flat and rushes to a conclusion after the scene on the train is pretty symptomatic of that. That said, the scene in the hotel room? I still fucking love that scene; the tension, the pathos, how charged it is? I’m proud of it, still, and it was the fact that it stood out so much that made my pre-reader think that that was what the fic was really about and made him suggest rewriting it to better support and explore those ideas. If your fic’s fatal flaw is you accidentally jammed a chunk of a really good fic into the middle of a really mediocre one, you could probably do worse.
Writing this fic was a disaster. The long and short of it was, years ago, I was mildly frustrated by a weird series of symbolic overlaps I ran across that seemed like the universe was trying to fuck with me, namely that I most closely identify with Luna out of the whole cast, and it turns out that lunar gods often have a death and rebirth thing going on.
I have a thing for karmic cycles, reincarnation, and necromancy; don’t judge.
But that overlap inspired me to concoct a story about Luna being a psychopomp, a spirit that shepards the dead onto the next life, and about her reaping Twilight when she died. I was pretty sold on the idea, and then promptly sat on it for six months until I completely forgot about it for years. As I do. Then, a couple years ago, I remembered that old idea, and, frustrated that I hadn’t put out anything in a while, decided to whip it up because I figured it would be easy and short, and the rest of you should be hearing the Always Sunny in Philadelphia title theme right about now.
I found it excruciatingly difficult to write. These were years old ideas I was barely remembering, and most of the pathos and appeal of them were faded, making it hard for me to emotionally connect to them. The story also quickly went off the rails as Twilight basically hijacked the whole affair to make it about her and being the fucking Princess of Friendship, and, unable to write a sentence with prose that wasn’t indigo at best, I eventually gave up and ended up writing it as total self-parody, sent it off to my then gaggle of usuals for pre-reading figuring they’d get a laugh out of the garbage fire, went to bed, and woke up to find a bloody war of snippy comments and flared tempers being waged in the right hand side of my Gdocs.
Yeah...
The version that got published was a total rewrite of the rough story from the original draft, this time from Celestia’s perspective retelling the events to another party. It’s still not great, and I kind of feel like it’s a much more muddied and shallow rehashing of some of the themes I explored in Forever and Again - but it was at least readable. The fact that I accomplished that alone is a victory. That said, for me, a few things about this story stand out. For one, it was excuse to practice the first person conversational style I’d used in Making an Old Lady Cry. For another, writing in Celestia’s voice was pretty interesting, finally, I found most of Twilight’s emotional-plot-thread derailing antics in the story so aggressively true to character, even in the terribad draft. She just refused to let the story be about anything other than friendship. She doesn’t even emotionally feel bad about being dead until she realizes her friends are probably sad. That’s… really amusing to me. Also, at least at the time of writing, no one’s downvoted it yet. That’s also pretty neat.
5. Super Gypsy Lord Admiral Nyronus Shachza Shouldn't Write Shipfics, Volume II
I almost didn’t include this one because, hey, most of what’s published under this title isn’t even mine. Not to mention it is the most shitposty shitpost to ever shitpost outside of Setheverman’s tumblr. That said, I took some time to think about this story and I decided there was something worth saying about it, namely, that I had a lot of fun contributing to this disasterpiece.
I never really liked crackfics. A lot of them are really tasteless, and, let’s be honest, that’s not untrue about some of the entries in this byzantine nightmare. As I described in my Bronycon retrospective, I was really nervous about getting involved for that reason, but once I decided to go all in? It was fun. I had fun just cutting loose and writing the silliest stories I could given the prompts. Plus, of the four entries I wrote, I still genuinely love one. The entire story may just be a genre pastiche leading up to a pun-based plot-twist/punchline that you’d probably only really understand if you were in the room that time (or read the title), but dammit, I thought it was funny and it’s okay that the joke isn’t for everyone.
So, I hope this helped, or at least gave you all a chuckle or two. Like I said, if you felt this was useful - please, spread the word. Thanks for reading all of that, and here’s to better living and more good ponyfic in the future!
Lol, disasterpiece
I see somepony listened to me advice.
First I must have success
Until then, I'll just keep on tapping the keys and arranging letters into something that resembles a story!
What I really need is more readers and comments, when done properly, even bad reviews can be useful.
This is a good, you did a good good, yes.
Huh. Thanks, I think I needed to read this.
There's a word for this blog post: strive.
Take anything and everything you can, from the best and worst of your efforts, and consciously push forward with those experiences to build something newer, bigger, and better. The level we strive to aspire to is a personal one we alone can choose, but to strive means to reach for it with everything we've got.
This was an uplifting post. It's good life advice everyone should listen to.
I definitely aim to celebrate my failures - as long as they are ones of honest effort - because hey, we learn that way.
4906149
That defines a lot of wacky ponyfics.
Just search "Fridge Horror" on this site.