State of the Writer, January 2014 · 2:41pm Jan 31st, 2014
First let me just say ARGH THE EPISODE LEAKED AGAIN I FUCKING HATE THAT at least it's the day before and not three days before like last time ._. Seriously, I like spoilers, but I also like things to happen when they do.
SO
January saw an upswing in activity from me. (I just checked my stories and apparently I hadn't released anything since October? What?) Snowdrop and Nyx Get Drunk and Make Out has been a hilarious success, just having passed over 1k views, while A Puzzle Unsolved had a wider audience than I anticipated, and is less than 20 views from being my third-least-viewed story. (There's a threshold based on The Story That Shall Not Be Named, that so far only Like a G5 has been unable to overcome. Bee-tee-dubs, go read Like a G5.)
Of course, writeoffs are happening left and right oh god make them stop. I placed seventh in the last one with The Mane Six Walk Into a Room, a very experimental story that was probably kind of boring. :B At least I'm trying to expand my horizons, y'know? I do wonder about my future in that scene, however. The only times I've won are when the number of stories, to say nothing of the number of entrants, was in the single digits. My goal is to win against a pool of at least twelve stories, at which point I will hang up my saddle and go do other stuff. But I'm not sure I can. It doesn't help that Pascoite certain unnamed parties continually beat me; with the shift onto Fimfiction, there's been an increase in the number of really good writers: Bob from Bottles and DuncanR have returned, RedSquirrel456 is still around, and Bad Horse has joined up, to name one.
And it's not like I consider myself to be a second-rate writer. I don't look at the tons of silver medals I've racked up and go "woe is me, I am le eternal first loser", because every single one of those represents me beating the pants off a dozen or more other writers. Sometimes even ones who've beaten me!
It's just that I've become aware of where I am as a writer. Writing for school taught me the basics. Writing by myself, I learned worldbuilding and action scenes. Writing for the PCA taught me characters. Writing for the SCP Foundation... is still ongoing enough that I can't really quantify what I've learned yet. It's certainly made me feel confidently versatile. Writing here, for this show and especially with this community, I've grown so much and put a whole crapload of ducks in a row that I often find myself wondering, "What's next? Where can I go from here?" Currently I'm working on theme and writing stories that mean something, but asking those questions has led me to one conclusion: I need to become independent.
Simply put, I can't write good stories by myself. I always miss something that makes another person scratch their head or go, "Wait a minute, it doesn't work like that." Less often, my stories come with unanticipated interpretations that I absolutely do not mean. I can't know these things without outside help, and that, I think, is going to be my, if not final, than at least next hurdle to overcome. And I've got no idea how to do it.
Anyway, the tl;dr is, I'm only as good a writer as my editors, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it kinda sucks when you're writing in a scenario where editors are verboten. :B On to current events.
Epic Unicorn History Chapter 2. Good FREAKING God, I'm almost there, I swear. I had a little trouble last week with dragging my feet on it when I should have been writing, because more or less all I had to do was rewrite an action scene. I've rewritten that action scene, but in doing so realized there needs to be another action scene after it and that led me to rewrite the climax of the chapter and ARGH. It's happening, don't fret, I'm sorry I'm worthless at making promises, but it's happening.
Meanwhile, there's another writeoff going on, as I've already said, so that's gonna slow things down. <.< Again. I'm gonna be writing today while doing laundry and grocery shopping, I'm that desperate to get this back to my editor.
I've also started work on another shitfic that's actually been sitting around as nothing but a title and a synopsis for a good three months now. When to the winter Olympics start? It's kind of a takeoff on that and I'd like to get it out before they begin.
Lastly, since I didn't do one of those "If you liked it..." journals for A Puzzle Unsolved, allow me to do so right now!
Uh, well, if you like the crossover bits, I don't really have any other crossovers, at least none that are serious. I have plans for an actual Marvel crossover, but I have no idea when I'm going to do that. >.>
But! If you liked the romance, there's Dance 'Til We're High, though the ending might leave you wanting more, if history serves. The Sun Shines Brightest at Night is my most recent romance, but it's all OCs and batponies. If you're really desperate, you could always try Right Before Your Eye, which is also OCs and very, very old.
In other words, if you liked that story, I'm sorry, it's kind of an anomaly. :B
Ooh, haven't checked those stories out before. I'll be sure to give them a read.
George Lucas became an independent writer once. It was awful.
And now I really want to know what exactly you wrote.
> At least I'm trying to expand my horizons, y'know?
Not that I haven't appreciated the tubs of deep-fried butter bacon balls, but would it kill you to feed me a salad once in a while?
But srsly:
> I need to become independent (…) and I've got no idea how to do it.
You could ask your edi… wait.
Really, though, unless you're one of those freaky author savants who can casually poop out awesome words (like Pascoite, the writing-AI-from-the-future known as Eakin, and known geniuses like Isaac Asimov), relying on editors is a huge benefit; once you push yourself to the point where you're "good enough" not to need them, you lose the source of feedback that pushes you hardest to improve.
I think you're already doing the right things — pushing your boundaries, changing things up, seeing what you learn from doing it differently. I guess where to go from here if you really want to step away from your editors is to go back through the stories that have improved due to their influence, and see if there's any commonalities that pop up in what they helped you change? Identifying patterns might help you see something you're overlooking as you write.
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Here's my author page. I actually have a hard time remembering.
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Hmm, I think comparing myself to other people is once again the source of my troubles. I will give myself credit for not being whiny about this topic, though; maybe I'm growing up? (I hope not!)
Just thinking back over feedback, especially that I've gotten from writeoff entries, I think the issue is that there are too many issues for me to deal with all at once. So I suppose the course of action would be to get to a point with themes and whatnot where I'm comfortable with that and then go looking at what I can't do myself and try to bolster maybe one or two. Because you're right, I don't ever want to go without editors or feedback of any kind, but I certainly would prefer to rely less on them for pointing out major fuckups, and catch those myself. It'd make my workload post-feedback significantly easier.