Epic Fail · 1:29pm Aug 30th, 2012
Dearest followers, I owe you all an apology.
About one week back, I was meandering through the cavernous void of the internet, without any real purpose, when I was struck with an idea. A delightfully grim idea. Possessed with the idea for a brand new fic, I immediately leaped onto GoogleDocs and began typing furiously. The idea was so tight in my head, so brilliant, and so exciting, that I wrote like I'd never written before. Every word felt right, everything seemed well placed, and I was enjoying myself immensely. Every single day, I clocked in no less than one thousand words. I was writing like I'd never written before, and all with the purpose of making one of the darkest fics I'd ever created.
It wasn't long before I was able to recline in my chair and revel in what I had created. Eight thousand and eight hundred words, all written within a week. The briefest time span I've ever achieved. I was satisfied. I was more than satisfied. I was proud in what I had accomplished and how well I had kept myself motivated. So I uploaded my creation to the Cesspool for review. And then I crashed into bed.
I woke up the next day with a bit of a migraine. That passed, thankfully, and I took a look at how my story was doing after a perusal from the folks that had volunteered their time. I found a tad of turnout. Not much, but enough to keep me satisfied. And yet some of the comments bugged me. But I decided to ignore them for now and carry on.
Then more comments came along. More that bothered me and made me look back at my fic questioningly. I gave it a quick read-over. The issue didn't seem too out of place to me. So I took it to my fellow pre-readers to see what they thought. They took a gander. And then they told me what I had feared.
I had screwed up. Viciously. I had written a fic that could not possibly hold water, no matter how well it was written, in the MLP universe. This was not a question of suspension of disbelief. This was not a question of using canonical ambiguity. So I'll put it this way: I put an entire week of tireless writing into a story that was literally unsalvageable.
This is the first time this has ever happened to me, needless to say. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't devastated that all that effort had gone for absolutely nothing. It put me in the dumps for the greater part of the day. Which kinda sucked. But at the same time, it made me realize that not all my projects are going to work. It sounds like something stupid and obvious, but it's true. I'm going to flub, and I'm going to flub hard every now and again. In the end, though, it's all for the better.
Yet, I still have to ask the question as to how this failure came about. A mistake is only a mistake if you learn nothing, right? Well, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a clever pony told me that he knew when his writing was going to be bad. And that was when he enjoyed what he was writing. I disagreed, at the time, thinking that enjoying what you're making can only lead to quality. But there's a danger to it. Out of love, you become blind to the inherently obvious facts that can be seen by anyone without a full frontal lobotomy.
In the end, though, it detracted from time that could have been used to put more work into writing Air or another decent one shot. And that's what I'm apologizing for: wasting your time.
I can't go into details about what my story is, because I'd rather accept the failure and move on. Those few of you who took a look at it on The Cesspool know what it is though. And thank you a ton for taking the time to snap me out of my stupid. You know who you are, and I really do appreciate it.
So instead, please enjoy the following video, which is a darkly, violently beautiful piece of animation. In watching it, you'll learn what I attempted, and why I failed.
Also, huge hug to Obselescence, that sexy mother hubber. He gifted me Frozen Synapse on Steam. I've been hungering for that game for ages. Mad thanks for giving it to me so generously. Go give him a hug on my behalf.
I've been there. Maybe not on the grand scale as yourself, but I know the feeling of getting into a story, writing out several scenes, stepping away, coming back, and realizing with that sinking feeling that what I just did was garbage.
And not only that, but someone had already done it, and done if FAR better than myself.
But hey, it was an experience that you can learn from. And learning from it and moving on is never a waste of time.
Chromo needs a hug?
If it makes you feel any better, I spent all last December/January planning and writing a 25,000 word mini epic which I sent for a review on Ponychan, only for the reviewer to tell me that they couldn't even make it past the first 2 pages due to extreme boredom. Not long after that (and I completely forgot about this until I read this blog post), I spewed out about 10,000 words of another story in the space of 2 weeks thinking that it was awesome, only for it to sail down the front page and into oblivion with just 2 thumbs up and no comments... and no wonder, because it was an unbelievably godawful story which mercifully doesn't exist anymore in any form whatsoever -- good riddance to it.
My point is though is that despite the amount of time and effort I put into those stories, I don't regret writing them at all. Like you said, it was bound to happen eventually, so as long as you learn from your mistakes and try to really understand why the story didn't work then I'd hardly call that a waste of time
I hear ya. Some of those ones I enjoy writing I keep to myself. Others I chalk up to my seventh wall and post just because I can. I mean, why not? It's practice, and I firmly believe one never knows what'll hit or miss.
I've also never had much of a filter anyway.
You accidentally made them all quetzalcoatls instead of ponies, didn't you? I swear, if I had a dollar for every time that's happened to me...
323000>>323005
I suppose it all comes down to at what stage you're able to realize you're doing something that can't work. That determines the bitterness of the blow, I think. But either way, you still learn something.
I just recently wrote 8000 words of a story that I intended to be a one-shot story that, after getting reviewed by a few peers, ended up being scrapped due to the complexity of the plot. It's not that it was unwritable, the issue was that, to do the story justice, I'd have to turn the "one-shot" into a multi-part epic that would take nearly all my time away from my primary story. That wasn't something I was willing to do.
I feel your pain! Stuff can get away from you sometimes, and turn into something you didn't expect. That's the nature of writing.
Now you get to hang with the rest of us mortals!
Like others before me, I know that feel, except I realized it about 50,000 words in. While it usually drives me mad, the fact that my writing is good, but not great, usually saves me from this level of disaster, but I realize after 50k words that I need to go back and re-work the whole damn thing.
It may sound selfish, but I'm glad you had this experience. While you're a nice guy and a great friend, I was always so envious of you because the first thing you ever submitted exploded like an atom bomb, and ever since everything you've ever written (sans your blatant trollfic) has been received with praise and awe. I mean you dispised the initial draft of Air because it was 4-star rather than 5-star. Seriously?
Like I said, welcome to the world we not-famous writers live in! Sorry your hard work didn't pay off, but I think it will in the long run. Better luck next time!
You don't owe us an apology. We knew the risks when we entered the Cesspool. Though I may never look at Applejack the same way.
I don't believe writing enjoyment has to do with quality. I'm hard-pressed to find any simple rule. Comedy is fun and easy to write. DDKRN, Interior Design Alicorn and Sisters both flowed out quickly and easily. They took a lot of revision, and after reading each joke about fifty times I couldn't tell whether anything was funny anymore, so it was like making love with numbing oil. So I'd imagine. But not difficult. There's no issues with theme, or foreshadowing, or all the structural problems that make other kinds of stories like putting together jigsaw puzzles out of pieces of bark that you picked up on the beach.
Detective & Magician was quite difficult to write because it had four parallel stories: The crime that Holmes imagined he was solving, what was actually happening, Trixie's character arc, and Holmes' character arc. That took months, and it's only 14,000 words, though IMHO it feels like a much longer story. Mortality Report (not submitted yet) was terrible to write because it's an idea story with no action, and while it was easy to get the first draft out, I spent a month on and off trying to figure out how to get people to read it. Adding action obscures the idea. Twenty Minutes was painful to write because, again, all the action took place before the story, and in my testing I found I had to keep cutting and cutting and cutting. Also, rape. For Burning Man Brony (also not yet submitted), the first half flowed out in a day and was lots of fun to write, because who doesn't like writing first-person angry-narrator-on-speed? Then the second half I've been working on for maybe two months, because the second half has to make explicit a whole lot of personality issues that, well, it would be simple enough to write up something dramatic and emotional and call it a story, but very easy to write something false. I'm dealing with personality problems I don't completely understand, and have to think about a lot to avoid saying something destructive and misleading. Also, I have this structure that demands each of the Mane 6 say something relevant to a specific personality issue, and some of them frankly don't have much to say about it.
So if there's a pattern, it's that the "deep" stuff is hard to write, and the "shallow" stuff is fun to write. But shallow stuff can be good!
I know how it feels, though not quite as bad as it was for you. I had the bright idea to start writing a fanfic (for the first time ever, might I add) and I kept going for a whole week, writing and planning things out. I lost the creative drive though and a month had passed before I realized that the plot of the story was absurdly untenable and my writing was terrible anyway. At least it provided some lessons to learn in case I choose to write more/again in the future.
i would like to see it anyway, can i get a link to the GDoc?
I've scrapped twice as many stories as I've published. In fact, the abandoned documents in my Microsoft Office total over 70,000 words. We're all in the same boat here, broseph, so don't sweat it. Writing is a growing process
323122
After thinking about it a little more... Every story starts out easy. If it's a shallow, fun, fluffy story, it can be easy all the way through. If it's a meaningful story, it's eventually going to run into a hard part where it's tough to know what to say and how to say it. If it were easy and simple, it wouldn't be meaningful. Everybody would already know it and/or do it. It wouldn't need to be said. If you're trying to write a deep story, and it's fun all the way through, it's probably not very deep.
(Although that doesn't apply in this specific case, since you were doing an adaptation! That's probably the real answer: It was fun and easy because the story was already developed.)
The animation is very well-done (not just great animation, but also great on a budget), and I liked the story. But it's also a metaphor for bad story-telling: Build up to a climax, to the point where you would have to sit back as a writer and do the hard work of figuring out what your story is saying and what it means for each character and how you should resolve it. Instead of doing that, kill everybody off, blow everything up, have a big light show. Some famous stories do this. Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Space Odyssey 2001 (the movie). Maybe sometimes it works. Hamlet does this. Personally, I think Hamlet has a sloppy, lazy ending. Shakespeare never figured out what the theme of Hamlet was, and neither has anybody else.
Meh, sounds pretty much like most (if not all) of my fics. Somehow I still get views, though.
Well, great. Now you got me on a short film binge again. This one I just clicked even starts with a song that was in BioShock.
I was going to be productive today, damnit.
So even star writers like you commit blunders from time to time. I don't know if it comforts or worries me.
Edit: This animation as dark as it is amazing...
I'm wondering why I never saw your story, Chrome. The Cesspool's the first group I've joined on the site, so I'm no expert on how they're supposed to work, but I figure I would have gotten a notification or something...
That fucking video... damn.
That aside, that's really too bad. Ditching bad ideas in which you were highly invested always sucks.
Is it bad if I now have a burning desire to read whatever it was you wrote?
I've been there before. That moment where you look back on your work and think: "Oh god, what possessed me to write this?". Luckily for me, my most recent attempt barely resulted to three thousand wasted words. That could easily have been another chapter for From Skies Above.
That video was awesome. I love that kind of thing.
-Sparklight
If it makes you feel any better I have a bunch of stories written up in word documents and on this site that will never be posted. Only one out of five or so fics that I write ever come out being as funny as I want them to be.
I must have, like, 40,000 words that will never be released to the public.
So yah...
It's a loss, but it's a lesson. Each fic corrects a mistake.
(of course, I write really fast...)
LOL that vid was funny and prof of how bad church doctrine is
Ohhh, I've totally done this before.
WAIT WAIT WAIT I NEED TO READ IT D:
That video just shows how hauntingly brilliant just sitting idly by can be.
Aw..... do you need a hug, Chromosome?
.....Creeper-hug? I promise not to explode twice, not even once.....
Hey, you need to go though the bad stories to get to the bad.