Noncontributing Zero · 10:21am Sep 8th, 2012
I feel this way about almost every fandom I engage in, but I have never felt it more keenly than in the MLPFIM fandom: I keep wanting to give something to the community, but the sheer amount of talent already on tap intimidates me into silence and inaction. All the things I can possibly do -- writing, composing, singing, acting, drawing, painting, all of them -- are already being done, a hundred thousand times better than I can do them, by about twelve dozen other people.
That inexhaustible inner well of motivation I used to think I had now dries up every time I sit down at the computer and look at the million things this fandom has done. And anyhow I seem to be one of those ludicrous, permanently limbo-stuck people who came into being with more ambition than talent... all the burning, unconquerable desire to contribute and to do great things, without the ability. (Not that I've never been inspired to do anything, of course. I once wrote the first nineteen chapters of a novel in four months; I've been stuck on the twentieth chapter for the better part of five years. The words and the inspiration died. They have never come back, there or pretty much anywhere else.)
So here I am, longing to stand on the shoulders of a mountain but knowing I no longer have what it takes to make the climb, if I ever did.
A fandom is composed of a body of individuals centered on a topic or individual canon. That body survives on ideas and works. Every work matters, because it adds to the collective understanding of the body. Whatever you create doesn't have to be better than someone else's work... it just has to capture tour vision.
Don't be afraid to try, sir!