Don't look down, Coyote · 3:39pm Oct 30th, 2012
There are many things that I want to have done, but don't like doing - exercising, cleaning, flirting, to name a few. But I don't think there's anything that I love and hate doing at the same time as much as writing.
Sometimes it's just love, and that's wonderful. Sometimes it's just hate, and then I stop. But sometimes, like now, I have a powerful longing to set a story down, to see what it will look like, to help the little pony who will continue to suffer in silence unless I tell his story.
(Maybe this is why I write so many sad stories. Those happy ponies who visit my head, they're doing all right. They don't need my help.)
So I sit down at the computer and start typing, and then after a short time I remember the impossibility of what I'm doing. Trying to tell a story, and explain all the thoughts and feelings and why they matter, with words.
It's theoretically impossible. I don't understand these feelings I'm trying to express. I can't organize them linearly any more than I could describe a painting by starting at the beginning and continuing to the end. People don't listen to words anyway. It can't be done. It doesn't matter that I've already got two-thirds of the story down, and I read it, and it seems good. I can't explain how that happened. I certainly can't do it again. I'm not a poet; I'm a bricklayer. I have a structure in mind and I plop beige, featureless words into place strictly according to their function, to what the blueprint says needs to happen here. The very idea that this thing of dead bricks can stand on its own if I look away, let alone can come to life, is absurd.
If you take bricks and build a church with it, is god in the bricks? If you build a hospital, is healing in the bricks? If you build a kindergarden, is children's laughter in them?
No.
Because these are just places for thoughts and actions of the people who visit them. They can be build to inspire a certain use, but in the end any architect can only hope to do a good enough job for the purpose of the building. If your unfinished stories seem to lack something, maybe it's the part you can not put into the words, but it is the part that the reader has to work out, to realize the meaning.
Or maybe I'm just ranting?
Who knows? More important: Who cares?
Been there. Very nearly am there. Far more than I care to admit. Why the crap did we pick this art form anyway? I bet people who can pickles as a hobby don't sit there agonizing about never being able to can a good pickle again and mope around hating their pickles.
Look at the irony of what you just said, just look at all of the thoughts and feelings that you just conveyed brilliantly through use of words just now
I can see what you're doing that's confusing you. You're thinking that you wrote a story.
Writing (well, any art) is weird, it's a mix between skill, talent, and finding the right readers. Because as a writer, all you can do is tell a story. There are skills you can use to tell it better or worse (spelling, grammar, plotting, pacing, characterization) but none of those will let you write a story. They have to be added to a certain amount of talent, your voice, whatever it is that makes some people put words together in ways that other people enjoy. Then you put it out there and hope the right readers will find you.
That combination of telling and talent and readers is what we call "writing." Obviously, since you have no control over two thirds of that, you didn't write the story. You can't write the story. You can just tell a story, and hope it finds enough talent in you and the right readers out there to be worth something in the end.
That's my thought process at least.
460853 This guy has got a point. You say you feel you are unable to convey emotions and deeper meaning in your writing. Know that this is false. Just look at your story "Mortality Report". I cried when I read that story, you may have told me that you don't pity gods for their immortality, yet you wrote that beautiful piece of writing. It moved me, it made the whole christian concept of "Jesus died for your sins" actually make sense. So smack yourself in the face, you just elicited a person to contemplate the divine, Aristotle would compliment you on that. Seriously, he pretty much focuses on something good for humans as being that which can lead to reasoned speech.
Says the guy who then proceeded to organize and express his thoughts linearly within a quite functional and beautiful extended metaphor.
Kind of caught up in that, myself. There's a spark that's needed to write, and sometimes that spark likes to play hide and seek.
460850
My wife is into canning, and making her own pickles. You'd be surprised how much pickle-related angst there is in my home
460920
I stand corrected. Apparently the goal of hobbies is to make us miserable.
460920
Now I'm having Ranma movie and O-Parts Hunter manga flashbacks.
460850
I dunno. I had this fantastic homemade lemon-ginger pickle a few years back and it completely ruined my ability to enjoy your run-of-the-mill dill.
Let's split this into two things here.
460872 opened with this:
I'm going to argue this same idea, but from a different perspective.
She's certainly right, of course, in that the sum total 'success' of any story is only partially up to the one who writes the words down. Whether it's read, and understood, falls to the readership. She put that well, and I'm going to leave it as such.
Now then: You think that you wrote a story. So let's presume, for the sake of the argument, that you write in a way similar to me; in which case no, you didn't write a story.
A story wrote itself, and you were its medium.
You don't understand the feelings. You can't organize them all that well. You've got two-thirds of the story down and it seems good, but you can't explain how that happened. And you can't do it again.
This is because it wasn't you doing it in the first place - it was the story itself. It needed to be told, and you happened to be listening. So a pile of words and feelings and dreams spilled forth from your fingertips in a deluge of half-conscious delirium, and now that you've come out of it you're not entirely sure what happened, but there's words on the page and they seem good, but you can't quite remember...
Is this such a bad thing?
When this happens to me, it's always "my" very best writing. Maybe it can use technical polish, sure, but the story, the feelings that spurred it into being, have a strength and purity I can rarely (if ever) match consciously. When I get seized whole-claw by an impatient muse, I revel in it.
With that in hand,
Bricklayers built Notre Dame. Bricklayers built Rome. People with loincloths and chisels built the pyramids. And all of these things remain today, in stark defiance of time and fate, standing tall against the universe and crying victory. But in the beginning, they were just stone; bricks and dust and mud, until someone put them together into something great.
So be that bricklayer. Bricklayers build worlds. Poets just describe them.
All of the people writing inspirational messages are wrong. Creative work is difficult and frustrating. Unfortunately, it's the only game in town. Power to you, brony- I wish you luck in getting out of your rut. Try not to become terminally frustrated. We love and cherish you and your work.
460929
Pretty much. This would probably make a good story actually. A series of one-shots about ponies whose favorite thing to do make them miserable.
I ate an entire cabbage once.
Wow, you just said everything that I'm feeling right now. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who feels this way.
>flirting
Tell me more
461203 Have you ever smoked spinach?
462553
Sadly, no. I did however snort parsley once, when I was six or seven. Rehab was a real bitch, but I've been proudly garnish free since 1986!
Besides, cocaine is WAY better.
I can't know exactly how this feels, because we are two different people who experience reality in fundamentally different ways, so we will never 100% understand how the other feels at any given moment. But for the sake of argument and all intents and purposes I know exactly how this feels.
460853>>460879>>460882>>461122 I wasn't fishing for compliments, but I won't turn them down. Thanks!
461092 So a pile of words and feelings and dreams spilled forth from your fingertips in a deluge of half-conscious delirium, and now that you've come out of it you're not entirely sure what happened, but there's words on the page and they seem good, but you can't quite remember...
That happens? I can see how what I wrote sounded like that might have happened, but... no. I just write one word after another, then have an irrational conviction that I'll never be able to do it again. Did this happen to you from the start, or only after many years of writing?
461203>>462553 Looks like a match made in heaven!
462696 That happens? I can see how what I wrote sounded like that might have happened, but... no. I just write one word after another, then have an irrational conviction that I'll never be able to do it again. Did this happen to you from the start, or only after many years of writing?
A little of both. My very first stories were terrible tripe, the typical teenage self-insert fantasy fare, but early in my second year of writing I had an entire series of five that I wrote in kind of a midnight trance. They're still basically terrible, but even today I can look at them and see bits here and there that are just as good as what I do now. I suppose I could say it's more common these days? Though it's not something I can just drop into at will. Not yet, at least.
But, well, yes, that happens. I recently wrote an 8,000 word shipfic, most of which happened in a period between midnight and five am for which I have no external memory.
Now, less pseudo-spiritually: oh, so you're basically just panicking a little about your chops as a writer? Well, that's also something that happens, but you really have nothing to worry about. If nothing else, Mortality Report proved that in my eyes, and I'm pretty demanding in my qualifications. At worst, so long as you have an editor to keep you grounded, I'm having a hard time seeing you go wrong.
461092 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Author of the German play Faust) Once said: "All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again." I agree that these ideas are out there, but I disagree on your saying that it is impossible to know where the thoughts came from. I believe in humans being rational agents, and therefore able to reconstruct their reasoning to at least some extent
462696 If the poets are to be believed, a certain man name Don Juan once said "Modesty is the only sure bait when fishing for praise."
462629 I see
462696 >heaven
You could argue there's two reasons to write. The first is for yourself, simply to enjoy the personal pleasure of creativity. There's a reason so many people write as a hobby, yet so few do accountancy on the side to relax. The second is for others, to allow someone else the to experience a world you've created that exists only inside your head.
When the creative process of writing stops becoming for pleasure and starts becoming work, the brain will stop feeding you happy chemicals for doing it. You're a junkie that isn't getting a fix from their favorite drug any more. You keep giving yourself hits, but it isn't getting you high. This ties into the first reason for writing. Somewhere along the track you've probably stopped getting the euphoria of creative expression, even though the urges to express yourself never stop.
However there's still the second reason to keep you writing. Humans are, by nature, social creatures. Online writing in particular is a social experience, with near instant feedback and interaction between authors and readers in a way never dreamed of a mere century ago. You create a fanbase, get constant praise, criticism and plain old communication because of your writing. Hopefully you make friends too, people you can simply talk with about things that you think are interesting.
Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.