“Don’t Be Figments”

I. History

I’ve been around this fandom for a while—six and a half years, to be precise. I joined back in February of 2012, during the second semester of my sophomore year of high school. Before then, I hadn’t really thought about posting anything I had written online—most of it was shitty Warcraft 3 stuff, or some random dreams I had. But the show had opened a new door for me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

Whether the outcome of going through it was good or bad, I’m still trying to figure out for myself.

The first story I wrote for the fandom featured a white alicorn with a short black mane, chained inside a prison with a metal plate bolted across his eyes. I don’t really remember his name, but the look’s still stuck in my head. The story itself was told in a series of flashbacks, and I managed to get a good four chapters written, with another three in the works.

But I had a nagging feeling that something was wrong with it. The whole thing, I mean. That feeling led me to discover a small imageboard called Ponychan, and its irreverent and oftentimes infuriating subcommunity /fic/. I submitted my story to several review threads, hoping that feeling I had was wrong.

They tore it to shreds.

At the time I was confused—how could something I worked so hard on be torn down so easily? But I knew all along that the work was trash, even if I wouldn’t admit it to myself.

The thing that really got to me, though, wasn’t the panning and disapproval of the /fic/ community. Rather, it was the words of a single reviewer—a man whose name I also forget—who unequivocally stated:

“I don’t think you can write.”

Now, in retrospect, those likely weren’t his exact words. But what I got out of it was the same. I was fucking furious.

So I scrapped everything I had and started from square one. “How can I rework the story in such a way that it’s essentially a completely different thing?” That was my driving goal, and the result was the first story I ever posted to FimFiction: Paradise Lost. The net result was much more positive.

“Thanks for proving me wrong.”

Words can’t really describe how happy I was to read that review. Paradise Lost isn’t a good story by any means, mind—it’s pretentious, vague, and a little too fast. But it was a step in the right direction, and at the time that was good enough for me.

I began planning out the next few chapters for Paradise Lost, trying to find ways to expand on that one good thing I had. And for a few weeks I was content—in that time, I had discovered #fic, the board’s semi-official IRC channel. I met several people there that I consider friends: Golden Vision, Yipyapper, Roan, Garnot, Umbra of Kin.

And from there I went on to join #fimfiction, the discord before Discord, mostly because I wanted to see why several members of #fic derided the community so much. I joined for laughs, but I stayed for the people. Some of them I pissed off (sorry about all the bullshit, MrNumbers), but some of them could tolerate me (Fission, maybe, though I know I’m probably forgetting someone).

Notice how I stopped talking about the writing. Good reason, that.

I tried, on several occasions, to publish a second chapter detailing the aftermath of that first chapter. Came up with some extensive amounts of lore, some of which I still browse through now and again. Filled a couple notebooks with it all. None of it bore any fruit.

Every chapter I wrote was trash, every concept I could picture was useless and cliché. Reviewers would look at unfinished, thousand-word scraps and tell me that it just wasn’t good enough—something I knew intimately. I became frustrated, and the project was later abandoned. So I moved on to see what other ideas I could work on, if there indeed was anything else.

The cycle repeats.

I’ve worked on a handful of other stories, each designed to be long. Lore was drafted for each, borrowing from the bits and pieces of things I’ve seen or things I’ve considered before. As you can see, none of them really panned out. Each one sits with only one chapter, and I can still see the placeholders for the chapters meant to come along afterwards. I’ve never finished a long work, and the one short story I wrote—one that I did as a joke after months of irritation—sits as the highest-viewed and highest-rated story I’ve ever written.

I marked Paradise Lost complete after that. There was nothing more I could say.

II. Don’t Be Figments

I’ve been told I shouldn’t give advice.

There are five or so stories on this account. One on another. Most of them are marked “Incomplete”. One of them is marked “On Hiatus”. Only two of them are marked “Complete”.

And none of them are younger than two years old.

Any random person that magically stumbles on my page will probably see the account of a moderately incompetent “writer”—most of the stories are written … well enough, and the ratios on each are … more or less fair. But nothing stands out, nothing is noteworthy, nothing is memorable.

If you’ve ever been around the #writing-help channel on the FimFiction Discord server, you’ve probably heard some of the in-jokes that the regulars like throwing around every once in a while. I’m one of them.

After years of struggling to make a dent in even one story, the frustrations of my peers—some of which tried on multiple occasions to help me—manifested in jokes and jeers at my expense. When they began, I simply played along, even if I found the words painful. It helped that what they said was true. Because of course it was true. It was always true.

I’ve wanted to tell them to stop many times, but the conversation in my head always plays out the same.

“If you want us to stop, then fucking finish something.”

RuponyKenshin, otherwise known as King of Beggars, once called me a coward. He’s right, in that regard. So cowardly that I let the taunts and mockery define some nebulous part of me. Not an insignificant part, either. It’s become such a problem that whenever a new writer asks for help in the chat, and their problem is longevity, the first response is almost always “Don’t Be Figments.”

And they’re right. You shouldn’t be me. Me is a bad place to be.

I’m the guy with a million worlds in my head and not one of them completely on paper. I’m the guy who can’t fucking focus on a single goddamn thing for more than two fucking weeks before I throw in the towel and find something else.

I’m a cliché. A hack. A wannabe who barely even registers that he is one. I could tell you how much I’m sick of it, but I’m always sick of it. The sickness itself has never been enough to push me to do anything. My greatest fear is irrelevance. But I’ve always been irrelevant. And it never seems like anything I do will ever change that.

Don’t be Figments. Because just like my namesake, I doubt any fruit I bear will give way to a better reality. This is just the one I find myself in now.

No matter how much it pains me to stay here.

III. On Advice

I’ve been told I shouldn’t give advice. I feel if anyone’s read this far, then they perhaps know why. I’m an asshole, a cunt, a pretentious piece of shit, a narcissist. If it wasn’t obvious from the depressed wanking up above, then I don’t know what to say to you. But as is usual to anyone that meets me, I rarely—if ever—listen to what people tell me not to do.

During the lulls between my writing, I participated in various reviewing roles in our tiny corner of the Internet. My first stint was reviewing fiction for /fic/‘s Training Grounds, an open review thread where anyone could contribute. The limited success I felt there was something I brought along to the handful of review threads I’ve hosted on and off throughout the years. The last reviewing/prereading thing I did was The Royal Guard, though I’m sure you all know how that turned out.

The point is, I learned a lot through my time failing to write something substantial and absorbing as much fiction as I could. I learned the do’s, the don’t’s, the attempts, the successes, and the failures. And I tried my hardest to get something out of any of that.

To some degree it worked, to some degree not so much.

But I still made progress, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. I became better—if not substantially, then markedly, at the very least. Enough so that I oftentimes feel comfortable talking about what I’ve learned, even if some might say that my less than stellar output should bar anyone from even considering my opinion. I don’t care. My opinion might be shit, but at least I can say I’ve tried.

I feel it pertinent to reflect on the title of this blogpost—the thing I mentioned that I hate in the last section. I fucked up a lot in my time writing. And I keep fucking up every single day. Everyone knows it by now, but I’m not going to stop admitting to my failures. Because by doing so, maybe one day I’ll force myself to wake up from whatever hazy thoughts keep me in place.

Just remember, the greatest thing I learned so far is that a good idea can come from anywhere. No one is so amazing as to be above the advice of anyone else. But if you know that the advice you receive isn’t necessarily relevant to what you need, make sure you point it out.

Bettering each other should be the goal of advice-giving, not wanking about how much shit you think you know.

So before this ends, I’m going to compile a general list of my thoughts in the last section. They’re short, innocuous, and probably things everyone’s heard before. Take from them what you think you’ll need, because heaven knows no one else will.

And above all, don’t be Figments, because no one can take that from me.

IV: Take From Them What You Need

• Don’t built a world for the sake of the world. Your lore is only as good as the characters and stories that live and breathe it. No one gives a shit if you came up with a way to create some hybrid oligarchy using parts of Warhammer and Warcraft. Not unless you’ve got the characters to back that shit up.
• Learn beats. Learn rhythm. A novel is like an orchestra—it has a lot of moving parts, and they all need to mesh well together. And if novels are like orchestras, then short stories are like pop songs. If you want to be in any way effective, then know your point and make it count. There isn’t much time to care about things that don’t matter.
• Don’t ever introduce something and then never use it. That shit pisses literature analysts off, and makes things confusing for average readers. If you introduce it, use it.
• Focus as much on the present as on the future. Don’t get caught up with making every moment in a scene count if it means sacrificing what you can do to build the plot later on.
• Every person does things for a reason, even if that reason is a load of shit. The same is true for characters. If a character is evil for the sake of being evil, then they’re just a cunt. And no one likes a cunt.
• Don’t edit while you write. Even I have a hard time with this one. Write first, make notes, edit later. This is vital.
• Not every bit of your lore is important, but try as much as you can to flesh out as many details as you can. Because if you don’t know how something in your universe works, then how the fuck is the reader supposed to figure that shit out through context clues? How are the characters even solving their problems then? Through fucking bullshit, that’s how.
• Feedback is important, but it’s also important to respect your editors. It’s not a take-take system. It’s a give-take system. Don’t be an asshole.
• Make a point and stick to it. It can be a point that’s straightforward and easy to represent, or a layered idea with multiple parts. Regardless, you fucking find it and you stick to it. Otherwise you’re wasting everyone’s time, including your own. Those points don’t even need to be “morals” or shit like that. Just some kind of focus. An idea, an argument, whatever. Something definitive enough to have an opinion on.

Comments

[PresentPerfect]

“I don’t think you can write.”

This is like the worst thing a person could have said to you. :( I'm glad the fandom's fanfic arm has improved in this area, at least somewhat, over the last eight years. And I'm glad you pushed past the criticism and proved them wrong after all. :) That's all you can really hope for.

[Caligari87]

Thanks for posting this. As a middling amateur with just enough published words under my belt to convince myself I'm a "writer", it hits a bit closer to home than I'd like. I had an experience like yours, where I dug up my fic on the Space Battles MLP thread. The brief discussion and consensus was "the author has some ideas but isn't skilled enough to pull them off."

I spent a lot of time and effort trying to prove that wrong. I don't think I succeeded, though I did at least cap it off reasonably cleanly.

Since then I've had a hard time getting past the first few chapters of anything. That little niggling voice keeps reminding me that while I'm passable, I can't do my best ideas any sort of justice, and I love all my ideas too much to let any of them be the sacrificial lamb on the altar of Practice.

Anyway, I'm not sure where I was going with that, but I do want to let you know that you're not alone in this space. I think (hope) folks like us have a lot to offer in our own way.

[Yip]

awesome post. brings back a lot of memories.