Fear · 12:12pm Oct 11th, 2018
What did I want out of my stories? What did I want out of Light?
From the very first instant I decided to write a piece of fiction, all I wanted to do was create quality and entertaining experiences. I loved fantasy. I loved reading. I loved being in awe of an author’s world and vision and the emotional connections I made with the characters most of all. I wanted to replicate that, to share that joy I felt while reading with others. And I wanted to share my unique ideas with others as well, and write stories that only I could write. More than anything, I wanted to do it right.
My standards for myself were high. And so one day, when I decided to read Light from the beginning to check how it all flowed, I realized that the story wasn’t as good as I thought it was. In fact, I hated it, and when I tried to continue writing for it, I hated that too. I don’t know what caused this massive surge of insecurity, but it killed all my desire to continue. I stated at the time that I would rewrite the story and resume in a couple of weeks, but that was a lie. As I started to rewrite, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. So I just gave up. I let fear rule me. I was simply afraid of being bad.
Giving up on Light was one of the two regrets I had in my life. The other regret was also giving up on something else I was passionate about.
I always intended on coming back, eventually. I always felt guilty for abandoning the people who liked the story. I knew, as a reader, how much I hated it when fics I loved were abandoned. At first, I thought it would just be a break for a few months. But the grip of the fear of being anything less than perfect was strong, and I couldn’t bring myself to write anything at all. Months turned into years.
I never truly stopped thinking about Light, however. It was the execution I hated, not the idea of the story itself. Over the years, whenever I came across something inspiring or interesting and I was reminded of Light, I would take a note on my phone. My note app eventually became filled with many short, one sentence notes about Light. I would slowly compile these notes into a google doc when there was too much Light note spam filling my phone. The google doc slowly grew to about ten thousand words in size.
In the early summer of this year, while reading the note doc, I reminisced about what the story could have been, and how much better the ideas would be if I wrote it now. But I figured the note doc was super messy and almost impossible to find any specific info in, so I decided to make a private wiki to neatly organize all the info. I started casually working on that, copying everything over from the doc, and even actively creating new information on stub pages and to fill in gaps. Doing that started to make me feel excited about Light again. Excited about writing again — something that I hadn’t felt for such a long time. I used to dream about becoming a published author, and I was reminded of that feeling. And after reading the praise in the old comments from the story again, I remembered how good it felt. I really appreciated the regular readers and commenters like AppleTank, Starlight Nova, and Lightning Bearer, and I felt all the more guilty.
I’m still afraid of being bad. I’d probably be even worse now if I wrote anything, since I hadn’t done anything for years. But I decided to get over myself. It’s impossible to be good without first being bad, and doing nothing out of fear won’t ever make me better. The allure of story craft has never left me, even after years of paying it no mind whatsoever. It feels like I was meant to do this.
So why am I writing this? I want to make a public commitment to force myself into doing what my heart tells me to do. I originally published the first chapter of Light on January 10th, 2014. That’s my deadline. The story currently sits just shy of 50k words. If I can get even half of that rewritten by January 10th, 2019, I’ll be happy. Exactly five years. It feels unreal. I know it will be bad, but I will accept that and get better. If this is another lie and I don’t put in the effort of doing it, then well… I guess writing never was for me. But I really do want it to be for me.
I don’t know if any of you who were originally fans of the story are still interested. I hope you are. But if not, no matter. I am interested. If you’ve been waiting thus far, I pray you bear with me a little longer.
Dreamy Days
ayy, that's pretty cool. good luck.
Part of me finds it eerie how much of myself I see in a blog like this, yet part of me also expected it. The details are rarely universal, but the core aspects of our aspirations with stories like this tend to be fundamentally similar. I, too, had dreams of becoming a famous author and that was at least part of my motive for starting and finishing a story, except the first one I wrote I did entirely for myself because I didn't know where to post it. Up to that point, I never publicly published anything. That was a courageous plunge I made back then.
But since then I helped to edit a bunch of other stories on this site. Originally I did it with the exchange of, "If I edit your story, will you at least read mine?" So I got desperate enough to bribe some of my readers to read my stories. That journey took me in plenty of directions. A small handful of them have become close friends. Another I know made some of the artwork for my stories cover in exchange for the edits. I became a lot better and more confident with the technical stuff ever since I started helping others.
Over time I noticed how much others are challenged by their work in some way, yet they also has the dream of becoming a famous writer. That is when I realized how common that hope was and I wasn't the only one. When I realized that, that desperate hope in me faded to something more grounded. Now I have more like a, "Whatever happens, happens" attitude. I no longer delude myself into thinking I'll be the next Steven King or J.K. Rowling. In fact, if I did get that famous then I'd probably not know how to handle it. Anyone that has that much attention undoubtedly gets lots of flack too. It just comes with the territory of being famous. When I realized that, I became more comfortable with being more small time. People rarely know me, but I'm not the kind of person who goes to bars just to socialize anyway. To shy for that. I prefer a few but very close friends. Very authentic relationships instead of shallow and frivolous.
I well remember that strive for perfection too. I used to go over and over and over my first story in an attempt to make it perfect. I'd always find something, including a few things that has got me suspicious of a mandella effect. A feeling like, "C'mon! I know I corrected that one already!" or "What?! I'd never make a mistake like that in the first place. How the hell did this get here?"
But now I take things more chill. Don't obsess correcting one story over and over again. I got a bunch to support now and it would take too much energy to devote to them all to that degree. Instead I just brush through it a few times, post it, then largely let it be. Sometimes I read my own stories online (I especially enjoy it on night mode reading) and now I sometimes don't even correct a mistake I've found. The best authors have mistakes in their stories too. It doesn't need to be perfect to be enjoyable. If you really can make absolute perfection in something, then you don't even need to be on planet earth at all. You're beyond this little school so go ahead and get reborn on some other more advanced world instead.
But being here is a great challenge. I've rarely met any human who said being human on earth is easy. That in itself alludes to being on earth is an advanced lesson. How far can we go in a world full of limitations?
I've known that disappointment and depression over abandoning a story. Largely because of my guilt for the audience that enjoys it, but twice in the past the main character of "1k Years Later" actually haunted me in my dreams. It was a very brief snippet but I never forgot it. It was of Cozy Glow galloping towards me and lugging a wagon behind her for some reason. She cried out to me in a desperate voice, "Cozy loves you!!!" When she said it, she was on the verge of tears and sounded deeply afraid, desperate, and sad, but also a tiny bit hopeful. It was as if she was terrified of being abandoned, and deep in my soul, I well know that trauma. That dream hurt my heart, and if I'm convinced that wasn't a real character in some way, then it was at least a personification of my guilt.
Man, I tall ya! These stories really take the author in a journey and it's amazing what can be uncovered along the way. I've learned a lot, including some esoteric things. That's par for the course.
As you read this response, how much do you resonate and identify with it?
5762483
Wow. Thank you for writing so much in response to this. I'm glad that you feel able to relate to it, and I find some parts of your experience relatable as well. For example, when I first joined the fandom and got interested in writing I also did editing work for others and made some good friends doing it. But I didn't do it in expectation of getting eyes on my stories. Instead, I just wanted to improve my mechanical ability, and being expected to help others fix their stuff was a great way to do it.
And of course, I understand your guilt over abandoning a story. As I said in the blog, I spent years thinking about the story afterward. And as is evident from the story on the site, I never actually fulfilled the promise I made in the blog to start writing it again. That's another helping of guilt there.
But I would say that my views on the things I wrote about in this blog are not the same as they were back when I first started publishing my stuff in 2014, nor are they same as they were in 2018 when I wrote the blog. It's been a long time, and I've had a lot of life experience and learned a lot of things. The things I thought were important as an insecure teenager and young adult are no longer relevant to me.
The biggest factor to change would probably be my motivation for writing. It took me a while to realize this, but back then I wrote only for the sake of my ego. I was wholly dependent on others' praise to provide me with self worth. There were many personal issues I was dealing with during my childhood that made this the case, but no doubt ascribing my self esteem to what strangers on the internet were saying about my horse-words was unhealthy and cringe. By giving my writing such false weight however, there was no doubt why I felt like it always had to be absolutely perfect, and I felt crushed when I realized I wasn't God's given gift to mankind as an author.
In the present day, I am very secure and confident in myself, which is something I never believed would be possible back then. I was introverted and shy like you — and I still am to some extent, a core part of a person like that never really changes — but now I can happily socialize at functions, meetings, and with random people on the street all day long. A couple months ago someone even surprised me greatly by calling me a "people person," since I had never considered myself as anything close to that. Point is, my self worth now has nothing to do with what anybody says about me or what I do, and so I do not need the crutch that was writing in my life anymore. If we left it at that, I would ride off into the sunset and never think about writing again, similar to what I've been doing for the past 10 years.
Except for one problem. I've had a few different occupations in my life, from retail worker to dishwasher, uber driver, waiter, chef, door-to-door salesman, and computer programmer. No job has ever made me feel as fulfilled and happy as I did when I was writing those silly horse-words, even if I was writing them for the wrong reasons. Writing was no doubt the most difficult activity I ever engaged in, followed by computer science as the second hardest, but the sense of pride and accomplishment I got from writing blew everything else out of the water no contest.
I did some serious soul searching in 2023 to ask myself what I truly wanted out of life. At the end of it, the answer was clear to me: I want to write. So I decided to get serious during the past summer and treat it like a proper part-time job. I'm not interested in any fame, praise, or money from my writing like I once was as an insecure teenager. Instead, I write only to fulfill my own soul. Other people's opinions are irrelevant to that.
Sure, it would be amazing if I could make writing my full time job so I could devote all my time to it. I guess I still hold on to that foolish dream, but I'm not so deluded this time and I know it'll probably never happen. Like you, I definitely adopted the "que será, será" view on that. But that's fine. As long as I have some crappy job to pay my rent, I can devote my attention to my true passion.
And so that brings me to once again publishing a story on here. I learned a lot of things from working in real life, such as perfection being impossible and that it's better to get things done and out rather than worrying about it too much. Those lessons have really helped me in my return to writing, and I feel confident I'll be able to complete my story this time and then continue writing more stories. I feel way more mature than I was when I first tried this. But I've always been susceptible to procrastination and laziness, so we shall see.
At the very least, I feel hopeful about my future.
5762510
Okay. That's it. You're getting a follow.
It's amazing to me how much I can relate to you in the blog post above. Maybe the only difference is degrees of strength in one experience or another. One feeling or another. Overall, though, we really seem to run parallel in many regards and I can't help but admire you for that, especially in terms of your personal growth. That, to me, signifies someone who has done some serious soul searching and, because of that, has found some answers over time. Questions will always linger in a world like this, but it's the one that keeps going, who keeps taking that next step, who has forward momentum in this life. It means you are traveling further from your starting point and where that journey takes you will be wonderful if you continue to let your heart be your guide.
Let me ask you this. Do you think you'd be where you are today if it weren't for the setbacks of your past? If you never tried to placate your own ego in the past, you wouldn't know the folly of it which means it is a lesson you haven't learned yet. But ah! On this day you have. When one goes on a journey, knowing which way is the wrong way helps to home in on your true destination. Some people might have a strong enough intuition to cut straight to the correct answers, but those people bypass those unopened doors that would have led them astray. It's difficult to resist looking over one's shoulder at those unopened doors and wonder what would have been behind them. It's a path left unexplored, so either go back and explore it or make peace with wondering forever until we're evolved enough to download instant answers.
Something you said above reminds me of a relatively recent story I made which I suddenly felt inspired to do. Usually my best and most popular work, relative to me, comes from those stories that came out of nowhere, and I trusted my heart with each chapter even though it made me nervous. Those stories I did not write pages and pages of notes for to plan out the route. Instead, I usually didn't know what would happen in the next chapter until I got to it. Those types of stories are downloads from a higher source. In it there is a message. I'm convinced it's not just for the author but some of the readers too, but I rarely get to learn just how much it impacted them so I just trust that the right people will find it.
But I digress. I'll explain a little situation from the story False Face that relates to your situation, particularly when it comes to the jobs you had and you not filling fulfilled except on the path your heart called for. The story I'm about to describe is not perfectly alike but you may find it similar and relatable enough to see some synergy with it. There is a little bit of a spoiler here so you don't have to click it if that bothers you, but that should only matter if you ever plan to read it later. I will say this snippet won't give the whole story away and might even serve as an incentive to check it out some time. But for my purpose here, I'm presenting it as an example and life lesson.
Very early in the story, the Cutie Mark Crusaders get a new client, but similar to Gilda the Griffoness, he can't get a cutie mark because he's not a pony. In this case it is a donkey named Slow Poke. The Crusaders first meeting with this new client is simply an interview as they explain what they do and he explains what his problem is. Slow Poke says he's a plume farmer from Mustangia. He also says he really enjoys that life because it's simple, slow, steady. He likes routines and feels quite settled in his life except for one problem; some part of him keeps wondering if he should do more or something else instead. It's a question that always nagged him, so he eventually came to the Crusaders in the hopes of clarification of his destiny.
Around the middle of the story, the character finally returns to the plot. By then Sweetie Belle has gone through some challenging changes. In this case she accidentally discovered she's a changeling for some reason now and that put her through a serious identity crisis. What's worse is she's the black, holes-in-legs filled changeling known for being hostile. This has made her afraid to socialize with the town because they might feel frightened of her and possibly even attack her.
But along comes Slow Poke and reminds her of her destiny as a Crusader. He tells her that a changeling is a blank canvas and that anything can be painted on. Sweetie Belle sort of knew that already, but not quite so meteorically, but she couldn't figure out how to shapeshift yet at that point of the story. That was really besides the point, though. Helping him with his destiny would help her to reconnect to her own. With that reminder, she finally accepted her new body and was able to transform for the first time. As for Slow Poke, she guided him to realize that pursuing a new destiny doesn't necessarily mean abandoning the old one. He does feel genuine fulfillment being a plumb farmer, but a person can be more than one thing at a time.
I'll leave it at that just encase you want to read the rest on your own. I only wanted to illustrate the main point as I think it applies to you. You had all these other jobs before because you needed to pay bills and such. Just common life stuff on the earth right now. But just because you have to do that doesn't mean you have to abandon your hearts desire, nor give up on the hope that it might be able to sustain you alone. Where there is a will, there is a way. Until then just find your own balancing act and while you do, whatever you experience may help to inspire you in your story.
Returning to the Crusaders as an example, but this time a show cannon episode, recall the one where the Crusaders got back together after they got their own cutie marks? They had trouble finding a pony with a problem and even if they did, they solved it so quickly that it left them with little to do. To remedy this, they split up for awhile which made Apple Bloom temporarily despondent because she was in the club for socialization. My point is, though, that splitting up not only made them three times more likely to find a pony with a problem, but they could acquire new skills which could help individual clients.
So, no matter what you do, it can be used to inspire you. I also find it wise to keep your phone around to record notes when something strikes you. It might be quite a bit to sort out later, but the alternative is to let the idea risk being forgotten. We all develop our own system over time and yours is a little familiar to me.
Anyway. I hope this helps you out. As you continue your journey, I'll cheer you on.
5762518
Thank you once again for the encouraging words. I gave you a follow as well because of how relatable you are, and I'll be cheering you on too. I do understand the value of my past failures and learning experiences, and I keep them in mind with my current projects. I'll also check out False Face at some point.
As for your advice to take notes on my phone: don't worry, I do that constantly. I have about 60k words in total of just notes for the story I'm writing right now, The Mean Princess. I use Obsidian to organize the notes. It's an amazing tool, sort of like a private wiki, and if you don't know about it I suggest you try it out.
Anyway, I don't have time right now to write a long reply since I have to go to work in an hour. I hope we can talk some more in the future, maybe help each other out or encourage each other. I'm happy to find someone here so like-minded and intelligent about these things.
I hope you have a great day.
5762519
Back at'cha. One hundred percent.