The Most Important Thing? · 4:08pm Apr 17th, 2019
In the last year, I've finally acknowledged the obvious: There is a difference between "I want to write but don't have much time" and "I write despite the fact that I don't have much time".
Some time ago, I brought up the idea of writing some advice blogs on the editing/proofreading process. You know, 'technically not writing advice because that's overdone'.
Some time before that, I put together some plans to have a whole series of stories on the Cutie Mark Crusaders becoming princesses because my first go at that was popular but cheaply done.
Along the way, I tried my hand at interviewing people, for a month or so.
And now, 4 years after I posted my first stories on this site, I have some 80,000 words published here. Most of those were spur-of-the-moment works.
Before I started writing anything, I read all the writing how-to's and guides that I could find in the corners of this site and even a few offsite. I wanted to hit the ground running; I wanted to start writing things people would want to read, not self-insert wish-fulfillment with an LD50 of 100 words. And that's what I did. I actually got frustrated after a few stories because nobody would tell me what I could have done better; they were already pretty happy with my work. My most intentionally bad stories, which I have downvoted myself, still have a majority of upvotes.
In 80,000 words – nearly, if not all, of the fiction that I have published anywhere – I have the attention of enough people to fill a moderately large room and earned a feature from the Seattle's Angels. And yet I look at what I had wanted to do, sitting untouched for months or years now, and wonder if I'm really worth paying attention to.
Now let me go on a short tangent. If you read the RCL interviews, they generally ask what advice the featured author has for other writers. Much the time, it's the sort of "don't do this" or "think about it like that" which you'd find in a pile of writing advice resources; some of the time, it's someone saying "just write, or you'll never get anywhere". You find that in writing advice resources a lot as well. It makes sense, right?
Well, recently I figured it's right, but I think it's much better when presented from a different angle: If you do put in the work, you will reap the reward. That's not to say you'll score big every time, but in my experience, nothing I've done here has really been worthless. I'm not going to dig into people who write what is colloquially known as 'garbage' in large quantities; suffice it to say that actually doing is half of the equation, where any efforts sunk into knowing how to do something 'right' is the rest.
I remember making a comment on one of Ferret's blog posts. Turns out I knew pretty much all of this over a year ago:
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/756475/why-i-edit#comment/4645087
Now, in the light of all that, I started writing and volunteered for my first editing work for completely unrelated reasons. At the time, I just wanted to do something, and there were all these cool people doing things, and I figured writing was probably my strongest skill when I compared it to music composition and pretty much any form of visual art. I spent the next few months reading about writing because I wouldn't want to be one of those fools who did it wrong. If there's one thing I suspect I'll never have, it's overconfidence.
Then I started working with other cool people. That's a big reason I like the writing and editing – and I don't really have to worry about writing losing its novelty to someone who had also invested years in learning it (probably voluntarily).
There's a fair bit more to it – a comment that I'm still happy to have made – this was just the most relevant bit.
"I just wanted to do something" is how I got into this mess. No, rather, I started actually doing something. Somewhere, I lost that 'doing' bit, and that's what I've finally realized. Something as seemingly obvious as that.
I think, for best results, I am going to strike that list of things that I 'want to do'. They are no longer something that I plan to do. If I get the motivation to get one done sometime down the line, I'll do it then. If not, then I won't get stuck up on them, or feel guilty about it. I'm not about to become super productive, because I still don't have a ton of free time and other hobbies do compete.
The plan is to be able to say that "I write despite the fact that I don't have much time", but only sitting down and doing the work will make that happen. Fortunately, I am already aware that I can. This last week or two, I've gotten a few thousand more words down.
In related news, I'm still working on 'how to write'. I've gotten better at it, enough so that my biggest problem is not employing what I know because it's not habit. I also realized, both independently recently and from re-reading that comment I linked above, that I have a fair bit of difficulty writing something that is straight-up serious. I can work with this, but the flip-side has its own problems:
The immediate question is whether ~500 words of Scoota-angst with a weird staring contest is something that I should publish in Unhinged.
And in keeping with the theme, I've run out of time to keep working on this post.
Depends. What kind of Scoota-angst?
I say go for it. Embrace the angst-chicken.
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It's probably just briefly/poorly implied angst and it's kind of why she's having a staring contest which is only possible because of unrelated and unexplained reasons?
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Yeah, go for it.