The grass is always sour grapes on the other side · 7:49pm Aug 23rd, 2019
So the RCL did its Bronycon thing, and we somehow ended up with a consensus that Monochromatic wrote the best story in the fandom, that my husband (we can all dream) Aragon placed, and I got an honourable mention. I also did very well in the online polling for submissions.
The less neurotic authors on that list might be jealous they didn’t do better, but are ultimately very glad just to have shown up on it. But all my friends on it are neurotic messes, and so hearing how they’ve internalized this has been really interesting.
In my case, as far as I’m aware, I’m the only Australian on that list. In a very real sense, I’m the best My Little Pony fanfiction author on a whole continent. But it didn’t make me happy, or content. The same seems to go for my other friends on the list.
The RCL only did this to celebrate things. There was never any intention to hurt feelings, or anything other than celebrate great writers. I don’t think it’s on them at all, but rather a problem with writing itself.
I was talking to R5h a few weeks ago - who is lovely - about not getting any of my stories in the short lived Royal Guard that was once slated to be Fimfic’s answer to Equestria Daily. And he said: Yes you did! You got Mare Who Once Lived on the Moon in there! I wrote the review! It was wonderful and glowing! Don’t you remember?
And I had to tell him I didn’t. And the reason I didn’t was probably because the review was so nice.
Several other friends have come to me to tell me how much it hurt to not be put on the list, because they feel like it means they haven’t been - won’t be - remembered, like they haven’t done enough, and I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
If you’re a person who cares about how their writing is received then no matter how much you succeed, it seems, you will never feel successful. You only see the ways you aren’t good enough yet.
I can’t count how many milestones I’ve made for myself where I’ve said: If only I could do this, I’d prove to myself I’m actually a good writer. I have value as an artist. I’m worth something. I can’t count those milestones because I passed them a long time ago, and I didn’t really notice it. Because how I felt didn’t change.
I started learning piano, recently. I’ve been playing for a few months. I’ve played guitar ever since I was a child, but that was so wrapped up in guilty feelings for wasted music lessons and bad memories that I felt like it’d be better to get a fresh start, from the beginning, on something as an adult.
Let me play something for you now.
You want to know what’s really funny?
When I play mediocre piano to myself, I feel really good. Great, even. It’s been the most consistent thing that has pulled me out of depressive episodes over the last three or so months that I’ve been teaching myself.
I’m objectively a better writer than I am a pianist though. I’ve put years into studying writing, practicing it, publishing it. I’ve put weeks into piano.
So why is it that piano makes me feel great, and writing makes me feel never good enough? Not just me, but so many of my friends?
I think it’s because I’m only playing piano for myself. I’m not teaching myself for any reason other than I want to know how to play piano. I’m not comparing myself to other pianists. I’m only comparing myself to how I was a week ago, two weeks ago.
You can’t really do that with writing. There’s too much of it, and it’s too abstract. From experience, I can say that trying to read your own writing is a lot closer to listening to yourself talk than listening to yourself sing.
What I mean is this - I find talking much easier than singing. I’ll even go so far and say that I honestly think I’m a terrible singer - another reason I dropped guitar for piano is the piano’s ability to play the melody, where guitar you’re usually expected to sing.
But I find editing recordings for my videos and articles to be much more painful than hearing my singing, because when I listen to my singing, I can just focus on what I need to improve on; focus on what I can change moment to moment.
When I listen to myself reading my scripts and stories, I want to fix who I am as a person, because that’s what I feel like needs changing. Personally, I find I end up criticizing my thinking more than the thoughts.
Writing has the same problem that listening to yourself talk does, where you try to compare yourself to yourself. So it’s a lot easier to compare yourself to other people, to look at the metrics - the views, the votes.
But that’s a pit with no bottom. No matter how much you put into it, you’re probably not going to see the progress you make.
So I put this up as a warning sign to other writers: Don’t come to the craft with the hopes that this will bring you happiness, or for wanting to be the next Hemingway, or Hunter S Thompson.
The thing both men put in their suicide notes is that their biggest regret was not doing it sooner.
When you’re good at writing, and when you feel like it’s too late to learn a different skillset, it’s really tempting to throw yourself deeper into it when you have depression spirals, hoping for that short term boost that comes from publishing a story and getting into the feature box.
But I’m starting to think you need something else that’s just for you. Something you have no plans on monetizing, no plans on doing it to compete with other people.
This isn’t to say that writing itself is bad. I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. Instead, what I mean is I think that it’s a really bad idea to get your self worth from any hobby that requires an external element to it you can't control. Writers don’t really have any control over how their work is received, but they draw their sense of worth from the reception, and not from how good their work is.
The people who were depressed about not being remembered, about not being ‘more’? They’re all extremely good and talented writers, all of them. But having a few close friends tell them that doesn’t seem to be enough.
Writing is a great art, it really is, but it relies on comparing yourself to other people, which is a recipe for disaster if you're trying to use it as a source of self-esteem. I think everyone who has a form of expression that’s for other people also need something that’s just for themselves.
Even when I'm not as good as I hope to be at piano, it makes me happy just to be as good as I am. I think everyone should have something like that for themselves, whatever it ends up being.
EDIT: To be doubly clear, this is not meant to be me saying writing is inherently bad. I wanted to say that tying your self-worth to external validation is bad, and explaining why a lot of people do that with writing. It is possible to write without tying it to external validation.
I wanted to focus on writing because I am a writer, and I was addressing this on a writing website. This isn't unique to writing, and is actually a major problem for Youtube creators and a major reason so many Youtubers burn out - and this covers a whole variety of skills and hobbies. I originally expanded on that in an earlier draft of this blog, but I thought it read as extraneous, or was otherwise covered by other lines. Apparently it wasn't. Whoops.
As one of the guys who's consistently tried to celebrate things -- as a new curator in the RCL, but also as the founder of the Pony Fiction Vault, the Pony Fiction Archive before that, and most recently Ponyfeather Publishing -- it's been a pretty disappointing slow realization over the years that it seems to be impossible to do a purely positive thing.
Everything I do in this fandom is an attempt to be positive, to hold up good things and encourage people... but inevitably if I publish a given author or the RCL features a given story, it makes many people who didn't get published or featured feel badly about themselves. Towards the end of the Vault's run, I started trying to downplay its significance by pointing out that it was really just one guy's glorified favorites list, because it hurt to see so many people be upset that they hadn't been featured. I was surprised to see it included in places like the Master Review List, because I didn't do any reviewing at all, beyond a "yes this good!"
I don't know if there's a better way to do things; I don't think it's worth stopping trying to be positive, even though I know it means it's going to hurt other peoples' feelings. I have to think that the net happiness I'm producing outweighs the net unhappiness. I hope it is. I'd rather try to make some people happy than give up and not try to do anything.
Okay, absolutely loved 'Mare Who once lived on the moon'. It was a stunning and refreshing difference compared to a lot of other fics.
"...for wanting to be the next Hemingway, or Hunter S Thompson."
Or H. Beam Piper, who wrote some of the most amazing things before his unfortunate end.
5110449
The RCL inspired me to write better, to try and improve my writing and branch out to different styles. Aspiring to it helped me improve as a writer, and being inducted made me very, very happy, but even if I'd never made it in, I would have been content with just using it as an impetus to improve. So for me, outside of actually being inducted, the RCL was a net good for my journey as a writer.
Nowadays, my goal is to actually place in a contest, and if it never happens then that's okay. But it's nice to have something to aim for, even if you never expect to reach it.
I disagree with your point here:
I feel like the problem isn't the hobby but rather the hobbyist. As a musician of 13 years. I still feel the need to compare myself to other musicians.
I feel like you touched on a great point that you can achieve a sense of self-satisfaction with your own progression in a hobby. And it is usually something that's felt when you're just starting out, going from crawling to walking/skipping. And When you compare yourself over long distances of time.
Instead, I feel like a dissection as deep as you've taken here without acknowledging or trying to find the root cause of -why- authors are comparing themselves to other authors is a better choice of action rather than trying to tell people there's no happiness to be found with writing. I'm sure there are hobbyist writers out there that have the same sense of satisfaction about their writing that you feel about piano.
It's not a problem with writing. And it's not unique to writing. I'd go as far as to say it's more a reflection of something in our community or something regarding mental health. But I'm not an expert, and I'm not trying to attack you or your article. And I definitely don't have the spoons to make a huge argument defending my points. I just think the innate feelings of inadequacy of writing and suicidal thought to 'being a writer' is a false equivalency that doesn't apply to every case.
5110464
That's exactly what I wanted from the Vault, and what I still want for my part in the RCL, so thank you.
NO.
No...just... NO this is terrible advice. NO. JUST. UGH. NO!
Writing can make you happy. Writing makes me happy every day. Whether I'm writing for pay, for others, or for me. It brings me more happiness than any other thing I have done in my life as far as work or play goes, and even on days it frustrates me or troubles me, the total sum joy I get from it FAR outweighs any negative. And it has done so for DECADES. I LOVE writing. With a passion, and it is absolutely part of my identity, and I am PROUD of that. Why on earth would you suggest that getting happiness from the craft of writing is not possible?
Writing can bring SO much happiness. Saying otherwise sounds like a personal experience painted as fact, and nothing more.
Another aspect is that it's much easier to see your own progress with something when you first pick it up. Someone just starting to play the piano can probably see pretty dramatic improvement over a week, or two, or three. When you get good enough at something (say writing after years and years of working at it) the improvements become much more gradual and subtle.
My solution was to work on a project that has absolutely no competition so I have nothing/nobody else to compare myself to. Which has had limited success as a motivation, so is obviously not the perfect solution.
5110449
My qualifier for 'review' is incredibly broad. Plus at the start I was looking for things to add so I'd have something to do while updating the list in those heady early days when there wasn't enough actual reviews to keep me working on it on a regular basis. Ha! Plus, you know, adding a 'review' source that I know won't update again is a nice boost since I can actually get a sense of completion with it.
5110449
Publicly praising someone for something (anything) ALWAYS leads to someone somewhere being upset that they were not also praised or more praised. And that's okay, it's just how some people are. Keep doing it, because some things and people damn well should be praised. Like you, for your hard work.
For what little it's worth, I was surprised to even be mentioned at all, and it was nice. No jealousy, no hurt, no negative feels at all. :)
5110472
I mean, that's true, but I wasn't trying to say writing inherently makes you unhappy. I was more trying to say it's a very dangerous practice for people who already have anxiety or self-esteem issues, because it's so critically tied to external opinions.
With illustration, music, cooking, gardening, pottery, underwater basket weaving, you have ways of self-assessing your creations and seeing whether you're improving or not, whether you like your own final products. It's much more difficult to do that with writing.
I can be happy about how good I am with piano because I identify to myself as a writer who plays piano, not as a pianist who writes. If it was the second one, I would not be nearly so happy with how well I play. I would feel about piano what I feel about writing, and vice versa. But, this is a website about writing, so that's how I wanted to approach this.
Actually, this comment probably goes a long way to addressing 5110469 too
5110488
Before I got into fimfic, I wrote a 115k word story about my DnD character that I will likely never to show to anyone, and that made me really happy and feel really accomplish to have written.
I think Flupri has a point that it might be the site itself more than writing itself causing this issue. The people posting on AO3 without any promotion are likely using writing the same way you use piano, which is a purely self-centred (not in a bad way, just that they don't keep comparing themselves to others and just wanna tell their own little story) hobby focused on personal growth in what is almost a vacuum.
I think it's Fimifc's front page telling you what the Hottest Stories are and the existence of things like the RCL, SA, the many, many contests on the site, and now a literal bookstore where people have sold out that leads to this focus on external metrics, because they're just so hard to avoid. If fimfic didn't have site posts or groups or blogs, I think a lot of this discontent would just, not exist anymore than it does in other hobbies where you just shut yourself out from the wider fandom/group.
5110493
I think that doesn't help when FimFiction is a social media site as well as a hosting site, but I can tell you 100% that isn't the cause. AO3 writers angst, SCP wiki writers angst, original-fiction only writers angst the hardest because publishing is so brutal.
Really, you probably see it less there because you have less places to see that angst expressed, whereas places like FimFiction it's a lot easier to look behind the curtain. It's an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence.
5110488
IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE.
That is a CHOICE you make. I sometimes write things that never see the light of day. Because I WANT to. The external opinions, even on published stuff, doesn't matter unless they are writing me a paycheck or unless I actively find their feedback helpful, valuable, and insightful.
I also compare my writing today to my writing six months ago, and I can see change, growth, things I wanted to improve on, nuts and bolts, problem areas, personal aspects I wanted to change. I analyze my own writing regularly, and my own opinion on how I am progressing is FAR more important than a like ratio or mean comment. If you know where to look YES you can absolutely see progress!!! If you aren't seeing your own progression and improvement, that's a YOU problem, not a nature of writing problem. And THAT is something I would like far more to see your advice on.
How to look INWARDS to find your writing's worth, not outward. If you don't know how to do that? It might be something you should try learning.
And for the damn record I am one of the most anxious people you will likely ever meet. I have battled depression, feelings of low self worth, suicide attempts, trauma, etc. Writing makes me LESS anxious, not more. It makes me feel at peace and happy. Dangerous? DANGEROUS?? It has kept me ALIVE before, so sorry if this sentence is something I take a little personal.
5110499
Amen to everything you said here.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Omg numbers how dare your blogs have more views than mine FFFFFF
I never set out to be the best, or to even compete, so to have received way more attention and praise for my stories than I ever expected is something I'll always treasure.
5110499
Preach, sister!
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5110488
If your friends can't see value in what they're writing and are basing their success and self-worth on being the most memorable in the fandom, then they're either writing for the wrong reason, or, they're not trying hard enough.
As for being a dangerous thing for anxiety and depression... no. Just no. This is one of the most Hug-Box-y fandoms to submit your writing to. I have received enough praise from my own writing to make a horrible day into a spectacular one, just over one of my short stories.
If I'm reading this right, this seems like a you or a them problem, not a problem with writing.
5110639
Here's the problem. "Success" in this analogy is a box of wine. If you hold the box wine hostage and tell five bogans: "Alright, you mongrels, there's only enough in this goonbag for one of you to get hammered - or two of you to get buzzed if you're good at sharing - so winner gets it. Have at it" - We'll call it the hungover games analogy.
pedestrian.tv/content/uploads/2016/01/yilmazfeature2-619-386.png
It's true for every individual bogan that, if they'd fought harder, they could have been the one to get the booze. But it's also true that most of them can't.
So, writing gets this problem. Every individual person, if they tried hard enough, might win out and get the name recognition. Most of them won't, or can't. Take that RCL contest we're talking about; There are over 126,000 stories on this site, and I believe less than fifty stories even made the Honourable Mention cut, or about 0.03% of the total.
That means, in this analogy, it's not five bogans to one box of wine. It's three hundred to one.
Except the bogans are actually writers, so in this analogy the only person they're really beating up is themselves. A lot of the 299 are thinking; Damn, didn't I try hard enough? Or was I just not good enough?
Different people get self worth differently, and a lot of people can't simply choose to not care about these things. Some people can just be happy they did as well as they did. And other people, who might want to make their living by writing, who know how many writers there are and how few professional positions in the world for them... when they can't even get noticed in the most welcoming, "hug-boxy" space they can find, what hope do they have in The Industry? It being rewarding for you doesn't invalidate why it can be painful for others, and that's what I'm trying to address - the people who do feel this way.
5110664
That's the way the world works though. Only a few people out of a bunch will have the top spots while a fair few of the bottom spots will be discontent that they are not on top. Everyone else is just happy to be where they are.
If you want something badly enough you have to fight for it. If you bitch and whine about not getting it, you're a sore loser; or you didn't fight hard enough, or gave up because fighting for it was too hard and hate yourself for it and are going to bitch about it to make people feel sorry for you.
So, it sounds like you are eluding to the idea that we should make everyone a winner so no one feels bad. No child left behind. That sort of thing.
Well, that's hardly fair to everyone else that's actually worked for everything they got.
Still, your original point makes it sound like writing is the problem rather than your friends with delusions of grandeur.
5110900
I'm less worried on how my writing or creative ideas or whatever are good or can be comparable, and I'm always more worried about whether I'm writing an idea that I feel is me. That my experiences and what in trying to express them through is understood fully, and I can have pride in showing something that is my life, that is my personality, that is something I didn't have to fake or lie about.
I know I didn't write anything that could match up what people wrote for the RCL, but in a way I never really aimed for those awards and such for all the crazy loglines that pass through my head. I was just wanting to express relatablility rather than skill. As long as someone is left happy, the world is a little brighter, you know?
5110900
It sounds like you're saying there's some hard and fast threshold at which you suddenly put in enough work to "win" this metaphorical fight. That isn't how the world works. It's possible to give your all and still fail; you can't tell someone oh, there was just a few more ticks on the fight bar to go, if only you just did that much more, you'd get 100% of the success. The way the world works is, sometimes you fail no matter what you did, and that's just the breaks. Sometimes you also succeed. Failure and success have different meanings in different situations. No two lives will have the exact same outcome and you must find happiness in the circumstances you find yourself in.
As Jean Luc Picard once said, "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life."
5114765
Well, yeah. That's a part of it. But if you think like that, like life is a coin-toss, then you'll never really try hard at anything and everything you do will be mediocre. Like playing the lottery, only one mediocre s.o.b. will win and everyone else is just throwing their money away. You have to think of creativity like a race. Eventually you'll win one, but not if you run like the kid from special ed or the stoner that just want to toke it up under the bleachers. You have to keep trying until something sticks.
I have a similar experience. I used to be in the furry scene. I used to (and still do on occasion) draw anthro. I never got anywhere in there because all the best anthro artists already occupy the tops spots and my skill was very lacking. I'm still not the best the brony fandom has to offer, I'm not winning this race any time soon, but I know a lot of people like my art and I'm happy with that. Maybe I'll win the next race I join. Who knows.
But! I'm not gonna be winning any races unless I improve. Like, a lot. I know how much better I need to be to win the next race and unless I dedicate my every waking minute (outside of work) to getting better, I'm not going to win that race. I can see the finish line, just not the track I need to be on.