#grab it
Be happy and proud when the hours put in at the gym pays off and you get your ass grabbed when you’re working out!
Subliminal
Vintage holds up
Hands making a cameo
THOROUGH INSPECTION
Anonymous asked: I know this is normal for writers and that there isn’t a real solution but I’m gonna ask anyway: Any advice on how to stop feeling insecure about what/how I write?
Oh man, this is gonna sound like such an asshole move, but my favorite way to help myself is to write to spite everyone else. Seriously. Write like you hate everyone else in the world. Write like they mean fucking nothing to you. Write because they’re gonna get what you write, and they’re gonna like it, if they know what’s good for them. Write to make that mental editor representing the ‘them’ in your head mad as hell.
It’s always energized me to flippantly declare to myself that if people don’t like something I like, they can go fuck themselves in some fancy new way, because I’m busy writing and I don’t see them getting off their ass! They’re reading anyways ain’t they? Then they god damn don’t have anything better to do than let me shove words, and ideas, and mental pictures into their heads rapidly. Them complaining? Hah, you mean leaving impassioned responses because I hit a nerve. I CONTROL them. .
…ahem. There’s other things to think about. I just, really like getting pumped about that concept because getting pumped makes it really awesome. Lemme uh… lemme try talking about … other things… next. Instead of declaring my godhood, wow, that is so ‘famous last words’ material for a character to say.
So forgiving my earlier outburst, I’m going to natter about the subject! Writing confidence comes around slowly, really, you were right. This is normal for writers, and there’s not always a solution. A lot of posts have been made on Tumblr about decreasing anxiety as a whole. Everything from taking a long bath with some scented candles, to breathing and meditation exercises, to radical acceptance. This can all soothe you, making it easier to write, or at least post your writing somewhere. That’s a good start. A lot of it though really, is understanding what you’re doing from new angles instead of just ‘am I good enough’ and ‘in my head about it editor mode’.
Going back a half step, I love radical acceptance, let’s focus on that for a moment. Basically, it’s just saying ‘I am who I am. These things have happened. Now that they have happened, they are passed, and while they are real, I can now experience other things. I give myself permission for this. I have permission to move on to something else because I accept what has happened entirely and cannot change it. I can only change what reality is in the now, and I can only do that by moving forwards and altering my behavior or other people’s ideas with fresh words and actions. The past remains, real and behind me. I accept it and step forward.’ This would be great if you put it to writing. ‘I accept my writing may not be the best, there is always someone better, and I do not need to care. I am writing what is meaningful to me. It is what it is.‘
Writing is also a performance art. Which means, writing is not complete until an audience, not necessarily the intended one, has read and reacted to it. It’s not whole. It hungers to be read and understood, and for the feedback on that writing works to complete the circuit. To explain what the writing did for someone else. Regularly we find that it was close to our intention, but sometimes wildly out of left field, they’ll point out something you may not have even noticed. This is secondary to knowing it is read. While they may never interact with you, it doesn’t matter. Your writing will evoke something in another person, one way or another, and that is the point at which it becomes complete. Kudos and comments and likes, and thumbs ups and everything are not a way to measure success. Sometimes someone never directly tells you how they feel at all. Page views are interactions, are chances for it to have been read. To know that someone has looked at it means it has been read. It’s finished.
The audience changes depending on the type of writing too. That audience may only be one person, it might even be yourself. A diary is like that, it forces us to complete the circuit by contemplating what is written and what it means about us, or towards us, on another day, at another time. It is a mirror of who we are, and we’ll judge the shit out of it because we’re fucking ruthless and don’t have any feelings to save when it comes to us. We’ll word it nicely to others, but to us. fuck you self, you’re not good enough. How demoralizing.
This is important to note here! We’re so used to being our main audience, so used to analyzing everything we do or say and how it effects others, we’re stuck in that eternal loop of ‘If no one likes it (or shows they like it) I did something wrong and I need to fix it.’ We blame ourselves for things that seem like they ‘broke’ it, but really we’re dealing with way more circumstances besides ‘did I do it good’.
Truth is, we can do everything right, and still not get a response. We can write brilliantly, and not have it get to the right audiences. We can get people who are oversensitive to certain topics going batshit about them, and disregarding the writing or intent. We can accidentally hit that one guy who tells his friend, who shares a link with a room of supporters, and suddenly we have a fanbase, and now everything we write is ‘good’ to them, and outsiders get attacked for being wrong if they don’t like it. We can get folks who just don’t say anything because they’re shy, and you’ve genuinely made them feel good but they can’t explain it.
Not everyone has the talent of putting their thoughts into writing, and that’s what comments are essentially. That’s why people read, to see someone who can do it, do it in front of them as a performance they can stare at in awe and pleasure. All those kudos on AO3 are made of this. This feeling of ‘not matching up’ or ‘not having the time or prowess to respond to something they love.’
You need to remember, you can’t please everyone. Think about the people you know, think about their favorite pairings. Do all of them have the same pairing? Does everyone you meet, without hesitation, name exactly the same couple in your favorite show? Not by a fuckin’ long shot unless somebody’s fucking with your Causality. If you loaned dice to any Gods, maybe take them back is all I’m saying. The point is, rambling aside, no one ships the same shit. No one even fucking agrees on pizza toppings. Why would they all agree your writing did something for them? Or means things exactly the way you intended it?
Language is imprecise, the job of a writer is to write things in the way that makes sense to their context of the world, and then let it loose to see if it works. If it doesn’t on a large scale, write something else and leave the first alone as an example. Don’t give up. They’re all tests, and somewhere, somehow, it’s gonna hit someone else just right. You might even hit a large section of the audience just right and make them all react like you intended. That’s the sign of a good writer who has also found serendipity has favored them. A good crowd, nicely warmed up and receptive instead of following an act that makes them hard and cold. Even if your writing is a couple hundred years old, you can still suddenly hit that audience one day.
It’s not always your writing that changes how people react to things either. People have lives. You’re a writer, you know that. Every character you write should have a backstory, a name, emotions, reasons for those emotions. These characters map onto real people. They had an ex that treated them like trash and called them Kitten. Well suddenly your cute little nickname for a character, which makes perfect sense to you, is a pun, feels right, and gives the feeling you want, suddenly hits a person wrong and is wrong. They don’t like what you wrote, not because you’re a bad writer, but because they have bad associations with things you cannot control.
Writing is a pot shot of hoping that what you want works with what someone else wants without ever meeting them. That’s why a lot of famous bullshit people love enmasse is kinda… blurry. It’s not precise because if you scattershot and allow the audience to make up half of it, everyone loves it for what they read into it. Look at popular fandoms, Homestuck took the world by force because everything was incomplete. This is a visual medium that managed to make characters that nobody knew what they actually looked like precisely. So some people drew the main characters are POC, and represented themselves, and loved them so much deeper for that. Some people drew them fat, or thin, or special. People expanded on their histories in ways that worked with the story, but voiced something in their own hearts.
Homestuck is a fantastic show of people getting a bunch of nonsense, that they’ve somehow turned into patterns that deeply changed their lives. That’s how a person reading it could come out on the other side either thinking, “Wow, I want to be a troll, they can be mean and classist, and they don’t fit in just like me. I’m gonna go be like my favorite character and hurt someone else by saying fuck a lot and spitting in a bucket.” just as much as we could get “Wow, this is a story about friendship, and different forms of love regardless of how different of socially ingrained it is to hate one another when we don’t understand. We can all work together and make things beautiful because the little things, like a can donation to food banks, can have a butterfly effect!” Like. Holy shit. Those are very different outcomes, but you saw both of them happen in the Fandom!
If you remember that writing, once set free, has such a huge life beyond the artist’s work? it can help the anxiety, because it’s not completely on you to do it right. It’s not your fault if no one reads it, well, not your writing’s fault anyways, go advertise for goodness sake. Self promote! Your writing doesn’t even have to be really fantastic technically to be adored and loved. Stephen King’s 11/22/63 has an example of this. No major spoilers, but a teacher reads a paper done by a student. That paper is written horribly. The grammar is shit, the wording is terrible, the spelling came out of a trash compactor, the punctuation is a masterclass in how not to do it. That story sticks with that teacher though, the whole book, it nags at him. It tickles him, because it made him feel a certain way. It gave him a motive, an imagination. It set something going in him. The writing was terrible from a technical point of view, but from an emotive empathy inducing view, holy shit. it worked. It was good.
So, that means, the value of your work changes depending on the metric you use to evaluate it. I’m sure technical specification manuals are all written wonderfully, with precise language and information by the bucketful. Hell that’s why they exist. But are they considered dry reads? Do classics lose that shiny new language feel, or connection to people via the words alone, because they can be a bit boxed in by the era’s acceptable standards of what made for good writing? Yep. 100%.
But what gets read, over and over again, every single generation? Things that make us feel because they have meaning. Things that strike a nerve. Monsters, and romances, and stories about the human condition. Sure fine grammar and spelling will get you more readers, which is important on a small-scale level like a roleplay, or a fanfic, but they aren’t the heart of good writing. Good writing makes you feel, relate, and love the characters. It brings a world to life. I can’t tell you how often I’ve ignored shitty skills and kept reading because they had me hooked on what was going to happen.
So instead engage with your project on different levels than ‘is it good’ because Jesus Christ, that is such a hard thing to measure. Ask yourself instead: Did it feel right? Do these words bring a clear mental image of what I want? Do the characters feel like people? Do I create a sense of ‘questions to be answered’ and do I answer them with enough regularity to keep people invested, while supplying more? Do I solve all the problems that come up, or suggest they can be solved easily? Do I feel engaged with this work, does it represent part of me? Is it easy to read, or does the pace stutter, is that what I want? Working on these instead of some non-solid idea of ‘good’ and instead ‘is it what I intended’ will give you fresh eyes, and help eliminate some anxiety because…
All writing is good for something.
All of it.
Somewhere, it will have an audience that needs it. Don’t stress about finding that audience, don’t stress about making it perfect for them. Make it perfect for you, and deign to allow others to read it. Your writing is your voice. It is you unique vision. Only you can write things in ways that play on your personal vision of the world. Seriously. We can’t even map minds at a level that allows us to pull stories out of it. Not even dreams can be recorded. You know what your dreams are. You know what you want on the paper. As long as you feel like it brings what you want to the table, you can write anything and it is good.
Think of yourself as a pioneer, forging new ideas into the world. No one gets it perfect the first time. You’ll throw an axle occasionally, or a horse will die, or a party member gets dysentery. But the point is you made the effort, and can change or recover. Writing is what it is. It exists waiting to be seen and translated into part of another person’s life. Try to pick a good idea of what you want to share, and then share it.
You’re golden. Don’t let one or two comments get to you. Don’t let your inner editor scream you down. Don’t engage with the ideas that you can’t write, or you aren’t good enough, or that this is easier for other people. Accept them as your personal doubts, not as your personal truths. Accept they are worries. Then let them go, they are worries, not truths. They exist, but they do not have to be what you base things on. Breathe. Think. Writers generally feel like shit, especially when they have been trying to write and finish a novel for 2 years and can’t even pick up a pencil to do it, god damn it self, get in gear can’t reach goals they set for themselves. If you disappoint yourself, that’s where anxiety sets in that you can’t live up to your ideals.
That’s actually good for one thing. If you can see flaws, you’re getting better at the job. Writing is practice. Editing is putting that practice to use. Like, seriously. If you had a piece of art, and you went back years later after a hundred more pieces of art, you could do a better sketch or version of it. Writing is very similar. You can figure out what went wrong, rewrite the sentences, the story, the flow, something you’ve learned doesn’t work. It’s not solid, I have to point that out. Writing can change, even if it felt perfect at the time. Not because it wasn’t right, because it was right for the you who wrote it, the mysterious past you who was in a certain mindset. It’s because the you now who read it, wants to say something different because they’ve seen the future. They’ve read ahead in the story. They’ve got spoilers, and you could set up for those spoilers a little better.
At a certain point though you have to say, ‘look, either I edit forever, like I’m going to do to myself as I grow and learn. Or I set it down now, call it history, and use it as a reference point in the future when I get even better.’ The second one is better, less stress. History isn’t something we can change, we can only change the perceptions of those around us with additional words and actions. It is what it is. You, and everyone around you, can accept that. Even if it means dealing with hard truths, or hiding something that got a less than stellar reputation. (Never fully delete anything, it’s painful, and makes you not want to do more. Just set it to private or something. Let your messed up creations hide in the dark places, because someday you might grow enough to want to visit them and love them as they are, when they remind you less of current immediate failure, and have a more sentimental feel.)
Remember too, your writing will not meet anyone, not finalize, can be changed and edited and fixed, all the way up and past you showing it to an audience. Read it in different fonts, in color changes, to catch it in new lights. Edit the shit out of it. Make it closer to your intent. Refine, and examine it until you feel like it’s good enough to share, and then share it. But until then, no one is judging you. No one sees it. No one is out to get you except that fucking little editor voice in your head trying to give you SHIT. Well fuck that voice, you can change it later. Get your ideas down now, and let them grow and evolve with your progress. Don’t worry about what it says, it could say anything. The important part is not the writing, but the experience of having written it.
A story is an idea, written down. You can’t change an idea, until there’s enough solid parts to interact with them. A vague idea you’re nurturing to growth is great, but you have to write it down before it becomes solid andreal and you can trim the branches and shape it into something more. Don’t be intimidated. Nothing has to be perfect the first go around, it’s just a draft. You have a story inside you, a life, a creation. Something about you, a part of you that longs to be free and shared and alive. It doesn’t have to be perfect, long, or well-written. It just has to bloom on paper, and then expand and grow and seed and birth new stories. You can do it, you really can. It’s just planting that idea that scares people.
You matter. Your writing matters. Regardless of anything else, everything you write is real, and it matters. It’s one of the steps you take to get somewhere else. Every step is important, even if you never reference that step again.
Let yourself fall in love with your writing. Let yourself put it away, and come back to it with fresh eyes, and experience it for the first time as an audience. Fix what doesn’t work, but love what does and focus on it, because that’s what an audience will remember. What they loved.
Good luck. You’re fantastic, and I cannot put into words what kind of pride, and joy, and this… big budding feeling in my chest is. This bubbling need to tell you that every action you take towards becoming a writer makes me kinda tear up and have hope. Because… I need writers. I need them badly. Whether they’re roleplayers writing ephemeral stories back and forth across electrons that expire after they’re spoken, or writers who sit down and write novels that will last and last and last. All of you give me hope, all of your words touch me, and mean something to me. Ones I disagree with, ones I love, ones I hate, ones that impassioned me, or bring me closer to understanding myself.
Just write. I love it, whatever it is. Thank you.
