Inspiration
This may become a recurring thing with me.
thefourthvine recently put up a meta post that struck a chord with me. She is endlessly entertaining and smart and on-point about lots of things, but this post was about writing - it was also a rant about people being assholes on the internet, because people suck, so I'm pulling out the positive bits in case you want to skip the rant:
Sturgeon's law is right, but it misses the point. Ninety percent of everything has to be shit. That's how you get the 10% that's good.
Your favorite writers, fan fiction, published fiction, published fan fiction, whatever -- they didn't start out writing that way. There was a time when they wrote unspeakably awful crap. Writing unspeakably awful crap is how you learn to write only moderately awful crap, and then eventually maybe decent stuff, and then, if you're lucky, actually good things. There are not two classes of people, those who are good writers and those who are bad writers, so that all you have to do to have only great stuff is scare away all the bad writers. There are people who used to write bad stuff, and there are people who are currently writing bad stuff, and there's a lot of crossover between the two. Some of the second category will one day be the first category. (Also, tomorrow some of the first category will move back to the second. No one hits it out of ballpark every time.) If you want to read new good stuff tomorrow, encourage the people writing bad stuff today. (And also maybe help them get betas. Betas are great.)
And, no, those people don't have to hide their work away until it gets better. They can share it with anyone who wants to read it. If they want to post it, they should. Wanting to is reason enough. (Although if you want another reason -- posting is how community happens. Which is how things like betas happen. People who share their work get better faster.)
Underlined emphasis mine because I need to remember both of those points. And that post linked to Not your usual "morality in art" debate by
staranise :
It's just a fact of life that teaching or trying to find art that satisfies you is going to be full of setbacks and frustration, so if you want to do those things, you have to deal with it.
And for artists and students and everyone else the truth is, You have no moral obligation to please everyone. You do not have to make everyone like you to be a good person. You are allowed to meet your own needs at the cost of meeting someone else's.
Which is another thing I need to remember: while I feel the need to honor my craft by doing the best work I can, I also write for me. The body of work I put out is my experience. It reflects the characters and stories that interest me at the time, my thought processes at the time, and sometimes the things that I wrestle with mentally and emotionally that I put into fanfic because fic is yet another outlet for understanding myself. While I do seek positive feedback (otherwise I'd never publish it), I need to remember that creating the work for myself in the first place is reason enough to exist, and let it be reward enough to me. In the words of Joss Whedon:
I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.
Originally posted at http://pslasher.dreamwidth.org/51800.html. Read
comments over there.
thefourthvine recently put up a meta post that struck a chord with me. She is endlessly entertaining and smart and on-point about lots of things, but this post was about writing - it was also a rant about people being assholes on the internet, because people suck, so I'm pulling out the positive bits in case you want to skip the rant:
Sturgeon's law is right, but it misses the point. Ninety percent of everything has to be shit. That's how you get the 10% that's good.
Your favorite writers, fan fiction, published fiction, published fan fiction, whatever -- they didn't start out writing that way. There was a time when they wrote unspeakably awful crap. Writing unspeakably awful crap is how you learn to write only moderately awful crap, and then eventually maybe decent stuff, and then, if you're lucky, actually good things. There are not two classes of people, those who are good writers and those who are bad writers, so that all you have to do to have only great stuff is scare away all the bad writers. There are people who used to write bad stuff, and there are people who are currently writing bad stuff, and there's a lot of crossover between the two. Some of the second category will one day be the first category. (Also, tomorrow some of the first category will move back to the second. No one hits it out of ballpark every time.) If you want to read new good stuff tomorrow, encourage the people writing bad stuff today. (And also maybe help them get betas. Betas are great.)
And, no, those people don't have to hide their work away until it gets better. They can share it with anyone who wants to read it. If they want to post it, they should. Wanting to is reason enough. (Although if you want another reason -- posting is how community happens. Which is how things like betas happen. People who share their work get better faster.)
Underlined emphasis mine because I need to remember both of those points. And that post linked to Not your usual "morality in art" debate by
staranise :
It's just a fact of life that teaching or trying to find art that satisfies you is going to be full of setbacks and frustration, so if you want to do those things, you have to deal with it.
And for artists and students and everyone else the truth is, You have no moral obligation to please everyone. You do not have to make everyone like you to be a good person. You are allowed to meet your own needs at the cost of meeting someone else's.
Which is another thing I need to remember: while I feel the need to honor my craft by doing the best work I can, I also write for me. The body of work I put out is my experience. It reflects the characters and stories that interest me at the time, my thought processes at the time, and sometimes the things that I wrestle with mentally and emotionally that I put into fanfic because fic is yet another outlet for understanding myself. While I do seek positive feedback (otherwise I'd never publish it), I need to remember that creating the work for myself in the first place is reason enough to exist, and let it be reward enough to me. In the words of Joss Whedon:
I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.
Originally posted at http://pslasher.dreamwidth.org/51800.html. Read
comments over there.