30 Days of Writing - Day 4
4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!
First? Like, I was four and had a plush Care Bear with a tape deck built in and I'd record one half of the conversation in the bear's voice and then play it back and play myself for the other half of the conversation? Or first like the Star Wars Mary Sues I filled up a couple notebooks with when I was 12 and playing pretend wasn't cool anymore? Or first like how I realized I'd built an entire team of original characters to function in the X-Men universe and really I could attempt to draft an original work out of the whole shebang (but it sprawled out too quickly and never held through)?
Those are all firsts, just a few firsts even, and from before I realized that honestly what I needed to be doing with myself was writing.
Coming back, hm. You want just one?
Have a morality tale on why you should never show a story that you're not really ready for feedback on, even once it's done. Depending on what it is, do some self edits first, and make sure you're confident and ready for whatever people will throw at you, good and bad and maybe what you weren't expecting. This is advice I'd heard before, but didn't entirely understand. And. Well.
I'd written a short story, the gist of which was in the near future humanity saves itself from an extinction event asteroid by redirecting it only to destroy a burgeoning civilization on an alien planet however many lightyears away. It was brief, but I felt that I'd established the warring fear and hope, and celebration of victory of the human race in the first half. The second half changed tone, purposefully paralleling the tenor of cultural origin stories (most specifically the dedication of a promised child) only to have the asteroid impact, destroying all chance of higher-than-mocrobial life for the next eon. Humanity hadn't done it on purpose - even if the planet were in a position for Earth to see it there wouldn't have been life in any way that humans could detect - but that was kind of the point. I was trying to highlight the impact of living on an, I don't know, universal scale? That in preserving ourselves it's never just preserving ourselves, socially, environmentally, whatever. That we need to be aware because everything, everything is connected.
Now, I can't tell you if it was effective for my point. I can't tell you where it was weak, or if there was some characterization I would need to embellish. I can't even tell you if it just sucked as a story and I needed to start the next draft from scratch and try again with new words.
Why? The first person I showed it to (no, it wasn't David) told me it was casually nihilistic. Now, just the phrase itself, perhaps, might not have been so bad. I can see how you might interpret nihilism in the latter half (at least so far as the summary is concerned). But it was said with such...... distaste. Not only had my reader missed the point (which could have been my fault), he had with two little words told me that there was utterly nothing worthwhile about the entire piece.
I was disheartened. Which, by the way, isn't a word I generally use. I might have been pissed, or insulted, but his words hurt. The rest of his feedback wasn't helpful either, and trying to dialog with him was frustrating at best. I decided, in the end, that the feedback was bad. (Certainly I've never shown that reader anything since.)
Except that when I sat down to edit the story.... the words stuck. Casually nihilistic. They danced around in my head every time I even thought about the piece, let alone when I was looking at the page. I could no longer look at my own words and see what was written and consider it against what I wanted. Those two little words had killed my story.
So I threw it away.
Not that I recommend doing that with stories someone kills. Sometimes they come back to you. A little space to breathe, to forget, to consider things from another angle, and sometimes you can go back to work, or at least start it over. But see, I hadn't learned that lesson then either, and it still hasn't been long enough to start from scratch....
First? Like, I was four and had a plush Care Bear with a tape deck built in and I'd record one half of the conversation in the bear's voice and then play it back and play myself for the other half of the conversation? Or first like the Star Wars Mary Sues I filled up a couple notebooks with when I was 12 and playing pretend wasn't cool anymore? Or first like how I realized I'd built an entire team of original characters to function in the X-Men universe and really I could attempt to draft an original work out of the whole shebang (but it sprawled out too quickly and never held through)?
Those are all firsts, just a few firsts even, and from before I realized that honestly what I needed to be doing with myself was writing.
Coming back, hm. You want just one?
Have a morality tale on why you should never show a story that you're not really ready for feedback on, even once it's done. Depending on what it is, do some self edits first, and make sure you're confident and ready for whatever people will throw at you, good and bad and maybe what you weren't expecting. This is advice I'd heard before, but didn't entirely understand. And. Well.
I'd written a short story, the gist of which was in the near future humanity saves itself from an extinction event asteroid by redirecting it only to destroy a burgeoning civilization on an alien planet however many lightyears away. It was brief, but I felt that I'd established the warring fear and hope, and celebration of victory of the human race in the first half. The second half changed tone, purposefully paralleling the tenor of cultural origin stories (most specifically the dedication of a promised child) only to have the asteroid impact, destroying all chance of higher-than-mocrobial life for the next eon. Humanity hadn't done it on purpose - even if the planet were in a position for Earth to see it there wouldn't have been life in any way that humans could detect - but that was kind of the point. I was trying to highlight the impact of living on an, I don't know, universal scale? That in preserving ourselves it's never just preserving ourselves, socially, environmentally, whatever. That we need to be aware because everything, everything is connected.
Now, I can't tell you if it was effective for my point. I can't tell you where it was weak, or if there was some characterization I would need to embellish. I can't even tell you if it just sucked as a story and I needed to start the next draft from scratch and try again with new words.
Why? The first person I showed it to (no, it wasn't David) told me it was casually nihilistic. Now, just the phrase itself, perhaps, might not have been so bad. I can see how you might interpret nihilism in the latter half (at least so far as the summary is concerned). But it was said with such...... distaste. Not only had my reader missed the point (which could have been my fault), he had with two little words told me that there was utterly nothing worthwhile about the entire piece.
I was disheartened. Which, by the way, isn't a word I generally use. I might have been pissed, or insulted, but his words hurt. The rest of his feedback wasn't helpful either, and trying to dialog with him was frustrating at best. I decided, in the end, that the feedback was bad. (Certainly I've never shown that reader anything since.)
Except that when I sat down to edit the story.... the words stuck. Casually nihilistic. They danced around in my head every time I even thought about the piece, let alone when I was looking at the page. I could no longer look at my own words and see what was written and consider it against what I wanted. Those two little words had killed my story.
So I threw it away.
Not that I recommend doing that with stories someone kills. Sometimes they come back to you. A little space to breathe, to forget, to consider things from another angle, and sometimes you can go back to work, or at least start it over. But see, I hadn't learned that lesson then either, and it still hasn't been long enough to start from scratch....