A side note

[weatherfront]

Writing is always so closely tied to anxiety, I think. What comes before the writing, what happens during the writing, and what's left after the writing is done-- I feel like all of it is about anxiety! So whenever I considered making a writing journal or a masterlist or anything of that sort, I've always come up with too many cons that seemed to

Comments

[vikki]

Interesting thoughts! I think you make a very good point regarding the ego trip of worrying about an ego trip. What exactly constitutes an 'ego trip'? Is it when other people think you are being ~pretentious~? Nobody can truly know your motives for X action except yourself, unless you choose to explain. The truth is, 90% of what any individual does is nothing anyone cares about. I, having a rather dim view of humanity, feel that the average person is too self-absorbed to devote so much time and effort into analyzing others' actions and defining them for others, unless it directly effects the person in question.

In short, if making a fic journal makes you happier, than WHAT OF IT? Hooray, fic journal! *friends*

Oh wait further thoughts:

[vikki]

Regarding writing itself:

I think being objective about one's own work is actually impossible.

In all honesty I devote a sickening amount of time on the intarwebs going OMG IS THERE FEEDBACK ON X FIC? Because I am an attention whore. I swing wildly between "I think I'm a good writer!" and "Seriously why do I even try?" But in the end I'm too close to the subject material to really know the quality of my own work except in an extremely subjective manner. This isn't to say you can't judge your own work at all (particularly from a beta standpoint: is this sentence clear? Is this paced well? Are the characters behaving rationally within the story?) but rather that determining your own fic's quality on the sliding scale of 'bad or good' is fundamentally a ridiculous exercise.

Compounding the problem, IMHO, is the fact this is fanfiction, which has an extremely different standard of quality writing from original work, but I think I should probably meta that somewhere else, IDEK.I don't know if you struggle with worrying about what

Re: Oh wait further thoughts:

[weatherfront]

Ahhhh, you're so right, though, so right. No one thinks about you as much as you think about yourself, so it's true, assuming that people will read all those motives into your actions is also to assume that they are that invested in you! Which is selfish and dangerous!!

And yesss, it is also wise to remember that so as long as it does not hurt or bore anyone, it is good to write what makes you happy. ♥ I know you were not asking for compliments, but oh, god, you're a good writer. You're an amazing writer, you really are. Hhnrhgh I kind of can't believe I am talking to you right now D:

Re: Oh wait further thoughts:

[vikki]

This comment thread made me end up meta-ing all these long horrible tl;dr thoughts about why fanfiction and original fiction are two different monsters, ahahhaa.

There is a legitimate fact in fandom (being a community) that sometimes what you do will be something other people talk about/pay attention to because they perceive that whatever action is something that effects them personally, but in general I feel that HATERS GONNA HATE and unless you're going out of your way to purposefully hurt people around you, most of the time their points won't be legitimate (there are exceptions). But also most of those people paying attention to what you're doing are IMAGINARY PEOPLE IN YOUR HEAD, ahaha. There is actually a psychology term for this! 'Imaginary Audience', where one views him/herself as an actor and the whole world is their stage. (I totally just looked it up, haha.) So! yeah.

stop flattering me omg my EGO. CAN YOU SEE IT EXPLODING OUT MY BEDROOM DOOR