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Jan. 11th, 2015 07:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkI previously mentioned the (melodramatically-named) Great Collapse of Summer 2014. Recently I was rereading one of my blog entries from that time, and I was sort of struck by how articulate and rational, even eloquent I was about everything that I had gone through. (Usually when I'm depressed my entries are more like "I feel like crap what are words how do you English.")
It's been four months since then, and I guess that's about as good a time as any to write another reflection.
Although I suppose not much has changed, really. It bothers me less on a day-to-day basis, but it's still there, like listening to a radio station with a poor signal and a constant undercurrent of static. Sometimes you can't hear much of it; sometimes it surges and overwhelms the music until all you can hear is the overwhelming white noise. But in any case, it's always there.
You know, it still hurts. And I suppose in one light, that's not a bad thing; as a friend told me, it means that I care. I care about my writing, I care about other people seeing my writing, I care about other people leaving feedback on my writing and helping me become a better writer. But on the other hand, it still hurts, and that sucks.
*
An excerpt from my blog post:
"And maybe what I write just isn’t “mainstream” enough. I know I have a particular set of interests when it comes to writing (no smut, somewhat dark, cathartic, exploring flawed and painfully human characters, intensely emotional), and I’m willing to allow that maybe this doesn’t speak to a wide audience."
Obviously, I don't want to intentionally write something that's mainstream or something I *think* will be popular—partly because I have standards, and partly because I get creatively bankrupted when I start to think along those lines.
But the idea that my writing interests aren't mainstream? That's frightening to me. That's frightening because the driving reason behind why I write, why I like to write and want to write, is to connect with people. The purpose of art and entertainment is to entertain people, and for that to be possible there has to be an audience. When you're creating something and you're not making other people happy with it, that's incredibly, incredibly demoralizing.
*
What my sister tells me in an effort to cheer me up is: "But people did like what you wrote! Look at the nice comments you got!"
I do appreciate the comments I get. I really do. They mean a lot to me and I wish I knew how to write thank-you notes because I feel so unable to express my gratitude.
The problem I have is that there's always a voice in the back of my head saying: "But it's not good enough."
Objectively, I know I got decent exposure (at least for one fic). Then that voice tells me: "But still not good enough." I know I got a decent number of kudos. The voice says: "But still not good enough, and it also doesn't track the number of hits well. Maybe for every 200 people who liked it, 5000 people didn't, and you'll never know what went wrong because none of them left any comments (except some vague bookmark tags and hashtags on Tumblr posts)."
(I'm a paranoid person. I'm haunted by those vaguely disapproving hashtags and the people on Tumblr who said they planned to read and liveblog or talk about it and never did. I'm haunted.)
Jealousy is, in my mind, the worst possible human emotion. It is "I want what you have and I hate that you have it and I don't." It is toxic. It is a double-edged sword that makes you angry at people who have done nothing to you and also cuts into the very core of your own self.
Jealousy, I think, is born when you end up lacking something essential. Self-esteem, self-security, something like that. You crave what you don't have, and you also think, "But why can't I have what other people have? What is it that's wrong with me, what am I missing?" So the cycle of insecurity and self-criticism continues in an unending cycle.
*
Writing is, for the most part, an incredibly lonely endeavor.
You spent the majority of your time in your head, with people who don't exist. For me, in certain ways, it's even lonelier than for others. I have never had other writer friends I could bounce ideas and drafts off of or get support from. When I was young, my parents weren't really supportive of my wish to become a writer, so I stopped talking about my writing to them early on. But that just reinforced my feeling of isolation.
I had been okay with the loneliness that comes with writing. (I mean, I'm also an introvert with social anxiety, so I've never really had a lot of friends or much of a social life to begin with.) But I saw famous AO3 authors who got a lot of people showing up on their Tumblr to talk about how great their writing was, and it just...grated. Like suddenly, it felt like all these writers had their own personal cheerleading squads, and meanwhile I was sitting in my little corner of the internet, talking to myself because I had no one else to talk to who would listen, clinging only to my own (sometimes fervent, sometimes shaky) belief that what I was writing had value.
Like I said, jealousy is a terrible emotion.
*
Maybe this is the problem: I got too invested in what I wrote.
I left the Captain America fandom at the end of last summer for a number of reasons, one of which was that I had a lot of passionate opinions about Bucky Barnes that ran counter to popular prevailing fandom sentiments. I wish I could detach myself and depersonalize the issue for myself, but I can't. The truth is, I overidentify with the character of Bucky Barnes and that's why I can't be calm about it—it's just too deeply personal for me.
Then I went and wrote this thing, which (whoops, spoilers) is not really about Bucky Barnes, actually, but let me talk about it for a moment.
(Or for more than a moment, because that thing took up three months of my life and I could talk about it for hours to anyone who'd stand still long enough to listen.)
There's a quote I really like from a professor at my undergrad, and it's this: "Writers write because they're bothered." In retrospect, I wrote it because I was bothered. It started out innocently enough—just a delirious, semi-conscious, pain-fueled dream fragment that caught my attention because (believe it or not) the idea came to me before the movie came out, and at the time it was different from most of the other fanfics I'd read, and I was eager to try my hand at something I thought was fresh and new.
(The irony was that the concept that I thought was "fresh"—the Winter Soldier being more of a weapon than a person—ended up also being the movie's take on Bucky. Cue the internet being flooded with such fanfics after the movie came out. I had already spent too much effort into my fic by that point to throw it out, but I was grumbling to my sister for weeks.)
It started out innocently. Just a "Hey I liked that sort-of dream I had, let me write it down before I forget it." I had no expectations whatsoever. I didn't know if I would finish it. I didn't have an idea for the ending at all—which was really unusual, for me, because I almost always need to know what the ending is before I start writing.
So I made it up as I went along. The funny thing is, the major "twist" in the story was something I came up with purely because I thought it would make the story "interesting." But once I decided on the twist, the ending wrote itself, and then I thought, "Well, damn, I actually like that ending, I'd better make sure it isn't wasted." I thought, and tinkered, and banged my head, and tinkered some more. I thought the story was crap for a long time—I thought the writing style was barely above caveman language, I thought I was severely rusty from months of writer's block, I thought the plotting was bad because plotting isn't my strong point ever.
And yet I kept going at it. Kept tinkering with it. The damn thing wouldn't leave me alone and I thought about it all the time. I ended up reusing ideas and scenes from other fanfic fragments that never got off the ground, and because I wasn't thinking about posting it for a long time, I had a no-limits, no-holds-barred approach to the fic. If I had been thinking about making it public from the beginning, I suspect the story would've shaped up differently. As it was, it became as weird and dark and angsty as the most private corners of my mind are.
I thought it was crap and weird as hell, but I still loved it. Because it was mine, and I had put so much of myself into it that it wasn't just my brainchild, it was my soulchild (yeah, I'm sorry that sounds so cheesy). It's...a bit hard to explain, and I know my sister thinks I'm overly dramatic about the whole thing, but I still feel like I could say "You want to know what kind of person I am? I'm the kind of person who wrote this story."
I waited anxiously for my sister to finish her semester and come home so she could beta-read it for me, because I had invested too much of myself into it to just let it sit in a dusty corner of my cloud drive forever. I was sure she would hand it back to me with a long laundry list of things I had to change (and/or she would tell me that she hated it, go find another beta-reader).
Instead, all she said was, "I liked it! It was great! You should post it!"
So this...weird thing ended up on the internet, in all its uncensored glory.
*
It started innocently. It didn't end that way.
I was able to get over the initial disappointments of my other fics, but this one has remained with me. Maybe it's because I thought, as weird as it was, it had the best chance of getting noticed. Though still smut-free, it was by far the slashiest thing I'd written (not on purpose, I swear), and slash is always wildly popular online.
Maybe it's because, in retrospect, I wrote this story because I had to. It has a lot of themes and ideas that appear all the time in my writing—all those unfinished drafts that withered and died and never saw the light of day. But this one saw the light of day. I finally wrote the kind of story I wanted to read. But in the end, I don't know whether that was enough to make it a success or not.
*
Objectively, I know that popularity isn't necessarily an indicator of quality. (Otherwise Twilight would have to be the best book ever written, and porn-without-plot would be quality literature.) But when it comes to entertainment, it's hard to see any other metric for success.
I don't regret the fic (although I'm sure there were parts that could've been better), but I regret everything else that happened. I regret having to withdraw from the fandom. I regret becoming consumed with toxic feelings. I regret that I had allowed something that had brought me great joy to become a source of insecurity and depressive downward spirals. And I regret the fact that I have a hard time recovering from failure.
*
I don't really have a conclusion, and I'm not sure what else to say. But then again, I don't feel a sense of closure myself, either. I spent much of summer 2014 feeling horrible, and feeling horrible about feeling horrible. I felt like I was an awful person for being so insecure, so jealous, so weak, so angry at other people and myself. I haven't solved anything since then, just buried the pain and numbed it with the stress of law school.
I was a little more optimistic back in August, so I guess I'll quote myself and leave it at that.
"It still hurts. Maybe it will never stop hurting, or at least not for a long time. But one day, I hope to reforge this pain into something better."
It's been four months since then, and I guess that's about as good a time as any to write another reflection.
Although I suppose not much has changed, really. It bothers me less on a day-to-day basis, but it's still there, like listening to a radio station with a poor signal and a constant undercurrent of static. Sometimes you can't hear much of it; sometimes it surges and overwhelms the music until all you can hear is the overwhelming white noise. But in any case, it's always there.
You know, it still hurts. And I suppose in one light, that's not a bad thing; as a friend told me, it means that I care. I care about my writing, I care about other people seeing my writing, I care about other people leaving feedback on my writing and helping me become a better writer. But on the other hand, it still hurts, and that sucks.
*
An excerpt from my blog post:
"And maybe what I write just isn’t “mainstream” enough. I know I have a particular set of interests when it comes to writing (no smut, somewhat dark, cathartic, exploring flawed and painfully human characters, intensely emotional), and I’m willing to allow that maybe this doesn’t speak to a wide audience."
Obviously, I don't want to intentionally write something that's mainstream or something I *think* will be popular—partly because I have standards, and partly because I get creatively bankrupted when I start to think along those lines.
But the idea that my writing interests aren't mainstream? That's frightening to me. That's frightening because the driving reason behind why I write, why I like to write and want to write, is to connect with people. The purpose of art and entertainment is to entertain people, and for that to be possible there has to be an audience. When you're creating something and you're not making other people happy with it, that's incredibly, incredibly demoralizing.
*
What my sister tells me in an effort to cheer me up is: "But people did like what you wrote! Look at the nice comments you got!"
I do appreciate the comments I get. I really do. They mean a lot to me and I wish I knew how to write thank-you notes because I feel so unable to express my gratitude.
The problem I have is that there's always a voice in the back of my head saying: "But it's not good enough."
Objectively, I know I got decent exposure (at least for one fic). Then that voice tells me: "But still not good enough." I know I got a decent number of kudos. The voice says: "But still not good enough, and it also doesn't track the number of hits well. Maybe for every 200 people who liked it, 5000 people didn't, and you'll never know what went wrong because none of them left any comments (except some vague bookmark tags and hashtags on Tumblr posts)."
(I'm a paranoid person. I'm haunted by those vaguely disapproving hashtags and the people on Tumblr who said they planned to read and liveblog or talk about it and never did. I'm haunted.)
Jealousy is, in my mind, the worst possible human emotion. It is "I want what you have and I hate that you have it and I don't." It is toxic. It is a double-edged sword that makes you angry at people who have done nothing to you and also cuts into the very core of your own self.
Jealousy, I think, is born when you end up lacking something essential. Self-esteem, self-security, something like that. You crave what you don't have, and you also think, "But why can't I have what other people have? What is it that's wrong with me, what am I missing?" So the cycle of insecurity and self-criticism continues in an unending cycle.
*
Writing is, for the most part, an incredibly lonely endeavor.
You spent the majority of your time in your head, with people who don't exist. For me, in certain ways, it's even lonelier than for others. I have never had other writer friends I could bounce ideas and drafts off of or get support from. When I was young, my parents weren't really supportive of my wish to become a writer, so I stopped talking about my writing to them early on. But that just reinforced my feeling of isolation.
I had been okay with the loneliness that comes with writing. (I mean, I'm also an introvert with social anxiety, so I've never really had a lot of friends or much of a social life to begin with.) But I saw famous AO3 authors who got a lot of people showing up on their Tumblr to talk about how great their writing was, and it just...grated. Like suddenly, it felt like all these writers had their own personal cheerleading squads, and meanwhile I was sitting in my little corner of the internet, talking to myself because I had no one else to talk to who would listen, clinging only to my own (sometimes fervent, sometimes shaky) belief that what I was writing had value.
Like I said, jealousy is a terrible emotion.
*
Maybe this is the problem: I got too invested in what I wrote.
I left the Captain America fandom at the end of last summer for a number of reasons, one of which was that I had a lot of passionate opinions about Bucky Barnes that ran counter to popular prevailing fandom sentiments. I wish I could detach myself and depersonalize the issue for myself, but I can't. The truth is, I overidentify with the character of Bucky Barnes and that's why I can't be calm about it—it's just too deeply personal for me.
Then I went and wrote this thing, which (whoops, spoilers) is not really about Bucky Barnes, actually, but let me talk about it for a moment.
(Or for more than a moment, because that thing took up three months of my life and I could talk about it for hours to anyone who'd stand still long enough to listen.)
There's a quote I really like from a professor at my undergrad, and it's this: "Writers write because they're bothered." In retrospect, I wrote it because I was bothered. It started out innocently enough—just a delirious, semi-conscious, pain-fueled dream fragment that caught my attention because (believe it or not) the idea came to me before the movie came out, and at the time it was different from most of the other fanfics I'd read, and I was eager to try my hand at something I thought was fresh and new.
(The irony was that the concept that I thought was "fresh"—the Winter Soldier being more of a weapon than a person—ended up also being the movie's take on Bucky. Cue the internet being flooded with such fanfics after the movie came out. I had already spent too much effort into my fic by that point to throw it out, but I was grumbling to my sister for weeks.)
It started out innocently. Just a "Hey I liked that sort-of dream I had, let me write it down before I forget it." I had no expectations whatsoever. I didn't know if I would finish it. I didn't have an idea for the ending at all—which was really unusual, for me, because I almost always need to know what the ending is before I start writing.
So I made it up as I went along. The funny thing is, the major "twist" in the story was something I came up with purely because I thought it would make the story "interesting." But once I decided on the twist, the ending wrote itself, and then I thought, "Well, damn, I actually like that ending, I'd better make sure it isn't wasted." I thought, and tinkered, and banged my head, and tinkered some more. I thought the story was crap for a long time—I thought the writing style was barely above caveman language, I thought I was severely rusty from months of writer's block, I thought the plotting was bad because plotting isn't my strong point ever.
And yet I kept going at it. Kept tinkering with it. The damn thing wouldn't leave me alone and I thought about it all the time. I ended up reusing ideas and scenes from other fanfic fragments that never got off the ground, and because I wasn't thinking about posting it for a long time, I had a no-limits, no-holds-barred approach to the fic. If I had been thinking about making it public from the beginning, I suspect the story would've shaped up differently. As it was, it became as weird and dark and angsty as the most private corners of my mind are.
I thought it was crap and weird as hell, but I still loved it. Because it was mine, and I had put so much of myself into it that it wasn't just my brainchild, it was my soulchild (yeah, I'm sorry that sounds so cheesy). It's...a bit hard to explain, and I know my sister thinks I'm overly dramatic about the whole thing, but I still feel like I could say "You want to know what kind of person I am? I'm the kind of person who wrote this story."
I waited anxiously for my sister to finish her semester and come home so she could beta-read it for me, because I had invested too much of myself into it to just let it sit in a dusty corner of my cloud drive forever. I was sure she would hand it back to me with a long laundry list of things I had to change (and/or she would tell me that she hated it, go find another beta-reader).
Instead, all she said was, "I liked it! It was great! You should post it!"
So this...weird thing ended up on the internet, in all its uncensored glory.
*
It started innocently. It didn't end that way.
I was able to get over the initial disappointments of my other fics, but this one has remained with me. Maybe it's because I thought, as weird as it was, it had the best chance of getting noticed. Though still smut-free, it was by far the slashiest thing I'd written (not on purpose, I swear), and slash is always wildly popular online.
Maybe it's because, in retrospect, I wrote this story because I had to. It has a lot of themes and ideas that appear all the time in my writing—all those unfinished drafts that withered and died and never saw the light of day. But this one saw the light of day. I finally wrote the kind of story I wanted to read. But in the end, I don't know whether that was enough to make it a success or not.
*
Objectively, I know that popularity isn't necessarily an indicator of quality. (Otherwise Twilight would have to be the best book ever written, and porn-without-plot would be quality literature.) But when it comes to entertainment, it's hard to see any other metric for success.
I don't regret the fic (although I'm sure there were parts that could've been better), but I regret everything else that happened. I regret having to withdraw from the fandom. I regret becoming consumed with toxic feelings. I regret that I had allowed something that had brought me great joy to become a source of insecurity and depressive downward spirals. And I regret the fact that I have a hard time recovering from failure.
*
I don't really have a conclusion, and I'm not sure what else to say. But then again, I don't feel a sense of closure myself, either. I spent much of summer 2014 feeling horrible, and feeling horrible about feeling horrible. I felt like I was an awful person for being so insecure, so jealous, so weak, so angry at other people and myself. I haven't solved anything since then, just buried the pain and numbed it with the stress of law school.
I was a little more optimistic back in August, so I guess I'll quote myself and leave it at that.
"It still hurts. Maybe it will never stop hurting, or at least not for a long time. But one day, I hope to reforge this pain into something better."
