Stories Just for Yourself

[ProbablyInsane]

An artist that I follow talked about how important it is to show your work to others (very easy nowadays) but how important it also is to keep some stuff for yourself, a little portfolio that's for your eyes only. I wrote a novella a little while back that tells a very intimate and personal story, and while I'm very proud of it and think that it would be well-received, I've decided to hold onto it, keep it just for myself, something for me to look back on every now and again and smile.

Anyone else have such stories?

 

[KeithD]

Nope. And I do everything I can to make money off of them.

 

[NotWise]

Anyone else have such stories?

Nope. I write to be read.

 

[TadOverdon]

An artist that I follow talked about how important it is to show your work to others (very easy nowadays) but how important it also is to keep some stuff for yourself, a little portfolio that's for your eyes only. I wrote a novella a little while back that tells a very intimate and personal story, and while I'm very proud of it and think that it would be well-received, I've decided to hold onto it, keep it just for myself, something for me to look back on every now and again and smile.

Anyone else have such stories?

Not as such.

There were long periods of time, though, when I wrote but had no one to show the work to, which is different from choosing to keep it private.

OTOH, I don't "write to be read" in the narrow sense that I give much thought to how to adjust my writing to an unseen audience. I like to be read. I know what I want to do, and I do it, and then I see what happens. I don't like it on the occasions when someone actively dislikes my writing, or when it's roundly ignored, but I don't change much in response, either.

On the subject of necessary feedback, writing has often been a major component of the other ways in which I've made my living. So I've been getting useful criticism and feedback about general matters of style, clarity, correct usage and vocabulary all my life whether people have been reading my fiction or not.

 

[PennameWombat]

<snip>
Anyone else have such stories?

Not intentionally. I don’t have enough time to write the stories that I want to put ‘out there’ so spending time to write something that’ll never get released isn’t interesting to me. I’ve never been interested in keeping a diary or anything like that and that’s the feeling this evokes in my head.

But I do have story ideas that aren’t more than a couple of paragraphs because they’d violate the age guidelines here and they’re not easily up-aged. But I’ve not yet gotten around to going elsewhere to publish them so I don’t spend more time on them.

I also have ideas and/or partially-written stories that ‘aren’t quite working’ so I put them aside until I can go back and wrestle them into submission. But they’re again only going to get worked on if I can release them.

 

[SimonDoom]

No.

Since I started writing erotic stories in November 2016, I have published every story I've completed. I have no interest in holding on to a completed story just for myself.

 

[SamScribble]

I do sometimes write chunks of stuff to see what I am thinking about a particular subject or a particular situation. Some of those don't get published. So, in the sense, I suppose I do sometimes write purely for myself.

 

[HeyAll]

I remember watching that Woody Allen movie "Vicky Christina Barcelona" and there was mention of a guy who was mad at the world so he made amazing art and kept it to himself to punish everyone. I thought that was an extremely odd philosophy.

Personally, if I was the last person alive, I wouldn't bother writing. The enjoyment of writing is that others will read it. And it's a fun process.

 

[KeithD]

I think if I were the last person in the world, I wouldn't last more than fifteen minutes.

 

[Omenainen]

I do this. I started writing as a way to process something relevant to me. I have stories I don’t intend to do anything with, except read them myself every now and then. I started writing first, and decided to publish something here later, and that’s still the order of things for me.

 

[ElectricBlue]

No. Once written, words are meant to be read.

Some of my content is deeply personal, but the general reader won't always know that - although the number of times I get the comment, "Thanks for sharing," suggests they recognise intimacy when they read it.

 

[oggbashan]

All my stories are written for myself to get them out of my brain. But except for one which would break Lit's rules, they are all here. Once they are submitted, I can forget them and move on to the hundred or more plot bunnies jumping around.

 

[TadOverdon]

An artist that I follow talked about how important it is to show your work to others (very easy nowadays) but how important it also is to keep some stuff for yourself, a little portfolio that's for your eyes only. I wrote a novella a little while back that tells a very intimate and personal story, and while I'm very proud of it and think that it would be well-received, I've decided to hold onto it, keep it just for myself, something for me to look back on every now and again and smile.

Just to be clear, IMHO there's nothing lesser about writing clearly and well only for oneself. You're "writing to be read" for an audience of one. The aim is to develop insight and make a fresh record of your experiences and feelings that will be useful and meaningful to you later. It's called "journaling" and there's no reason it can't be done in the format of fiction if that's what works.

 

[Nightwaves]

Ultimately, I want these to be read

I started writing down my churning young thoughts back in the '70s in a spiral-bound notebook, never meaning them to be seen. I progressed to sending in a very short story to Penthouse Forum, which was never published. When I got on the internet, I discovered a lot of kindred spirits, but it took about a decade before I submitted anything to Lit. Damn right, I want to share these, but the characters and worlds and situations I create are primarily for me. Amazing how I've found followers for the stuff I write (incest, etc). Strangely enough, once I've submitted a work, I usually lose interest in it and move on. Writing is a very slow process for me, mostly due to time, but there's also an OCD factor, which I'm trying to improve.

No doubt, some psychologist reading my works would come to some very interesting conclusions

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Every story I write is for me, but I do put them out there for others to read if they wish.

I have started some that became a little too much for me to finish and scrapped them.

But no, I don't have any that I keep for myself.

 

[ScrappyPaperDoodler]

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I’d say we all 'keep something to ourselves' even in the works we publish. The creative process is a continuum — it ends when we die. Words, sentences, paragraphs, get lost between one draft and the next. Artefacts may survive in old text files or simply in the subconscious of the writer, but the public never see them.

I would love to have the self-discipline to write a whole novella for my eyes only, but I wouldn’t be able to see where that 'ends.' The benefit of publishing, for me at least, is that it forces me to conclude a project, otherwise I’d just keep writing and revising. Even looking at my old stories on Lit, I desperately want to go back and change them, and I’ll probably always want to do that.

 

[Payne_Hall]

I don’t know if this counts as it kind of breaks the rules, but that’s actually how Sightless started out, as a comfort story for me when I learned quite how, ah, progressive my hearing loss turned out to be over the years haha. But then it just kind of... evolved. And I broke the rules and shared it, but am glad I did. It seemed to make people happy

 

[lovecraft68]

Can't say that I have because if its something I want to keep to myself its in my head, no need to write it.

 

[ProbablyInsane]

Like many of you, I used to write to be read and, in some cases, allowed my writing to be affected by the rules of the publisher and the expectations of the audience. Now, I write because it's a process of introspection, of self-expression, and of growing to tell a story with the skill of my favorite authors (a challenge, not an expectation). Two of the stories that I just published (In a Word, Coffee and Pain, in Brief) were written because I was sick of the porn and erotic fiction that dominate the web (and which I'd spent years writing) and wanted to write something so absurd that it wouldn't be sexy. I published them to see just how low they would score lol

Edit:

I should say that I've always written with the goals of self-discovery and growth as an author, but those've become my primary reasons to write.

 

[KeithD]

Two of the stories that I just published (In a Word, Coffee and Pain, in Brief) were written because I was sick of the porn and erotic fiction that dominate the web (and which I'd spent years writing) and wanted to write something so absurd that it wouldn't be sexy. I published them to see just how low they would score lol

And the air is full of the sound of shuffling feet of those off to find and read these stories.

 

[AlphaLyon]

I don't have stories I intentionally hold on to, although I do have scenes that I haven't figured out how best to integrate into other pieces.
I enjoy the dopamine hit of knowing someone read and appreciated what I have written.