pink_silk_glove
Literate Smutress
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2018
- Posts
- 3,682
I don't agree. As a new writer, I spent more than three years writing a series and publishing the chapters (36 of them) as I finished them.
There is no doubt in my mind that I improved as a writer because of the regular feedback I received during that time. Had I sat alone for three years, putting down words which no one was reading, I doubt very much if I would have made the kind of progress I achieved. In fact, it's unlikely I would have finished it at all.
But you don't do it any more. If you kept writing that way you would pretty much cap yourself. Plus, you wrote it largely to push yourself and test yourself. You're on record saying that. You might be the only one on lit who really challenged yourself that way. The rest who post as they go do it mostly because it's the quickest line between typing something and getting scores.
We hear these calls all the time.
"I need the feedback for inspiration for the next chapter."
"The feedback has dried up so I've lost the motivation to continue the story."
Were you not inspired to tell a story? What happened to that story? The reality is that they never had much of a story and were inspired with an idea of a character and a setting and a plot bunny and couldn't resist the short cut to see if anyone likes it, because they just want someone to like it. That is the motivation. Now that people aren't liking it, the motivation is gone since that was the prime motivation all along. These are dead giveaways for why people write. Do you have a story that you want to tell or do you just want someone to like something that you submitted and tell you that you're good?
I'm going to get a little spiritual here but this is the truth. True inspiration is positive energy (ethereal), therefore not bound by time, so it can wait until it's done. Instant gratification is impatient because the applause is negative energy (material) - at least the energy that the ego looks to harvest is - therefore dissipates (and dies) over time, hence the impatience to hurry and finish. If one understands the basics of sin and virtue (they are terribly misunderstood - religion has twisted them so horribly) then it becomes easy to spot this stuff. But people don't like it when you spot it and point it out, because they are writing from their ego more than they think they are and the ego doesn't like being outed so it tells its host to get angry at the messenger. So when people get butthurt, that gets pretty easy to spot the ego too. So you point that out and ... they get butthurter and angrier ... That's just how us humans roll - at least until we figure it out.