ScrappyPaperDoodler
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2020
- Posts
- 263
I'm feeling sentimental tonight.
I've been on Lit for about 5.5 years now. I used to come to these forums a lot for advice on the smallest things, mostly because I was terrified of "the public" and what they might think of my work.
My output has decreased over time — I think I made a few initial errors in where I put my effort and how much I cared about accommodating my most vocal readers. Mainly, they wanted marriages and pregnancies (they still want that, to an extent). I love my commenters and those who send feedback, but I was far too happy to bend narratives in those directions despite having no real sense of how to manage it (nor a desire to actually go down those roads). Throughout those years, I've only done one story outside T/I (or what used to be I/T), which is to say I definitely stuck to a comfort zone. I had plenty of ideas for stories outside that category, but I never pursued them because they seemed too "difficult" (I'm not saying T/I is easy to write, just that I developed a mental block of sorts).
I've been writing more in the first few months of 2026, but it's still slow going. My plan is to publish across different categories and, maybe, finally, participate in a few more contests. I also want to challenge myself to try to write something funny.
For the first time in three years, I've got more than one draft running simultaneously, which feels great.
One of these drafts is an essay in which I reflect on what I've published thus far. It will probably be read by like five people, but that's okay — it's my contribution to "the craft" and a piece of self-reflection. As I write it, I've realised that small "fixes" often spiral out of control. Or, rather, I've sometimes deployed outsized "solutions" to address very minor inconveniences.
I've basically run two "families" in terms of long-running series. With family one, I recall being very concerned that American readers might notice that I myself am not American, and that my knowledge of America is fairly limited. I somehow managed to convince myself that the characters' sex appeal is of a uniquely American type, and therefore it became necessary to invent a fictional American town and an adjacent city, as I couldn't possibly do basic research and some hand-waving to have them live in an imperfect recollection of New York, for example. Oh no, that would never work. Much better to build something entirely from scratch and have full control while constantly stressing about a hypothetical commenter who might point out a slight inconsistency.
My second family (the subjects of my Dimensions of Eternity series) is split across Canada and the UK. Now, referring to what I said above, could you possibly guess why I wrote them that way...?
Again, my fear was that an American audience would read them as inauthentic if they were written as being from the States by someone who is not. You might ask, why couldn't they be from the UK? Well, because the sex appeal thing nagged at me. There is a perception in certain corners of the internet that Brits are just not hot (undeserved, I think), which is not to say Canadians are known for being the pinnacle of our species. It just seemed a safe choice to solve a problem that probably didn't exist. On top of that, I had the narrator go to school in the UK + Switzerland — I didn't want to go back and forth checking whether he'd use "flat" or "apartment," "boot" or "trunk," etc. — so, I made him so international that he could conceivably use either and/or both.
Obviously, that kind of thing changes the whole makeup of a story. What started as a little shortcut became a core part of the narrative (and sometimes a handicap), and I think that's generally how many of a writer's choices get made. Yes, we use pure imagination to an extent, but we mainly use situational imagination. I'll leave the rest for the essay, but there are dozens of examples in my fairly limited body of work, and I'd be keen to hear how others experience this phenomenon.
I'm in my "write what I like" era, which is great, and hopefully my output increases as a result, though real life still gets in the way (if only I could win the lottery and retire early).
If you're someone who has just started publishing and you're on this forum, please get there faster than I did. Trust the people who tell you not to just aim for 4.5 and a red H. Your most read, most liked, most highly rated stories are not as important as whatever comes next! Keep up your momentum. If you are authentic to yourself, you will attract the kind of readers you want — Lit is still the biggest platform for achieving that while being relatively uninhibited in terms of the subjects you're allowed to tackle. Embrace it.
I've been on Lit for about 5.5 years now. I used to come to these forums a lot for advice on the smallest things, mostly because I was terrified of "the public" and what they might think of my work.
My output has decreased over time — I think I made a few initial errors in where I put my effort and how much I cared about accommodating my most vocal readers. Mainly, they wanted marriages and pregnancies (they still want that, to an extent). I love my commenters and those who send feedback, but I was far too happy to bend narratives in those directions despite having no real sense of how to manage it (nor a desire to actually go down those roads). Throughout those years, I've only done one story outside T/I (or what used to be I/T), which is to say I definitely stuck to a comfort zone. I had plenty of ideas for stories outside that category, but I never pursued them because they seemed too "difficult" (I'm not saying T/I is easy to write, just that I developed a mental block of sorts).
I've been writing more in the first few months of 2026, but it's still slow going. My plan is to publish across different categories and, maybe, finally, participate in a few more contests. I also want to challenge myself to try to write something funny.
For the first time in three years, I've got more than one draft running simultaneously, which feels great.
One of these drafts is an essay in which I reflect on what I've published thus far. It will probably be read by like five people, but that's okay — it's my contribution to "the craft" and a piece of self-reflection. As I write it, I've realised that small "fixes" often spiral out of control. Or, rather, I've sometimes deployed outsized "solutions" to address very minor inconveniences.
I've basically run two "families" in terms of long-running series. With family one, I recall being very concerned that American readers might notice that I myself am not American, and that my knowledge of America is fairly limited. I somehow managed to convince myself that the characters' sex appeal is of a uniquely American type, and therefore it became necessary to invent a fictional American town and an adjacent city, as I couldn't possibly do basic research and some hand-waving to have them live in an imperfect recollection of New York, for example. Oh no, that would never work. Much better to build something entirely from scratch and have full control while constantly stressing about a hypothetical commenter who might point out a slight inconsistency.
My second family (the subjects of my Dimensions of Eternity series) is split across Canada and the UK. Now, referring to what I said above, could you possibly guess why I wrote them that way...?
Again, my fear was that an American audience would read them as inauthentic if they were written as being from the States by someone who is not. You might ask, why couldn't they be from the UK? Well, because the sex appeal thing nagged at me. There is a perception in certain corners of the internet that Brits are just not hot (undeserved, I think), which is not to say Canadians are known for being the pinnacle of our species. It just seemed a safe choice to solve a problem that probably didn't exist. On top of that, I had the narrator go to school in the UK + Switzerland — I didn't want to go back and forth checking whether he'd use "flat" or "apartment," "boot" or "trunk," etc. — so, I made him so international that he could conceivably use either and/or both.
Obviously, that kind of thing changes the whole makeup of a story. What started as a little shortcut became a core part of the narrative (and sometimes a handicap), and I think that's generally how many of a writer's choices get made. Yes, we use pure imagination to an extent, but we mainly use situational imagination. I'll leave the rest for the essay, but there are dozens of examples in my fairly limited body of work, and I'd be keen to hear how others experience this phenomenon.
I'm in my "write what I like" era, which is great, and hopefully my output increases as a result, though real life still gets in the way (if only I could win the lottery and retire early).
If you're someone who has just started publishing and you're on this forum, please get there faster than I did. Trust the people who tell you not to just aim for 4.5 and a red H. Your most read, most liked, most highly rated stories are not as important as whatever comes next! Keep up your momentum. If you are authentic to yourself, you will attract the kind of readers you want — Lit is still the biggest platform for achieving that while being relatively uninhibited in terms of the subjects you're allowed to tackle. Embrace it.
