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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2eKb710:
chaosbria:
claricechiarasorcha:
firstorder-pixie:
I don’t think that people realize that when writers beg for comments it isn’t because we want our egos stroked it’s because we FEEL SO LONELY AND JUST WANT TO TALK
like if i wrote that thing I’ve been THINKING about that thing for a long time and been all locked up about it inside of my brain by myself please come and talk to me aBOUT IT?
SO MUCH THIS
Yesssss this! Also because it’s feedback! If someone comments on something specific in a chapter, it must have stuck out to them in either a good or a bad way and that’s something I want to know.
When I started out, fresh off a career in academia where writing was all about feedback to improve your craft and rarely about a thing to enjoy in and of itself, that was genuinely what I was looking for, yes, but now after about twenty years of writing a lot, I mostly know how to achieve the effect I want– and I don’t mean that to sound stuck-up, and it’s not that people’s responses don’t still surprise me, and that I don’t myself find meanings I didn’t know I was conveying, and such– but I just wanted to say, a lot of times it really is OP’s point. I write these things because they kind of boil up in my imagination and I have to make them. But creating things is just so lonely, and you’re so involved in your own head, in your own private reality, that it’s an enormous relief to get it out– but it’s the sharing that’s really rewarding, having it reflected back to you as it is absorbed by other minds. It eases the terrible loneliness, and refills the well that creating drains. It takes a lot out of me to make these things, and often all I get back is people’s reactions. So I kind of need them, it’s an important source of energy and inspiration.
But, most of all, creating things is really fucking lonely. It’s a compulsion, and it’s not like I’ll stop– but if I can’t get that reaction, that reflection, I have to find some other way of refilling the void left by pulling this thing out of myself, and I’m really not sure where else I’d find that.
I like this post better than all the other ones that are either in favor of commenting or lurking on fic etc– because this is more fundamentally true. I’m not going to stop writing just because nobody comments; I may, like a plant seeking water or sun, turn my efforts more toward areas that yield results (i.e. writing things that get more response), or I may do something else (I don’t know what!), but it’s not pettiness or a lust for fame or attention or whatever, it’s a genuine and undeniable hunger.
It’s just so goddamn lonely, sometimes, populating made-up worlds with imagined characters. I’m making them out of myself, and it’s not harmful exactly, it’s just draining.
chaosbria:
claricechiarasorcha:
firstorder-pixie:
I don’t think that people realize that when writers beg for comments it isn’t because we want our egos stroked it’s because we FEEL SO LONELY AND JUST WANT TO TALK
like if i wrote that thing I’ve been THINKING about that thing for a long time and been all locked up about it inside of my brain by myself please come and talk to me aBOUT IT?
SO MUCH THIS
Yesssss this! Also because it’s feedback! If someone comments on something specific in a chapter, it must have stuck out to them in either a good or a bad way and that’s something I want to know.
When I started out, fresh off a career in academia where writing was all about feedback to improve your craft and rarely about a thing to enjoy in and of itself, that was genuinely what I was looking for, yes, but now after about twenty years of writing a lot, I mostly know how to achieve the effect I want– and I don’t mean that to sound stuck-up, and it’s not that people’s responses don’t still surprise me, and that I don’t myself find meanings I didn’t know I was conveying, and such– but I just wanted to say, a lot of times it really is OP’s point. I write these things because they kind of boil up in my imagination and I have to make them. But creating things is just so lonely, and you’re so involved in your own head, in your own private reality, that it’s an enormous relief to get it out– but it’s the sharing that’s really rewarding, having it reflected back to you as it is absorbed by other minds. It eases the terrible loneliness, and refills the well that creating drains. It takes a lot out of me to make these things, and often all I get back is people’s reactions. So I kind of need them, it’s an important source of energy and inspiration.
But, most of all, creating things is really fucking lonely. It’s a compulsion, and it’s not like I’ll stop– but if I can’t get that reaction, that reflection, I have to find some other way of refilling the void left by pulling this thing out of myself, and I’m really not sure where else I’d find that.
I like this post better than all the other ones that are either in favor of commenting or lurking on fic etc– because this is more fundamentally true. I’m not going to stop writing just because nobody comments; I may, like a plant seeking water or sun, turn my efforts more toward areas that yield results (i.e. writing things that get more response), or I may do something else (I don’t know what!), but it’s not pettiness or a lust for fame or attention or whatever, it’s a genuine and undeniable hunger.
It’s just so goddamn lonely, sometimes, populating made-up worlds with imagined characters. I’m making them out of myself, and it’s not harmful exactly, it’s just draining.
