Queenfisher
Bird?
- Joined
- May 29, 2020
- Messages
- 333
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- 108
This thread comes right on time for my depressive episode +_+. I wish threads like these were pinned somewhere because many of us need them so much. The issue is that when I'm happy and on the roll with my writing, I find it hard to even imagine how this episode feels. On the other hand, right now, I can't remember what being inspired and happy feels like. I can't read, I can't watch movies, I can hardly get myself to wake up, so frustrated my mind feels with everything. So I 100% second @HansTrondheim with the bipolar thing, only for me it's manic-depressive,
.When this happens, I usually have to remind myself how little such judgments as good/bad even mean in the world of art and that I know nothing and cannot make objective value claims about anyone's art, including my own. These steps help me remember this:
1) The "Shit" reviews of Masterpieces
I go to goodreads.com (or sometimes amazon books, or novelupdates for webnovels) and search for my most favorite books or widely-accepted masterpieces and then go on a binge-reading of
and star reviews of them, . It's sobering to an almost hilarious degree. Every book known to be good will have a ton of people shitting all over it and sometimes so competently, you might find yourself agreeing with them only to realize that a good argument can prove or disprove literally anything as good or bad.Also helps with masterpiece animes on myanimelist, and movies on imdb and rotten tomatoes critic reviews, lol. It's an innocent way to spend time and is very fun, especially when two of your favorite writers clash. (Nabokov shitting on Dostoevsky always cracks me up because I can't help but think that Nabokov's statements are such nitpicky moronisms, but so funnily made that I end up enjoying them ^^).
So when you find yourself thinking that you suck, imagine that your brain is now currently only surfing the 1-star reviews of your own writing. But there are bound to be other star-reviews of it (at least 3-stars, and sometimes, maybe even 4-stars if your brain is being very nice to you *_*), statistically-speaking. You just have to push yourself to check those out.
2) The "Underrated Masterpiece" reviews of something claimed as shit
The same, only I usually go to reddit, youtube essays, and tumblr/livejournal for such hot takes. Essentially, you type something like "Why Dan Brown is actually a subversive genius", or "Transformers is seriously underrated", or "SAO is a hidden gem among animes" and read whatever Google throws at you. You are bound to find at least one hot take you will agree with and will see your mind expanding to cosmic levels of enlightenment
.Now imagine that whatever crap you think you write, someone out there might not only love it but would also make it their religion to disprove everyone else who claims it's shit -- including yourself!
^^
The above methods usually dispel my mood of "I suck" or "I am useless and incompetent" very fast because can you even say what good or bad about your writing is if most people can't agree about what those concepts represent about any piece of art?
The 3) method is even weirder, but it's involves the inspirational stories about artists' resolve and the fickle nature of art history.
What is popular right now might not be so in a decade. Popularity is a revolving door, alas. Thus, some artists who had written what we now know of as solid, decent books that become mainstays in their niches, actually believed they were crap and either didn't publish it, or published it and saw it rot in obscurity at the time. Sometimes it takes the art piece a lot of time to find its audience. So much, in fact, that the author dies before it gets recognition, which is sad, of course. But the only way it can find that belated recognition is if it's actually published in some way or form!
So if you are too insecure with your writing and end up not finishing/not publishing/deleting it, your writing will fail 100%. Or as the quote goes, "You miss 100% of shots you don't fire."
Just think of Ray Bradbury writing 50 stories every year just so that a fraction of them could end up published! He understood the odds very well. To write a good story (or at least a story perceived as good by someone) -- you have to throw a lot of shit at the wall and hope that at least one sticks. The odds suck, and coupled with the Sturgeon's law of 90% of everything being bad, the likelihood is -- at least one of the books any of us will ever write WILL fall into that 90%. If that is upsetting, remember that out of all of Picasso's, Michelangelo's, Caravaggio's works, only a small fraction is known or cared for and the rest is largely ignored. Shakespeare's plays go from genius levels to utter shite regardless of whether he was writing them early in his career or late! But even if they all churned out masterpieces one by one, some of these masterpieces would still fall into the Sturgeon's law trap for somebody out there because that's just how these stats work...
Think of Stephen King and Rowling and how close they were to never being published. Stephen King's first book actually ended up in a trash bin, and Rowling's first book ended up in the discard pile in the publisher's home after a big run of rejections. Both were fished out of those places by sheer luck. By that one person who believed in them and pushed them to go on.
Not everybody of us can find that one person to believe in us, which sucks. But to have the chance to meet that person, we still have to write our book first so that they can maybe see it one day ^^.
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The conclusion here is... to simply write +_+. Recognition (especially long-term recognition) is a kind of a gamble as is the perception of your writing being "good" or "bad". You can't control how this gamble will play out, but you can make your bets anyway (write and publish and hope for best) because that's literally the only thing that you can influence.
