Okay so, writing is often difficult for me because of an awesome combination of anxiety and depression. (I have been diagnosed as bipolar, but I don't really seem to get the manic bit? I get meltdowns instead, which suck.) I crave, and get anxious about feedback. I have deep, green-eyed envy over the writing skills of others. I am possibly not the only one who has these feels, so have a thread for overcoming the green-eyed monster and/or writing based anxiety (or maybe just complaining about the beasties in question.) Things that work when writing is making me anxious: 1. If it's a specific project, go work on a different project. If it's writing in general, stop writing and do something else. 2. If I get depressed because of WIPs, I remind myself that I've written many completed works. 3. If I get anxious about a lack of feedback, a) talk to friends about it! b) read feeback for previous work c) remind self that kudos and likes are also good c) solicit feedback from Reliable Sources.
good thread good thread my anxiety is largely from having it pounded in over and over that almost all types of fanfiction shouldn't exist, that writing certain stuff is bad because it only exists to make the author happy, and so on. so i handle that by getting feedback from people, and honestly? by participating in bottom serket here and seeing other people here enjoy what they enjoy without needing or wanting to feel ashamed about that. stuff like that gives me the encouragement i need to keep doing what i want! (also, i think you wrote (they flow from form to form) and i wanted to say i really like it. eldritch shit ftw)
Yeah this is the thread for me. I seem to constantly have writing anxiety. I swing wildly between being frustrated that my writing doesn't get all that much attention because I know I write pretty well and having a complete lack of faith in what I write because it never gets that much attention. Logically, I know why. The fandoms I write for are pretty quiet and most stories focus pretty heavily on writer OCs. But it is still eternally frustrating to be throwing what I'm reasonably sure are good ideas with decent execution out into the void and hear very little back.
Wanting more feedback is a complete pain. I can't just be happy with kudos and likes, no, I need feedback. (I try to make something of a joke of it, but I also worry about seeming too "needy" which is obviously a bad thing.) What I do sometimes is solicit feedback, though I try to keep that to a minimum, with people I know.
I want every sentence and turn of phrase to be perfect. I get so upset when other people can come up with the perfect analogy or description and I'm just staring at my WIP like "this is wrong. I don't know what 'right' would look like but this isn't it." I try to remind myself of my strengths - like, I am actually okay at writing dialogue and capturing a voice? But man, I hate some bits of my current WIP so much and I can't go back and spend 3 hours editing them because NaNo and they're just sitting there being wrong. Like wormholes in an apple or something.
I write things in bits and pieces, and a lot of the stuff I get excited about is stuff I'd have to do a lot of legwork to set up, and all that shit gets me bored and frustrated. Shit I write comes out all disjointed and crappy, and my beginnings and endings are always fucking terrible, and I don't have any idea how to fix that. It's just kinda bluh.
Wanting everything to be perfect can be enormously frustrating. I tend to be an "edit as you write" type, and it's a habit I can't seem to get out of.
i have -2 idea what i am doing it, i am winging this so much and i have no idea how i've even written this much. i have no idea what i'm even going to write now. i am tempted to throw in more weird magic and make my narrator figure out what the fuck is even happening, but he's kind of. overwhelmed by all the weird magic i've already thrown at him. i think maybe i should explore my side characters more, they're interesting and havent said nearly enough yet.
I'm in the same boat. I have an enormously hard time writing with my editor turned off. And I think that while occasionally pushing myself with things like nano, this is okay for me, as long as I don't let it stop me from writing at all. For me, a lot of the editing is that I tend to process things slowly and like to mull over things, so editing as I go gives me more time to sit with the scene.
The draft I'm working on has a bunch of [insert conflict/dialogue/wordplay here] type notes, which I'm trying to actually turn into story, and it's just not working. Bracket notes are nice for nanowrimo because I don't have to slow down, but otherwise I'm not sure that they work for me. Maybe if I made myself try to tackle it from the start, I'd get farther with it. Plus someone I know wrote over 100k for nano, and I'm trying very hard not to feel jealous and inferior.
vague screaming because 7000 words left to write and i cant seem to write a single sentence i was bursting with ideas earlier, but the moment i sit down to write? nothing
