User blog:Atarumaster88/Perspective on writing

This one's for all the aspiring fan-fiction writers out there. Article-writers, you uh&hellip;you stay classy. I have no idea how much this applies to you. But for all of you who think "I want to write a short story/novella/novel/novel series," and haven't yet done so, I have news for you.

You're going to fail. It might not be immediately. It might happen before you even finish. It might happen years after you write the series. You might not even realize that it's happening. Also, the more ambitious your project, the more likely you'll fail (not to mention fail to even complete it!)

Confused? Let me explain. There's a few ways this could happen.

You could lose interest in the story, real-life could interfere, or you could have a bad case of writer's block. It never gets finished. It maybe never even leaves the conceptual stage. That's a failure to complete.

You could finish your story. At some point, either you or someone else will look at that story and think "My God, this thing is terrible." That's a failure to compete. Your story no longer (or never did) meets a certain standard.

You could finish your story and then later decide that wasn't the direction you wanted to go with the storyline. The story is abandoned or (at least partially) rewritten. This is a failure to commit to the outcome or resolution of your story.

However, that's not the worst type of failure. The worst type is when you finish the story and never realize how bad it is at some point. If people tell you that it's bad, you blow them off. You can't understand the flaws in your own work (and trust me, they exist). That's a failure to ''comprehend'.

At some point, you'll hopefully look back at your writing, however far along it is, and view it as a failure. Maybe it's not finished. Maybe it is finished, and it sucks. That's okay, because Star Wars Fanon literally exists to provide a home for these failures. Don't believe me? Click the random page button a few times. Your failures are in good company.

But Ataru, why should I write if I'm later going to regard the work as bad/incomplete?

Well, there are a few reasons. First off, hopefully because writing is fun. If it's not fun to you, you need a better way to spend your free time. Unless you're getting paid to write on this website, participating on SWF should be fun. Secondly, because failing is a learning experience. You're going to learn a ton from writing your first piece of fan-fiction, even if it's awful. You'll learn more from the second one. You'll become a better writer because you've made those mistakes and learned from them&mdash;assuming you're not one of those stubborn types who can't comprehend their own flaws.

Once you stop seeing the flaws in your own work, it means you need to either find someone who can tell you those flaws, or you've reached the pinnacle of writing perfection. Experience tells me the latter scenario is far from likely.

Now, of course, you can always learn from the mistakes of others. If you see a certain Archivist mark up a work for mixing-and-matching its verb tenses, that's a lesson you can take away. If you observe MPK excoriating something in IRC (and his nerdrage is truly legendary), well, guess what? Maybe writing the crew of the Ebon Hawk like the cast of "Jersey Shore" isn't the best method if you're not going for the tongue-in-cheek campy approach.

Also, you can ask other writers how to improve and avoid some of those failures. Personally, I recommend you ask Goodwood if you're struggling with the technical aspects of writing. When Goodwood strings together words, it's a friggin symphony compared to some of the other works on SWF. If you're having trouble on the narrative side, with constructing a plot or characters that seem to really achieve the level of writing you want, I suggest JM76. Not only is he a veteran member and the author of multiple novels, but his works are known for their compelling plots and diverse characters.

Now maybe you don't care how good your writing is. You just want to do your thing. That's fine. I personally don't find it as interesting to never try and better myself, but if that's your cup of tea, you keep drinking it, and don't let anyone tell you to switch to coffee. You might not ever get noticed or recognized, but if writing is your outlet and you're happy with it&mdash;good on you.

The bottom line is this: accept that you're going to make mistakes in writing, but as long as it's fun, then so what? And if you're trying to always get better, then not having the "perfect" story is okay, provided you learn from it. What's the worst that could happen? You spend a few (or many) hours writing something, you post it on SWF, and people who you'll probably never meet might read it. (If you're on this website for acclaim, you're probably doing it wrong. Go write a mushy sappy romance fic on TF.N instead.) You presumably had fun writing it&mdash;anything you get in terms of feedback, viewership, or swag on SWF after it's posted should be considered purely bonus.

That's my two creds on writing. If you read it, great, leave me a comment. If you didn't read it, you're probably skipped down here anyway while thinking of something snarky to say, in which case the comments section is still available. And if you didn't want to read whatever pseudo-wisdom I have to dispense, why are you here? Begone!