Tumgik
#but rearranging shit has been the highlight of my editing process
My favourite past-time lately is moving all my best scenes earlier in my novel, and eliminating as much of the final act as I can because 🎶I don’t know what I’m doing with my ending!🎶
0 notes
Note
Hey imposter syndrome anon. I knows others go through this well my brain does but my heart doesn’t I saw a video that said talking about it with others helps and it did a little. My the biggest problem is my art? Can I call it that? I have a bit of imposter syndrome in my academic life but I get the grades I get with the effort I put in and I mean I’m not the best student in the world but I have satisfactory grades, my problem? My creative life I’m in college for not art stuff (not that comfortable sharing this many details about my life) but I like telling stories and creating worlds as a hobby I think I have perfect worlds in my head almost the opposite of imposter syndrome, I think I’m such hot shit Everyone will love me!, but the moment I try to translate the jumbled up ideas in my mind into paper it’s just... completely terrible honestly, how can I share something I don’t even like and I know that like you said people don’t share their failures but I only have failures do I not share anything then?The problem isn’t grammar I can fix it, i have dyslexia I’m used to making mistakes but nothing I write makes me happy and when I force myself to put something out I just scream it into the void and don’t even hear my own echo as a response I’m so afraid of not being good enough but I’m also so afraid of being good or hell even average would be awesome and giving up because i can’t see it. I’ve deleted so many fics because to top it off I have some sort of internalized elitism that thinks I won’t sell books (I don’t even want to publish!) or will be ridiculed for writing it I can’t understand my feelings so this probably has been the worse ask you got I’m sorry
Welcome back, anon!
First things first: absolutely call your art exactly that. Writing, drawing, painting, poetry, sewing - it’s all art, regardless of quality or skill. 
Secondly: I appreciate the apology, but I assure you it’s not needed! I’m answering because I want to (and you would be amazed at some bad asks I’ve gotten - and by “bad” I tend to mean “rude or invasive”).
Thirdly: Can I express how much I envy your confidence with ideas? It sounds like you’re bursting with amazing ideas, and that’s great! Own that confidence! Share some with me! (I kid.)
Onto what seems like the problem: you love your ideas, but the translation from brain to page isn’t working out. I can commiserate. Writing is one of those hobbies people love and hate simultaneously. Most of us struggle to have a productive, motivated writing day where the words go exactly where we want them to go. It’s incredible when it happens, but that muse isn’t around for long. The rest of the time? We suffer through the process because if we don’t get the ideas out of our heads, we might explode.
You’re probably not going to like my advice. I don’t even like my advice. And that’s simply: let yourself be bad.
I know how much it just sucks to be writing something and thinking, oh no this is awful - but you need to let yourself do it anyway. Get the basics down however you want - I like to take notes (sometimes organized, sometimes very not), or outline (whether or not I stick to the outline isn’t consistent), or write bits of scenes out of order, or just dive right into a rough draft. But let that draft be rough. Let your notes be awful and disjointed. Rearrange your outline a dozen times. But get the ideas down in whatever raw form they come out as. It can get ugly. I could share some truly heinous looking brainstorms from my posted fics. But I knew I just needed to get those ideas down, and then I could figure out how to make them look like the visions I had in my head.
It’s okay if it’s bad. At this point, I expect it to be bad, and I’ve been writing for years! Get the first steps down, and then you can start to edit. And I don’t mean just proofreading grammar - real, soul-crushing editing (I love writing, I promise). This is where you highlight whole paragraphs and put “wtf” in the margins, or axe entire subplots, or expand on things that didn’t get the attention they should have in the rough draft. Your rough draft (whether an actual draft or just a collection of notes and outlines) is a neat rock you found. Your draft after that should start to polish it enough to let your stone begin to shine when it catches the light. 
How many drafts you need before your stone is a gleaming gem varies from writer to writer, and from story to story. I recently posted a story with a conversation between two characters that I edited to death; I agonized over whether it felt stilted and flat until I finally just tossed it out there. And I received compliments on how “natural” it felt. Is this bragging? Maybe a little, if only to shut up my impostor voice. But I know how hard I worked that scene, and so I’m allowed to be happy for myself. I also know that it’s okay that it started out as a disaster. It doesn’t have to remain a disaster, but there’s a lot of work that sometimes has to be done to get there.
Remember too that you don’t have to post your work. You say you delete a lot of fics - you can keep them to yourself for a while, let them marinate so you can come back to them with fresh eyes and a fresh edit. I know back in my day, the internet barely existed. Posting my crappy grade school stories was never an option, so I admit I don’t have the strong urge to post everything I write (all for the best, I assure you). It’s okay to want to share, and to seek validation for your work. But public opinion is fickle, and it’s hard to promote work because there is so much amazing content these days. It’s up to you if and when you share your work, but please don’t feel pressured if you genuinely aren’t happy doing so.
So really - let yourself be bad. It’s how you improve as an artist, and it will give you even more confidence to explore new ideas, new styles, new worlds. You know you’re sitting on diamonds; you just need to roll up your sleeves and start polishing.
14 notes · View notes