I struggle with writing a lot too. In fact, speaking as well. There’s a lot of things, even insignificant stuff like comments that I will draft and halfway through I drop them or I’ll have a whole comment written out and as I’m proofing it for clarity of reading and for errors I’ll just be like “Nope” and I delete it and not respond.

There’s a few elements that I think can be teased out from your post:

• Autistic masking

• Understanding your purpose for writing

• Criticism, internalised criticism, self-consciousness, and how people are remembered

• Maybe radical acceptance sorta stuff

I’m just going to do a scattershot reply so don’t expect this to be particularly coherent.

With regards to understanding your purpose for writing, I think this is worth reflecting upon; are you writing for self-expression, for enjoyment, for recognition and praise, or maybe other things.

If you are writing for self-expression it’s not necessarily going to be enjoyable. Think like people writing down their thoughts after a difficult breakup - it might be useful and cathartic but it’s not necessarily going to be an enjoyable process. Gratifying, perhaps, but it’s hard to imagine tear-streamed writing about heartbreak and being like “This Is fun, I should do this more often!”

If you enjoy playing with words and finding ways to describe things then obviously it’s a leisure activity of some sort to you.

If it’s about getting a publishing career or to edify others or for recognition then your purpose is obviously going to be very different.

Worth noting that these things and others can overlap too.

But if you’re writing for your own pleasure or self-expression then it doesn’t really matter whether other people get anything from it, y’know? It can be hard to internalise this idea without pondering it and maybe hashing it out with the self-critical part of you or the part that feels that deep shame.

I have known artists and they tend to be pretty insular about their craft. If you get it, cool. If you like it, cool. If you don’t understand it or it doesn’t vibe with you, whatever. There’s a significant degree of generosity on behalf of a person who decides to share things with you, even if it’s just some rambling armchair psychologizing comment on Hexbear, and it’s important to keep that in mind - they are inviting you in as a guest, to some degree, and if someone is going to demand that you rearrange your furniture then you don’t really need to take that on board or to invite them back in as a guest in future. That’s probably a bit abstract, I know, but when you are sufficiently satisfied with what you do then you don’t really need the validation of others and so if someone doesn’t like what you do then you aren’t going to be inclined to chase their approval and if they think it things could be better then it’s easier to take an attitude of “Okay - if that’s your preference then you can make something to your tastes yourself or you can look elsewhere”. Not in a bitter, vindictive sort of way but just an amicable sort of recognition that this isn’t for them and that’s their responsibility that you don’t have to take on.

One piece of wisdom that I came across a long time ago is this: you will know that you have a sense of fashion when someone else doesn’t like your style.

I think this can be applied pretty broadly - you know you have a personality when someone clashes with it, you know you have made good art when someone dislikes it etc.

It’s not a hard rule nor am I saying that people should be as offensive and confrontational as possible but I guess it’s worth reflecting upon - few things are universally loved, especially when it comes to art, and if you are writing something that is completely inoffensive and that nobody will take a dislike to then you’re probably a technical writer and you’ve probably authored something with all the flair of an instruction manual.

So maybe just do some writing exclusively for yourself. Or maybe write for the sake of writing and make a clear committment that you aren’t open for criticism on it, it just is how it is and that’s the end of the discussion.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that even highly regarded artists are remembered for their best works and the stuff that is middling often gets ignored or overlooked. And their bad stuff that gets produced usually doesn’t get much attention, especially outside of the period that it is released. And I can guarantee you that there’s a mountain of material that ends up on the metaphorical cutting room floor too.

Often a lot of it is about honing your craft and producing a lot. Some stuff you produce is naturally going to be better than other stuff and that’s fine. It’s very rare that an artist will just produce one thing or one set of things like an album or whatever and that’s it, especially if you take into consideration their pile of drafts and their discard pile.

So maybe it’s about embracing the fact that some of the stuff is necessarily going on be mediocre or worse. There are plenty of examples of novels that are highly regarded as stories which have varying degrees of bad writing - whether throughout the book itself or whether it’s some really clunky sex scene or there’s a character that’s written in a really goofy/awkward/annoying way or something else.

It’s exceedingly rare that every sentence is poetry and that each sentence builds upon the last to create a finished product that is the pinnacle of flawless writing.

Then there’s the stuff about autistic masking and how it’s etched into your brain via social trauma.

This is a big discussion but if you have people who accept you for who you are, and more importantly if you are accepting and nurturing of yourself, then it might be helpful to reflect on this and to recognise that you aren’t going to experience the same rejection for your writing as it happened in that time in your past. You aren’t going to lose anything by writing, there’s not a whole lot at stake especially if you aren’t choosing to stake a lot of your identity or self-worth on something that you have written.

You are allowed to afford yourself the grace to write things that are imperfect or flawed or, heck, even just straight-up bad.

I have a similar thing where I lost my love for/ability to write creatively. For me the origin was a bit different - I had some strange experiences with multiple English teachers who like, identified me as a “gifted” kid and in need of extra attention, and then used me as a little ego-booster. They put additional pressure on me to perform that the other kids didn’t get, assigned me extra/different assignments from the rest of the class, and then consistently singled me out as a “good example” in a way that made all my classmates despise me. I just wanted to be invisible, but if I didn’t go along with what they wanted, or continue to produce the kind of work they had come to expect from me, they got horribly disappointed and took it as a personal insult to their teaching ability and thus to their very identity. I was just a kid, so I internalized that my inability to meet these distorted expectations was literally harming the adults in my life.

It was strange and bad and scary. I was already being abused at home and the extra bullying did not help. In the end it made me so anxious about writing anything and having it be seen by others. I used to have panic attacks about writing ordinary essays. I have gone many years without writing anything for fun, when it was my childhood dream to be an author.

But this isn’t the kind of thing that most people think of as capital-T trauma, so I put off addressing my feelings about it for a long time. I’m still working through it today - I haven’t fully reclaimed my creativity yet. But I have made very meaningful progress and it’s given me a lot of hope. The key for me was addressing it in the way I addressed my other sources of childhood trauma. For me, that’s been trauma therapy but also breathwork, somatic techniques, and the use of entheogens in community.

Aside from trauma healing, I’ve also tried some clever ways to be creative while circumventing my fear of writing. One of these is solo TTRPGs. They are a great way to experience a story of your own making, building up characters and a complex world, without any expectation to write it out and show it to others.

The other strategy I’ve been using is to write in another language. I use toki pona, mostly because I have pretty severe cognitive impairment from long covid, and so it was the only language I felt I could reasonably achieve fluency in. Writing in not-English is like using a room in my head where all the other trauma never happened.

Possibly these specific workarounds won’t work for you, but maybe they will give you some ideas of other creative ways you can circumvent the anxiety response you currently have. I think of my creativity as something like an injured kitten, who needs to be gently coaxed to trust me again. Anything I can do to get her playing is a step in the right direction.

My mom was an editor for a little while and while the feedback was typically useful and my writing was good I found myself not wanting to write because it was never finished. I liked math better, because each equation has an end, whereas writing can be subject to draft after draft. Even today basically all of my writing is first drafts only.

I have thoughts on this but it’s quite late and I really need to get to bed as I have a lunch date tomorrow

Writing anxiety is normal to have, no artist is ever ever ever fully satisfied with their art unless they’re a self-important douche. Will most more in-depth stuff later

@[email protected] I can recommend something which has allowed me to produce a surprising variety of small stories, although honestly I end up culling them down to a single thought in almost every case:
Just write a short chapter. Almost every book has chapters. Don’t make it an intensely personal topic. Force yourself to take on multitudinous perspectives through this process by not binding any particular chapter to the same project unless it really feels right (does that make any sense? maybe I should go to bed).

I feel this way about communication in general, only thing I do go for it and cringe later. If you’re really wanting to publish you could self publish some of your works you’re not too overly attached to on Amazon or similar online places and a copy of adobe illustrator or something to make it look neat.

I love reading slop, I have like over a hundred tabs of royalroad open on my phone.

Don’t have any advice for realizing the story concept part, all of mine are even more nonexistent than yours.

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