Second weirdest post I’ve ever made. Third maybe? Idk. My best attempt to kill you with secondhand embarrassment alone. It’s the lamest trauma anyone has ever had.
Hi chat, so I’m kind of weird when it comes to fiction, big fan. Oftentimes being a big reader goes hand in hand with being a writer, and yeah that’s in me somewhere. I’m not super far removed from Ao3 users writing sweaty gay fic about whatever show they like, I guess. Recently though thinking about writing gives me huge panic attacks.
I’d written in bits and pieces through my childhood and stuff, but (yes, again, I swear ot’s important) when I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie it really completely busted my brain. Not just in that it alerted me that there were books with queers in 'em, not just in that I swore an oath to search out every fictional trans sapphic I could find, not just in that Maria Griffiths became like half of my personality, not just in that I still can’t shut the fuck up about it a decade later. On my 77th re-read of Nevada, I was like “Yeah but what if it was t4t and also a romance and also the leads were younger than sad thirty year old transbian. That would be rad!”
Through my last year of high school, I wrote like 70 pages of a novel manuscript (the formatting was apalling) for that, and even worse than that I started showing it to people. It must have been the autism, but it just never occured to me not to show off this freakishly weird too-personal work-in-progress I was writing. I started by showing it to my awful girlfriend at the time, and then to my parents, and then to people in the writing class I was in at the time. If people didn’t know what .odt was, I’d print a copy off, which horrifically means there is still evidence of this Out There Somewhere.
I got nothing but positive reactions, which to be real was probably all of these people trying to be nice to the absurd little autistic trans kid. It was nice except that nobody ever discouraged me from sharing this, so when this older (like 50s-ish) lesbian showed up at a queer youth group I was at and talked about publishing novels, I obviously asked if I could send her my dumb story to look at, and the response I got was the .odt file with so much red pen that the wordcount had more than doubled.
I didn’t even get past the first few pages, I get that what I was writing was bad but I was sixteen ma’am, please be a little nicer? My instinct is that a lady in her fifties could have been a little nicer to my bright-eyed, painfully unaware self. I think that’s unironically where I got all of my rejection sensitivity stuff from, or at least when it crystallised. I quit writing that shit right there and then, and did not write any fiction from then on. I still wrote giant rambling analysis posts or essays or whatever on video games or movies or books I liked, trying to keep the writing muscles from weakening, but I think the idea that that could eger happen again, and that some random fuck would just completely viciously shred anything I write, before it’s even done, kind of messed me up.
By the time I got the guff up to want to write again, I couldn’t really do it. I’d sometimes get struck by the lightning bolt of “WRITE SOMETHING” and scratch out some notes, a plot plan, or maybe a page or two of actual story, but nothing ever got far. Always felt stilted and awkward somehow - the shit I wrote in highschool was bad, but I really envy that little bitch for her total lack of self-consciousness. I feel like I’m pre-emptively policing myself all the time or judging and critiquing my own writing as I’m writing it. It stops me all the time, in the last eight years I have successfully completed one short story, six pages and I did not like how it turned out. I’m worse than the “haha I have ten unfinished stories on my hard drive” person; I have like 20 different concepts for stories and maybe five .odt files with less than two pages completed.
It just gets worse and worse it seems, like I have tried showing people my writings since then but the rejection sensitivity is so fucking jacked that I just can’t. At this point even when I do get a good idea, and my brain starts the process of boiling over with ideas and dialogue and stuff, my body goes into fight-or-flight mode and my breathing gets unsteady, my chest gets sore. Shit is exhausting and it’s why I’m awake now. (3am!)
So, uh, do you have experience with getting over internal cringe response and rejection sensitivity with regard to writing, I guess? It would be cool if I could just idly type out big long stories about women kissing, that’s what I’d want. Idk any advice is welcome I guess, not sure what else the point of this is.
If this gets no replies 
I will delete the fuck out of this post
tbh if it does I might still, this hurt to type and its weird lol
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.
Ah, man who says he’s not good at writing or speaking and then writes excellent paragraphs! =) Surely you must mean the verbal component.
My reason for writing is extremely simple: I am lesbians, I enjoy my fiction having lesbians, sometimes I want to write very specific things with cool queers involved! I never thought about it as writing for self-expression but you’re right and that makes sense, at least explains why I’m cringing all the time. I dunno why exactly I have the desire to show people my writings all the time, maybe because I Did A Thing, maybe something is pushing me to seek validation for my goofy thoughts that I can barely manage to get out? I see what you mean about furniture rearrangement, I do need to get it through my head that when I am writing, it’s first and foremost for ME. I wish kid me hadn’t started showing her writing to everybody.
I’m glad to know I have a personality then since I get into MANY clashes about it
but that makes sense, whenever I see a creative-person bowing to criticism a lot online, my instinct is that they should stop reading their reviews, because as much as there may be valid, constructive criticism in there, some people are in fact just going to hate your shit.
I have tried producing a lot, like nose-to-the-grindstone, Stephen King says “write everyday” shit, but the internalised cringe response wears me down every time and I stop. Very sad, my output volume is very low and if I ever had a style I probably lost it =)
Oh, you noticed the tism did you? I am always doing my best not to mask because that shit sucks, and I think I do okay on here, I do very little editorialising of myself even though that can be a struggle too. I have my wife who accepts who I am fully, but even then I’m always feeling like I annoy her even though I know I do not. Actually one of the healthiest things for me in a long time has been yelling on the bear website, because to date (five months) nobody on here has even once been mean or rude to me, it’s a stellar place. I am genuinely a little choked up thinking about the grace I’ve been given to just post infodumps everywhere, quick shoutout to everyone who’s ever posted about Unjust Depths with me ❤
You are right that the autism plays the biggest part, and it’s hard not to look at a writing I did and then instantly think about how someone would judge it, that’s my single biggest issue. I can’t even write for myself without doing that. I know I’ve also tried showing people my writings to try to gain a confidence boost, but since many people have a habit of talking around me or ignoring me, that has not gone well
I would not write bad, how dare! /s It would be kind of shameful, after reading so many books and doing so much analytical writing over a decade, if I wrote really bad. Surely I can write a good?