Writing Problems

[sunkelles]

On one hand, writing is always better than not writing, and writing fanfiction is not inherently less valuable than writing our own original works. Fic will always hold a dear place in my heart and every single fic I have ever written is important to me both as a person and as a developing writer. If I didn't start writing fic back in high school, I doubt if I would even be a writer now. I definitely wouldn't be as good at it as I am now. Sometimes when I write fic nowadays though, I feel bad because I WANT to write more of my original stuff and I keep not doing that in order to chase my newest fic ambition. I technically completed nano, but I only wrote 20k of original stuff and then 30k of fic. On one hand, writing 20k of that novel idea is a huge accomplishment and I might not have actually been able to stay focused on writing that much for that long if I couldn't write some fic to blow off other creative energies, but on the other hand, if I hadn't gotten distracted by fic I might have been able to write the whole 50k OF my nano project and really finished that first draft.

I HAVE cool ideas. I want to bring them into the world and I want to someday be published, but I keep coming back and writing more and more and more fic and barely devoting any time to my own works and my own ideas.

On one hand, I think that this feeling of guilt for dedicating time to a hobby is because of the capitalist drive to go go go and that any work that cannot be monetized is inherently worthless, but I'm also a little bit terrified that if I keep going back to fic and writing almost nothing BUT fic I'll never pursue writing my own ideas and leave my own mark, you know?

I don't know. I guess I'm just afraid that if I don't get to writing more of my own original works now in college when I have some time I'm afraid that

Comments

[hebethen]

I know that feeling -- it's why I quit freeform RP in high school. But I regret that. On a higher level/broader scale, I think more creative outlets provides ferment, not dissipation. Quitting RP didn't help me write more, it just made me not RP.

If it helps, there are plenty of published authors who didn't get published -- even in terms of short fiction -- until they were in their late thirties, their forties, maybe later. Ann Leckie and Susanna Clarke come to mind off the top of my head. I remember there was a bit of a go-round on author Twitter recently kind of sighing over the way that media tends to megaphone the stories about young prodigies, the "30 under 30s", etc., which they opined didn't really reflect their publishing experiences.

& FWIW, I know in college I had barely any headspace to read novels at all, but I was able to read a lot more after graduating. It's not necessarily set-in-stone inevitability that your post-college life will have less room for creative hobbies/callings!