Do I name characters based on that one girl that gave me a dirty look ONCE in the halls and then kill them brutally? yes. Do I name them after my middle school enemy who I haven't seen in a decade and kill the brutally? yes again. Do I find it therapeutic? you guessed it, YEP.
Am I a psycho for it? Probably. I plead guilty, your honor.
A writer's ego is different than your average ego. It boosts itself higher than the heavens when someone compliments my work.
But tell me something as small as "is that comma meant to be there?" or "that's not the correct way to use that word" and I will go into a writing hibernation-sesh for the next century in a fit of self-doubt.
We are fragile creatures.
sometimes I feel bad for my characters because even though they go off-script half of the time, during the other half, I appear after hours of procrastinating-writing-by-making-up-random-backstories-and-lore out of nowhere and just go:
"surprise! as of now your parents died in cold blood when you were six and you witnessed it with your little sister" and such is the start of a villain arc that will cause me to re-write the ENTIRE book because why am I even giving my main character a villain arc if they're literally the hero?
who left me unsupervised?
Nobody talks about how damaging being a reader AND a writer is. Like I can't read a book normally without either: a) mentally criticizing every poorly constructed sentence and analyzing it or b) comparing an EDITED AND PROFESSIONALLY PROOFREAD piece of published work to my MEANT-TO-BE-BAD-FIRST DRAFT and proceeding to gaslight myself into thinking I'm shit and being thrust into a week-long writing hiatus.
I CAN NEVER WIN
I resonate so hard with this. Without intending to, I criticize others' work while reading and feel bad at my own damned audacity. At the same time almost any other story I read seems better than my own work. This makes me waste time writing a draft for days because I'm trying to write it perfectly. It still seems sucky at the end and this frustrates me into hiatus😣
These days I try to be my own biggest fan and to relax about these things but the woes come sometimes.
THIS RIGHT HEREE!
Glad to see it's not just me 😭😭 like I know a first draft is not meant to be perfect but the self-doubt HITS HARD. That's why I usually don't read books in the genre I write in 😭
Nobody talks about how damaging being a reader AND a writer is. Like I can't read a book normally without either: a) mentally criticizing every poorly constructed sentence and analyzing it or b) comparing an EDITED AND PROFESSIONALLY PROOFREAD piece of published work to my MEANT-TO-BE-BAD-FIRST DRAFT and proceeding to gaslight myself into thinking I'm shit and being thrust into a week-long writing hiatus.
I CAN NEVER WIN
As a writer, I can guarantee we don't know what we want half of the time.
Some days we want people to obsess unhealthily and make fan art of our characters and make Pinterest pins on quotes and create those fake twitter posts and then at the same time I would rather burn my house down before showing anyone my work.
Who created such a mentally damaging hobby and can they give me my sanity back???
