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 soviet-bottom I will delete the fuck out of this post soviet-bottom

tbh if it does I might still, this hurt to type and its weird lol

  • ashinadash [she/her]
    ·
    7 months ago

    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 omori-miserable 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 madeline-sadeline

    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?