*** the struggles of sharing (creative) writing
writing is steadfast for me. it's been my first creative hobby; i was that kid walking around on the playground writing would-be plays and short stories and making my friends read them, writing scripts with me as the main character and my friends as my supporting cast. when i made this site i quickly stripped it back to make the writing be front and center.
i struggle with sharing my writing, or at least writing that 'feels' creative. the writing i've mostly done thus far on clearglass is that weird mixture of personal and blog-like. i pride myself on my writing abilities, that much is probably obvious from even a cursory glance around my site, but i still struggle with sharing anything that feels 'creative' at least with my friends or people who even seem to know me. for whatever reason i don't have this problem with sharing my visual art.
i tried to combat this by getting into roleplay tumblr, which is a hobby i still participate in but have something ofa mixed relationship with. for better or for worse i don't really mesh with the majority of the people who are active in that space. i find there is way more of an emphasis on graphics and aesthetics and that in turn leads to this weird understanding that if your blog doesn't look nice you clearly must be a bad writer. and those who rely too much on formatting built with triple spaces in their words and small font, i have found, are the ones who usually can't write to save their lives. if i have to read the word 'pon one more time, i'll explode. anyway...the point in me bringing this up is to say that drawing can ebb and flow for me but i'm not as shy in sharing it. writing has been constant for me, but i only really feel confident sharing it with people whom i have met through the hobby.
the other nice thing about rp tumblr is that i do have some very close friends i've made this way, most notably one of my best friends and my partner who i of course talk about a lot on here. the crux of my relationships forming with these people was built off of building worlds and navigating made-up relationships and bouncing prose off of each other. with these people being such steadfast rocks in my life who already know what my writing feels and flows like, it makes it easier to share with them.
i have been working on and off again on a devil may cry 'fic' (i guess?) that i started back in 2022. it was meant to just be a short drabble but, as writing often does, changed shape and bubbled outwards into something else. i'm really enjoying working on it. my inspiration for fic tends to wax and wane, the other nice thing about rp (if you have a good writing partner) is that the two of you can bounce ideas off of each other and within rp tumblr spheres too there are little prompt lists people reblog that you can then use to send in an ask to generate a scene without needing to come up with the idea 100% on your own. it's great for practice and flexing your creative muscles; due to my struggles in maintaining personal longrunning forms of fiction, rp tumblr is basically the best way i can keep at it without stagnating.
when talking about this current fic with my partner the other day, i brought up the first devil may cry thing i wrote, a basic drabble featuring dante and vergil shortly after the events of DMC5. of course he's read it. i mentioned i wanted to put it on AO3 but that i was embarrassed and he pointed out that he still doesn't even know my AO3 and the thought of sharing it made me cringe. my partner knows i've orphaned my old works, anything posted to AO3 as a teen--i don't want to delete them because even though i can't bring myself to read them again, i think they still have worth and maybe some other 15 year old will enjoy them, but thinking about opening them again brings a metaphorical tear to my eye. i do, however, have two other posts on my AO3 associated with my account still, a really short drabble (that i called a 'prose poetry exercise' because i was pretentious i guess) for code geass and a thing i wrote in 2020 lockdown after the clone wars S7 finale about & centering on ahsoka. these pieces are just old enough now that they also give me great embarrassment, and i also wrote them before i met my best friend or my boyfriend, so thinking of them reading them is... well, it once again makes me cringe.
when talking about this with my boyfriend i said, "i don't know why i get like this with writing specifically. i don't usually mind sharing old art or half-finished sketches with people," and he said something to the effect of:
"i think you just take writing more seriously than you do drawing."
those weren't his exact words, but that was what i took from them, and i kind of realized he's right.
in college i took a bunch of writing classes as electives. not to toot my horn but i was always one of the best people in those classes and my professors knew it too. at the encouragement of one of them i even got a piece (that i am now embarrassed of) published to an undergrad magazine, and while i can't bring myself to reread it, i am still overjoyed to think that other people read it and thought it was enough of a banger that it should exist in physical form, ink pressed to paper. the review lives on my bookshelf.
but in these creative writing classes the other people who my professors and i also identified as those with talent and a real knack for the craft tended to write more emotionally-driven works. i feel like i always struggle with that.
in a poetry class (not my strong suit and not one where i felt i was one of the better folks) a boy gave me the concrit: "i just don't feel like there's any emotion in it. i'm struggling to see what your feelings are in this work."
now on one hand i think that concrit is kind of fucking stupid especially when every poem this boy wrote was about being sad, gay, and broken up with, even name dropping a really popular sushi place in the vicinity of the college in one of his poems, and to that i say, "(andrew garfield in the social network voice from the 'marlins and the trout' line) what about the wheelbarrow besides the chickens!!!" and also "stop trying to be richard siken!!" but also i think with this observation now being juxtaposed against my boyfriend's statement i must have felt like my writing cannot or must not deeply matter to me because i'm not someone who seeks to pepper 'my self' into everything that i do.
there is some of myself in every piece i write but i feel strongly that that is usually a side effect of simply being a person and wanting to write about things you are interested in. i don't ever strive to make it about me or what i am feeling though, at least not actively. again, i'm sure there is bleedthrough.
i am not an emotionally intense person by default. i used to be though. i wonder often if i could be more like that in another world. but now i feel like i justify myself out of my feelings, i logic them away and make them feel as if they are unactionable because i usually can see the circumstances that are almost never personal or never directed at me that have led to my being-hurt or what have you. and, maybe this is just what happens when you hit your teen years and you're an artist and everyone is learning about van gogh and the trope of the sad tortured emotional byronic artist, but i think i began to equate emotional intensity with those who care about their art at some point, and thought that i didn't care so much about my art, at least not how other people do, because i didn't feel 'compelled' to write in that emotionally fraught inautonomous way we often associate with compulsions at least in the realm of art. 'oh, i just HAD to create something,' has never really applied to me. i do it because it's fun.
...which should then make things easy to share, right, if i don't feel like it's a reflection of me at all, right?
so it's an ouroboros of course.
after talking about this with my boyfriend i put my dmc drabble up on AO3 and so far the reception has been really positive, which inspired me to go back and work on the longer one again.
some of my problems with AO3 specifically i think are also compounded into the fact that i am writing fic, which of course has been the subject of hot debate from the beginning of time. i find both sides of the 'discourse' to be irritating...on one hand i don't think reading fic that essentially seeks to dilute and remove characters from their original context for the sake of shipping is particularly 'good' or maybe 'notable' is the best word here. even if the writing itself is actually powerful and good. which brings me to an interesting phenomenon i have stumbled across lately as an remnant of being an ex-jujutsu kaisen fan who still really likes satoru gojo, the splitting of him into two different guys dubbed 'nerd gojo' and 'frat boy gojo' who serve no role apart from having gojo's face and name to be used in reader/gojo smut fiction. i don't really understand why this is so popular right now and why it basically uses gojo's name for OCs who are so separated from what the character represents, his backstory, and even his personality, while still pretending it's about him, the character from jjk, because they call him satoru gojo and because he has white hair and blue eyes. to loop back to my original point i also am not of the school of thought that fanfic isn't worth anything at all either and the relentless looking down on of fanfic for simply 'being' fanfic is sad to me too and also makes me not want to share my works with writing friends i have met outside of the context of tumblr rp (which is essentially usually writing collaborative fanfic since people often write/explore canon muses) for fear of it being immediately written off as simply not worth the time. which has happened to me before too, even, a side effect i think of sometimes being friends with people who feel that emotionally-driven compulsion of putting themselves into all of their works while not being able to understand that i do not feel that way when i create/write/etc.
i'm not sure how to wrap this up but i think i've said everything i wanted to say. hopefully i can work more on my own independent stories, fic or not, and hopefully i can bring myself to not feel so nervous about sharing them with people, those who care about fic or don't, and hopefully i can make it so that i can acknowledge the seriousness of my craft to me while not trying to force myself to be a writer i never will be too.