I had a neat concept I was trying to execute yesterday and today. I completely flubbed it. Now I cannot bear to look at it. LOL In hindsight, I probably pushed myself too hard to hit some benchmarks. Anyway care to share your own failures so I feel better about mine?
Yeah I wrote a sci fi thriller once that was meant to be a cat-and-mouse, but it got so repetitive I added in some extra characters, and then the heroine became a Mary Sue and fuck that story it’s trash
Not long ago, I pulled out a young adult fantasy that I've been working on off and on for years. Half an hour into revising, it struck me: I hate this book. It's boring. I don't want to read it. Illumination. Freedom. On to something better.
I just realised I didn't actually describe what I wrote: It was a departure from what I usually write as of now, lots of symbolism, heavy prose, deconstruction of a fairytale. It seemed interesting, but just became boring as I kept going. After a certain while, it was like pulling teeth to try and finish. So I ended up scrapping it.
The highest praise I can pay contest entries is to tell the writers that they don't read like contest entries. I wrote a piece for a contest here that just stinks of flash contest entry.
I think I personally find it hard not to become/feel pretentious when I attempt a short story. It always feels gimmicky. A massive failure on my part that I need to get better at fixing. Even a novel is a bunch of small individuals stories strung together.
I think "hating" your work is a sign that you are serious about it; let other people do the judging, just do your best. You will always be convinced you could have done better, but that may or may not be true.
I don’t think anyone can objectively evaluate their own work to a reliable degree. Thanks to communities like this one, we don’t have to! It’s ok to scrap or shelve something if you’re not enjoying the writing process with it. A good book called Creativity made a good point: coming up with idea is easy, identifying the bad one quickly is what makes you successful. I’m trying to write a memoir, which in itself is quite pretentious of me. There are days I am convinced nobody is going to care about my crap, usually Tuesday through Friday. I keep going because I love the process, even if it never sees the light of day.
The amount of cringe I get from reading my writings is directly proportional to length of time between the time of reading and time of writing. I have had several instances of accidentally viewing my past NaNoWriMo manuscripts from years ago. Immediately felt like shit every time.
I will add this corollary: nearly every time I feel viscerally satisfied with something I have written it turns out to be sappy or contrived or blatantly derivative of someone else's [better] writing. Originality and sincerity are hard to capture.
All the time, though it's mostly with poetry. They say: "Good poems come from Odin's mouth. Bad ones come from his ass." A story there, but I'm not willing to tell it.
All the time. I feel like I have good ideas, but executing them well is another story I am not exactly well-versed in yet, and criticism I’ve gotten in the past seems to back that up. All I can really do is ignore that self-hatred of my work as best as I can and make an contentious effort to improve my work.
