Simple question, needs very little explanation.

Personally I enjoy the product of writing. I like having added something to the fandom which promotes the kind of fic that I wish there was more of. I like receiving positive reviews. I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction when I complete a chapter and am happy with it. I sometimes even read my own fics just because they're the kind of fic I enjoy.

But I very much dislike the writing process. It's like pulling blood from a stone. On a very rare occasion, the momentum of a scene might carry me away with it, but most of the time, every single sentence is a struggle to get onto the page.

 

Almost all of the time I enjoy the process of writing. I enjoy planning what to write more, but I recognise it as a black hole.

I recognise there’s a hump to starting writing, because I also enjoy Netflix and there’s no hump there, but once I’m in, I’m in. I don’t enjoy publishing the work though, which is weird I suppose. I haven’t bothered with ffn or ao3 in years. I much prefer writing to polishing and publishing, I get something out of what people on DLP say, but I recognise I’d be disappointed by both the comments on ffn or the silence.

 

I enjoy it, but its not very relaxing, to me its a way of pouring out emotions I guess, putting them to words makes them easier to process or understand.

I also enjoy uploading and getting recognition for it, I think anyone who writes has at least a bit of arrogance to them and that desire for attention and praise.

 

Assume I just copied Taure's post.

 

Yes and no, I suppose.

There are times when I'm really excited by an idea, and the words just flow out almost effortlessly. The problem is that I can't rely on those moments as they can be rare, and usually don't last more than 20k words or so. Once that honeymoon period is done, the writing quickly becomes much more like hard work.

My favourite part of the process is almost certainly the planning phase, in addition to those first 20k words. There's a little spike of excitement when I come up with an idea I like, then that excitement grows slowly as I flesh the idea out and come up with a full story to go along with it. Once it reaches a tipping point, there's not really anything I can do to stop myself from sitting down and very rapidly writing the first chapter or two. It's typically all downhill from there, though. There is a high when I get to the end of a story, but that's pretty rare for me!

The editing process is difficult. When I'm writing with those creative juices flowing, the result is never as good as I felt it was in the moment, and the process of going through it and seeing all my missteps is a bit of a downer. On the other hand, when I'm passed the excited scribblings phase, I often feel like every sentence I write is clumsy and half-baked, and I dread having to read through it again.

Then there's posting it for feedback into WbA. I'll admit that my first response to any criticism beyond grammatical/spelling is always overly defensive. It's a knee-jerk thing that I know is wrong. My way of getting around it is to read the feedback, then sit on it for a few hours to gain some distance, then go back and re-read it. Usually that's enough to get me thinking more logically about things again. At that point, I really do appreciate the feedback for what it is, I just wish I could get over that brief moment of 'What do you mean my baby, deformed as I may think it is, isn't perfect? Who are you to make such pronouncements!?'

I also tend to slightly dread that first bit of feedback on a new piece of writing. I don't typically post my stuff at the moment of 'this is great, everyone's going to love it', instead its more like 'I am so done with this. It's not good enough, but maybe it does just enough to distract people from its obvious failings'. As a result, I always feel like this chapter of Shadow of Angmar is going to be the one where someone wakes up and says 'actually, guys, this is a bit shit, innit?' Once the first comments come in, and the criticisms are about fairly minor things, I get much less nervous about the process.

Posting to FFN is... fun. I guess? I still think my stories (SoA in particular) are much more popular than they reasonably deserve, but there's a simple pleasure to seeing numbers go up. Every now and then I get these really detailed glowing reviews/PMs that make me wonder if they're actually reading the same story as I'm writing, but it's nice to see. It seems my writing has brightened the lives of quite a few people, and even if I don't think it's really that good, who am I to tell people where to find their little joys?

 

I'm like Taure. I enjoy the end result, adore getting feedback but the process of writing is often tedious.

I'm a very slow writer and this leads to immense frustration, especially when I get stuck. On top of that, I'm not especially creative, so world building and the smaller things can take me weeks to think of. What I am good at is adaptation.

This makes me enjoy the editing and rewriting process as I know I can make it better. Its even better when I have people to bounce ideas off of or who review and comment on my stories.

What has been driving me forward to continue writing is seeing my improvement over the years and my pride when I re-read a scene, sentence or even a chapter I wrote. I did this. What a wonderful feeling.

Now hopefully I can get to a place that I feel comfortable with publishing it. I can't wait to have others read it.

 

The effect of distance is very important, I think.

When I wrote Alexandra Potter, one of my main worldbuilding ideas was that I wanted the world to feel alien to the Muggle world - a true, distinct culture, not a sub-society of the Muggle world. So I increased its size and added a second British magical school for Hogwarts to play Quidditch against. I emphasised the different value of objects in the wizarding world, with books being absurdly expensive, given that they held the knowledge which would give you access to significant powers. I made it so wizarding society had no nudity taboo in certain contexts like bathing.

And then I got a fair number of critical reviews to the effect that readers found it hard to relate to the world because it was too alien and felt weird. And my reaction was pretty much "That's the intention, get with the programme or piss off". The society was meant to feel weird. And for pretty much every worldbuilding element, there was some real-life analogue, such as social nudity in saunas in Finland, which I felt justified their inclusion.

Another one of the main worldbuilding ideas was to depict kids realistically based off my own memories of high school. Which meant kids being immature and gossipy about sex, and rumours about students' first explorations into sex at an age that, as adults, we like to pretend doesn't happen -- or even wilfully forget. Again, critical reviews: the depiction of kids clashed with readers' ideas of what kids should be discussing. And again, my reaction was "That's the intention, get with the programme or piss off". The kids' interactions were meant to disabuse adult readers of the myths we tell ourselves about the innocence of childhood. And again, pretty much every conversation that readers objected to was based off a real conversation I remember people having when I was that age, so I felt that the real-life reference point justified the worldbuilding.

Several years later, with much distance from the story, and I wrote Victoria Potter without those elements. In retrospect, the criticism communicated something important that I missed at the time. I probably still owe @Inverarity an apology over that.

Telling a story that readers can connect to emotionally, and can buy into as real, is more important than achieving some worldbuilding or thematic vision. If the worldbuilding broke the suspension of disbelief, then saying to your reader "This shouldn't break your immersion because of reasons X, Y, Z." is no defence. The subjective reaction of the reader is what it is - it's an emotional reaction, not a rational one - and you can't override it with arguments. You have to take your readers as they are. Similarly, if the faithful depiction of children makes readers uncomfortable, then the fact that it is true to life does not suddenly make your story better or more readable. Discomfort is discomfort, regardless of its rationality.

So I suppose the message I am trying to convey to aspiring authors is this: if readers don't like the story you want to tell, you should totally sell out your vision and conform to popular demand.

 

This is almost the literature vs commercial fiction debate on a smaller scale.

For noting, we're all of us commercial bastards here.

 

Stephen King once said something similar - he called himself the literary equivalent of a Big Mac & Fries.

And damned if that isn't accurate. The man has certainly sold a few 'cheeseburgers'.

 

I enjoy world-building for the sake of world-building. Actually writing it is not for me.

 

Very much me. Love discussing ideas or world building. But in terms of writing, all I can do is maybe a couple of hundred words before I run out of air and stop enjoying it.

 

This^. I love world-building and coming up with stories. I have probably 16 or 17 notebooks (80-100 pages each) that I've completely filled over the last ten years with plot ideas, story outlines, technology/magic system breakdowns, political/historical essays for fictional universes, random story scenes, background details of various universes, character lists/outlines, etc... But actually fleshing out a story is like pulling goddamn teeth.

I basically nitpick-edit everything to death, until by the time I'm five or six thousand words in, I'm thoroughly bored and sick of my own story. Then I quit in frustration, and move on to the next idea. Rinse. And. Repeat.

 

The German language has the great word Jein, which -- being a blending of Ja and Nein -- perfectly encapsulates my thoughts on the matter.

I very much enjoy writing. When I don't, then I hate it. Although that is too black-and-white. So let's say that I enjoy it until I don't, then I descend in steps down the grayscale, at the extreme end of which lies hate, I suppose, or simply inaction, because the farther down that scale I go, the more I'm drawn to other activities which promise to be more fun. What keeps me writing is mainly that I have more good than bad days.

Also, in comparison to some other posters here, I write more than I world-build. The indepth creation of worlds happens kind-of as a byproduct, and only rarely is really sussed out before the writing starts. Given that I started writing because I was interested in what I could do with language, it feels right to give my allegiance to the sentence first and the world second, even if sometimes a story suffers for it. Playing with language is what makes it fun.

So I guess as long as I get to stretch myself in that regard, I'm fine, and I'll gladly suffer all the bad days.

 

I enjoy writing like nothing else. For spells of an hour at a time usually spread six months apart.

 

I enjoy it because I feel like I'm contributing to the community and the ideas I like, and even if it is trash, it can serve as an example of what not to do . I enjoy it much more in my first language, but there is no source of decent feedback in it so I switched in English.

Writing in another language, however, can be such a chore. Constant search for synonyms, odd translations, lack of knowledge about the structure of sentences, inability to get my point across to the readers... Even now I'm wondering do you say in English or on English, and there is a lot of little things like that I always forget and have to google again.

The biggest problem for me is to begin with writing. I constantly have to force myself to start, but once I do, I get absorbed in it, and can go on for hours.