The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Trying to do more fiction writing (given the sheer number of story ideas I have piling up), but I keep getting discouraged. Why bother putting in the effort, I keep thinking, when the result is guaranteed to suck and nobody's going to want to read any of it? Because "write what you know," and I don't really know anything, because I've not had much of a life (being a useless subhuman parasite any sane society would have put down over a decade ago). Because "three-dimensional characters" are key, and I'm too autistic to get into another person's head well enough to write believable human beings. And the amount of research each story demands, in order to get all the details exactly right, just keeps growing and growing, even as the advice all says to spend less time researching and more time writing (so I'm doing that wrong, too).
I've found that it helps to write either very early in the morning or late at night, when you're not so hung up with logical worries like that. Also, if you put it online in the right places, usually someone will read it, even if it's weird crazy people who give you crazy negative feedback.
I don't know what you mean here — I've not noticed any such pattern.
Such as?
But if everyone who reads it hates it, then what good was writing it? Would my time have not been better spent doing something else?
My feeling is that those are all the sort of analytical, logical questions that get in the way of fiction writing, which is why I recommend doing it early or late. Or at least, when you're feeling more free and creative. But I don't know man, do whatever works for you.
Again, why would time of day affect "the sort of analytical, logical questions that get in the way" or how "free and creative" I'm feeling?
You dont notice your mood and thinking change over the course of the day? Youre able to switch instantly from something like writing code to writing fiction? If you can, great, its just not easy for most people.
Not really. At least, not with regards to this sort of worrying — what other people tend to call "catastrophizing" and I call 'the identification of how things can fail as a necessary precondition to take the necessary measures to prevent such bad outcomes' and 'not going blithely through life with a naïve optimism that everything will just somehow work out for the best for me with no real effort on my part.'
No, because, despite ~30 years of effort, I still can't really code.
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