Recap. Plus, a small step forward.

I started publishing my writing all the way back in January of this year. It’s been just about 2 whole months since. I posted my 13th (I think) story yesterday, and I’ve gotten (in my view) an incredible response. People telling me they FELT something, they identified with the character, and they were genuinely affected by it.

These comments made me feel amazing. I don’t care about the number of likes. I care about making my readers feel something from my work.

So I decided to take a look back at my stories so far and post some of the key points, from my perspective. Here goes.

1. The first story I posted, “My Life is Aggressively Average”, was on Reddit. It got over 500 upvotes, and I was so excited. This response made me think – hey, there’s something I’m reasonably OK at doing, and people don’t hate it.
2. I posted a 2-sentence story – “I thought wading through a pile of bones was bad. I soon discovered that wading through everything BUT the bones was worse.” – this has been BY FAR my best-performing work to date. Over 10,000 upvotes, hundreds of comments. The numbers felt great, but what the hell could I do with 2 sentences? Not much, it turns out.
3. I posted a bunch of stories with varying degrees of (what I defined as) success. Some I thought were fantastic, and got 10 upvotes. Others I thought were mediocre, and got 200. Confusion reigned supreme, and I felt like I was getting nowhere.
4. I tried writing a longer-form story, one that I intended to be a series on a very popular subreddit. I posted it twice, and deleted it both times because I felt it wasn’t good. I felt the pressure to post it…for no real reason, other than I thought I should be done by now. I learned my lesson, stepped away from it, and let it marinate in my subconscious. I think I have a better approach for it now, and will tackle it again soon.
5. Yesterday, I posted “My Clock has a 13th Hour“. This story is one I’m genuinely proud of, because it struck an emotional chord with so many readers. I’m genuinely shocked that I’ve had an impact on anyone, and couldn’t care less about the “numbers”. It was also the first time I feel I’ve been able to create emotion in a story, which I consider a massive achievement and a small step toward crafting stories that are very good.

In general, I still have a lot to learn.

I think it’s much easier to invoke certain emotions than others.

I think disgust is the easiest (though you can argue it’s not an emotion) and cheapest, and I personally shy away from writing stories based on it despite seeing massive reader response to it. Basing your stories on disgust leads to a cycle you can’t get out of. You have to constantly out-disgust yourself, and eventually your stories devolve into profanity-laden grotesque-fests that are vulgar for the sake of being vulgar.

Loss is more difficult than disgust. You have to really understand how someone in that situation would feel, and convey this in the character’s actions.

In future stories, I’m going to be placing more emphasis on helping the reader resonate emotionally with the characters. It’s a difficult thing to do, but it will make my stories that much better if I’m able to pull it off consistently.

Thanks for reading.