dancinguniverse replied to your post: I roll my eyes forever every time some Feedback...
this is maybe going personal, but I’ve been following you for a decade (maybe more?), and I think you’ve really ingrained in me the value of writing for yourself. Feedback is awesome, but I have never understood people who threaten to stop writing if they don’t get it.
It’s been a lot of years! <3
I mean, I don’t claim to be virtuous or uninterested in getting comments! I love getting feedback (despite being terrible at responding to it! mea maxima culpa) and I understand being discouraged when you (I!) don’t get a lot of it! I understand it can make a hard hobby even more difficult when it feels like there’s so little validation at the end of it. Especially if you do it for the validation.
But I also feel like at the end of the day, I now have a story that I can read whenever I want, because I wrote a thing that didn’t exist before, and probably 90% of the time, I wrote it because it was something I wanted to read and couldn’t find. (I used to be better at getting people to write things for me. *sigh*)
I also find having one or two friends who are interested in what I’m writing is enough to keep me going when it feels pointless. If I know I can make one or two people happy, including myself, it’s often enough to keep me chugging along through the more difficult times.
I know everybody has their own reasons for writing, but it must be really hard to sustain if external validation is the only driver for it. Because sometimes, you’re just not gonna get it, or what you do get will never feel like it’s enough.
