Abra Staffin-Wiebe (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
abracanabra) wrote2008-04-28 01:31 pm
abracanabra) wrote2008-04-28 01:31 pm
Entry tags:
Sharing Works-in-Progress
This started out as a reply to a comment, but now it is clearly post-sized.
I post a lot about my works-in-progress, mostly writing-related ones. There are a few reasons that I do this.
1) It's a lazy way of trying to drum up a fan base, to get people interested in my projects, to make them interested in the success of the finished projects.
2) It's an excellent discipline for me. It helps me to quantify and track my progress, which encourages said progress to occur.
3) It may be useful for other writers to follow my struggles and successes. I hesitate to write that, because it sounds presumptuous as hell, but there's a pretty solid community of writers who support each other that way. It's certainly helped me. And from time to time, I'll get a comment from another writer who's found something I wrote to be useful or inspiring.
4) It is a large part of who I am, and this journal is the main way that I share The Me That I Am and The Me That I Want To Be. (It's so much easier to skim the boring bits than if we were having a conversation in person, and I hate boring people.)
5) I hope that it's entertaining. And I am clearly biased, but I find it interesting.
A lot of this is writing-specific, for obvious reasons! And all my own viewpoint, not the One Objective Truth.
Problems that aren't, for me:
Losing the magic - Showing how things come to be is in many ways a value-adding process. It gives the people who've followed along more of an investment in the final product, more of a reason to want it to succeed. Look how popular extras on a DVD are! I've also seen this in the blogs of writers online, and the close relationships that they build with a quite large group of followers.
Higher expectations - I don't find this worrisome. I see it more as "higher hopes," not expectations. I have the opposite problem--I've had to work quite hard to overcome my tendency to try to deliberately lower people's expectations to make it, whatever it may be, less challenging, whether by playing the fool or by poor-talking. To do so is to perform a disservice to my talents, and to make those around me uncomfortable or irritated.
Nagging - Well, it's never happened to me. Of course, I don't see, "So, how is such-and-such going?" as nagging, but as honest interest. And I like interest!
Unwanted critiquing - Ah-hahahahaha. This is a problem that many writers *wish* they had! Most of the time, nobody gets a "critique" unless they note that they're looking for one, and usually not even then. Of course, I almost never post a complete work in a public forum, because that would mean giving up first publishing rights, and *that's* what all the publications want. So I post snippets and excerpts, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter...and hope I don't bore everybody too much! It provides a peephole view, but not enough to actually get an unwanted critique on.
I post a lot about my works-in-progress, mostly writing-related ones. There are a few reasons that I do this.
1) It's a lazy way of trying to drum up a fan base, to get people interested in my projects, to make them interested in the success of the finished projects.
2) It's an excellent discipline for me. It helps me to quantify and track my progress, which encourages said progress to occur.
3) It may be useful for other writers to follow my struggles and successes. I hesitate to write that, because it sounds presumptuous as hell, but there's a pretty solid community of writers who support each other that way. It's certainly helped me. And from time to time, I'll get a comment from another writer who's found something I wrote to be useful or inspiring.
4) It is a large part of who I am, and this journal is the main way that I share The Me That I Am and The Me That I Want To Be. (It's so much easier to skim the boring bits than if we were having a conversation in person, and I hate boring people.)
5) I hope that it's entertaining. And I am clearly biased, but I find it interesting.
A lot of this is writing-specific, for obvious reasons! And all my own viewpoint, not the One Objective Truth.
Problems that aren't, for me:
Losing the magic - Showing how things come to be is in many ways a value-adding process. It gives the people who've followed along more of an investment in the final product, more of a reason to want it to succeed. Look how popular extras on a DVD are! I've also seen this in the blogs of writers online, and the close relationships that they build with a quite large group of followers.
Higher expectations - I don't find this worrisome. I see it more as "higher hopes," not expectations. I have the opposite problem--I've had to work quite hard to overcome my tendency to try to deliberately lower people's expectations to make it, whatever it may be, less challenging, whether by playing the fool or by poor-talking. To do so is to perform a disservice to my talents, and to make those around me uncomfortable or irritated.
Nagging - Well, it's never happened to me. Of course, I don't see, "So, how is such-and-such going?" as nagging, but as honest interest. And I like interest!
Unwanted critiquing - Ah-hahahahaha. This is a problem that many writers *wish* they had! Most of the time, nobody gets a "critique" unless they note that they're looking for one, and usually not even then. Of course, I almost never post a complete work in a public forum, because that would mean giving up first publishing rights, and *that's* what all the publications want. So I post snippets and excerpts, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter...and hope I don't bore everybody too much! It provides a peephole view, but not enough to actually get an unwanted critique on.
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