I’ll Title This When I Finish It / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page I’ll Title This When I Finish It.

Oops?

DigitalPrincess234 08 Aug 2023 23:36

“Hey I wanna write about my relationship with fiction it’s really incomprehensibly complex.”

“Actually this sounds kinda fake maybe?”

“Isn’t the Library all about stories? They’d dig this.”

“…WASN’T I SUPPOSED TO BE DOING STUFF FOR THEM ANYWAY?”

- Me, this afternoon, staring out of the car window because my phone had started overheating and I didn’t know what to do because I struggle to hold conversations with my father.

Uh, anyway. Yep! I hope this is liked, or at the very least, kindly disliked?

If this flops, will you forgive my hubris?

Am I using the word hubris right?

Who cares. Bye!

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By ourselves, we’re no one. It’s when other people look at us and see someone— that’s the moment we each start to exist.

Last edited on 08 Aug 2023 23:36 by DigitalPrincess234 Show more

Call me biased

AmbroseArietes 09 Aug 2023 00:40

I am, after all, probably very biased in my upvote of this, but hey. Short, sweet, and shows a path that many an ever-growing writer can relate to.

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Ambrose Arietes

Snapdragon133 09 Aug 2023 06:19

I like the premise of this story - we get a lot of “I don’t know what to write so I’ll write about writing” stories and this one differentiates itself pretty well. I think the set-up is quite good also. However, I felt like things didn’t really follow through for the rest of the story.

The lines about your phone battery are great, they’re personal and unique and tell me something about you. But most of what’s after isn’t so detailed. The big offender here is the list of attempts. A lot of the descriptions feel very ironed out, there’s nothing there that suggests what sort of story they actually were - just involving magic or logic or another general concept. #4 is an exception, it doesn’t start strong but the last two sentences are great.

I get the vibes that at least some the attempts are based on real stories you’ve written - if that’s true, you really should go all in one capturing those stories’ vibes for this story. Right now it’s just not the convincing, I’m not convinced to care about the 9th. Also btw you abandoned the guidance framing for attempts 6-9, which I didn’t mind that much because as it stands the guiding thing wasn’t convincing me either.

I’m going to downvote this, not because I dislike it, but because I’d really like to see it reworked and reposted. I want to see you infuse this story with your own unique story because this feels rushed to me after thinking longer I decided to switch to a novote

Last edited on 09 Aug 2023 15:38 by Snapdragon133 Show more

DigitalPrincess234 09 Aug 2023 07:17

Here's the part where I wish I could say "oh yeah, you're totally right, let me fix this up a little bit and throw it back out there."

Unfortunately, it's not exactly that this was rushed and so I was vague, I am just… bad at writing personal stories, which is why I wrote this! I got as personal as I could muster, and, obviously, since I know myself, I'm able to look at this and go "man I was really open! More open than I usually am!"

Of course, this is an internal perspective only I can have and doesn't excuse anything. That's the issue with writing personal stories, they're good for an audience of one.

I'm glad you liked the opener, though. I always felt like a bit of a weirdo because my writing is oftentimes messy both in prose and in process. I'll scribble things down on napkins, and empty discord servers, and laggy phones, and half of it is just its own 100 word thing that doesn't exactly mean anything, and I always thought there was a kind of weird, messy beauty to those things? Like weeds. They're not as grand as a flower or as pretty or whatever, but no one denies that a weed is a plant too.

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By ourselves, we’re no one. It’s when other people look at us and see someone— that’s the moment we each start to exist.

Rounderhouse 09 Aug 2023 18:48

The feelings posited here are interesting, but because of the nature of it it can’t help but feel more than a little self-pitying. I think that these feelings are better off explored through a piece of writing that subtly invokes and discusses those themes, rather than just openly talking about them, which takes it from meditation on fiction to commiseration about stories not working out.