How do I stop Judging my own story?

[Shang-Dion]

For those who've written more than I have, how???

[kyupol]

Remember this: no matter how intelligent you are or how amazing your story is, there's always gonna be haters. Just a fact of life. Can't please everyone.

[justincarbunkle]

Don't compare yourself to others. Write the best you can, then try to do better the next time.

[VibrantFox]

something thats been a huge help for me lately is theres people out there who are not only doing it worse than you but they're doing it with ai than with their own effort which makes your work all the better in that regard

but acknowledging that not everyone is part of your target audience or will deem your work as "good" based on whatever their own metric is, can also help.

you really truly will not satisfy every reader but so long as you enjoy what you're working on and you're having fun that's what matters at the core everything else is just a bonus ‍️

[jwabeasley]

The best cure for this that I know of is to get someone who knows you well that has good literary critic skills and have them be your editor or beta reader. Their opinion is trustworthy, if they say it's good then it is.

Also, curse of the artist here - you need to get comfortable with knowing that you did the best that you knew how to do at the time. Let that project go and start a new one that applies the skills that you learned.

Each chapter of Etherwood that I do I feel is miles ahead of the last one, about which I see only mistakes. Invariably my editor is correct about the pages being good - I look at them a year later and think, "Oh, that was really good, huh?"

If you did the best that you could've done, then be content. Your skills improved, you can do better next time.

[Shang-Dion]

Hello, I began this thread somewhat without thought because I often find it hard to get past that hurdle of reading my own work and thinking, "Would I even want to read this myself?"

This meant a lot, and it made a lot of sense.

Thanks for taking the time out of your day to reply. I am grateful.

[Lingering_Wanderer]

Put your heart into it! It takes time to master a craft, but by already starting, you are ahead of those who are not and those who use AI to write their stories

For every person who dropped your work, there would always be another one out there who would love it.

[Ordinaryaverageguy]

I'm not worried about my own judgments of my writing.
I'm terrified of other people's judgments of my writing.

[moontokkym]

To use a very illustrative lyric: "I only accept critique from those who are trying to lift me up". That includes you.

It takes practice but especially for your first draft, you really just need to word vomit onto the page so you have something to work with. It's gonna be shit, repetitious, muddled metaphors, bad grammar... It just needs to get out like poison. Working on saying "yeah it's bad but for now that's the point, I'm doing it right" and pushing through without listening to the bagging voice saying "but it's bad though" took a bit of brute forcing in my case. I hate first drafting for that reason. Currently doing it now for a horror anthology, awful.

Then on the second draft you only accept comments from yourself that are useful for improving the prose.

"This word choice needs to change, it doesn't work" "This scene isn't serving a purpose, I should delete/merge it" "This character is falling flat, i need to rewrite them" "this metaphor isn't saying what I need it to say" "I need to restructure this whole story because I now have a clearer view of what I want this to be so draft 2 is going to look very different from draft 1", etc...

"This is shit" "no one will want to read this" "people will laugh at me" "this is useless" "I can't make it as good as X story i love" etc...

You kind of have to Pavlov yourself, everytime you start te get paralysed by an unhelpful thought (and to be clear, some helpful thoughts are unpleasant, so it takes a while to distinguish the two), you have to stop and tell it no, it's wrong, and dismiss it.

You have a story to tell and something inside you made you want to start writing it, so remember that something. You were compelled to put pen to paper, and you can do it. Take your time, breathe, and work through it.

[Nikolain]

I think it some sense, you can't. You'll always be your worst critic amongst others. You want the characters to feel a certain way, to express themselves, and to relate to others, but then it falls flat you hate yourself for not doing more.

It'll be a constant loop of judging and appreciating, and the only thing you can do is move forward. Like me, no matter how much I try, I will always judge how I write and I can never truly ignore that feeling.