The Most Demotivating thing you have ever been told

Crusoe 2020-08-20 21:29:50 UTC #18

I agree! I have two dyslexic friends who are both brilliant writers! They just need more time to figure out how to edit their work.

Macarenaoftime 2020-08-20 21:32:42 UTC #19

I don't know if to find this thread encouraging or aniexy inducing. How can people be so insensible

derekh95 2020-08-20 21:35:45 UTC #20

Insert "Road to El Dorado" meme
Both?
Both.
Both is good.

Llyrel 2020-08-20 21:35:57 UTC #21

Thankfully not, lol! I had a whole bunch of really good teachers, but yep, there were also a couple of buttholes like the one I mentioned, unfortunately D: Mine in particular wasn't particulary obsessed with realistic or abstract art, though... she was a children's illustrator and apparently thought that ALL drawings had to be for children. If you dared to do anything that wasn't suited for a five years old, your stuff was automatically bad and you were a failure as an artist ._.

If there's one thing I learned from this whole experience as I recently got into the world of teaching myself, though, is to never, EVER treat my students like that.

And aaaaw, thank you so much, @DaphnePanda! O <3

DiscountedArtist 2020-08-20 21:38:49 UTC #22

Well, about two months ago I made a comic. I was making comics under a different name and stuff. I shared one of my comics here, and someone told me "where's the dislike button?" and "quit please." I took a two week break, and to this day it still makes me sad even though I don't make comics like that anymore.

HGohwell 2020-08-20 21:44:58 UTC #23

Not quite demotivating but in the same way but I once shared a design with a friend, just a single character design with a name and no other information, for a potential new project just as a "hey what do you think of this design?" and the first thing they said was "no one wants another story about some cishet white dude". I left the conversation right there and was pretty angry for a while and then hit a big slump.

In a more conventionally demotivating sense, someone I very much trusted and admired as a fellow writer, I was bouncing some new plot ideas off of them, just tossing out ideas, and out of nowhere they told me "wow you really do just write the same story over and over and think you're being creative, don't you?" and I honestly had no idea what to say to that. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure how to. I don't think I write the same story over and over, but what if I am and I'm too close to it too tell?

domisotto 2020-08-20 21:47:25 UTC #24

Ouch, that’s just mean. Like, really, can’t people just take a break when they are in that mood?

DiscountedArtist 2020-08-20 21:49:58 UTC #25

I had one other encounter with someone who was in a bad mood. Then we just talked the next day and now we're fine. I haven't talked to the first person though.

impossiblesoul 2020-08-20 21:50:06 UTC #26

When I was teenager, I became a fan of a webcomic called Slightly Damned, and so I got involved with the chatroom the writer had set up. They had a bot account in there with commands you could give it - one of them being the ability to speak through it.

I was going through an edgy/emo nihilistic phase, and otherwise I'm not even sure why I said it, but I made the bot say, "God isn't real."

The writer of the comic was there and she blasted me for it. She then asked me why I made the bot say that, and my anxious reply was something like, "I don't know I was just having fun," and she responds,

"Oh so you're just an idiot. Got it."

I had looked up to her as an idol in my childhood because I loved her storytelling so much. I had other things going poorly in my life at the time so that was the needle on the haystack that finally killed my self-esteem. I stopped writing short stories for a couple years.

Looking back on it now, I know I took it too seriously, but hindsight is 20/20.

DiscountedArtist 2020-08-20 21:52:50 UTC #27

I hate how people will act like they know who you are on the internet. Especially when you were just making a joke.

KJWhitten 2020-08-20 22:05:34 UTC #28

Well the most demotivating thing I received so far was from a book club that I used to be part of. A member of the club told me my grammar was so bad that they had to stop reading. Then they told me to go hire an editor. What they said stuck with me for a while and I didn't write anything for some time.

Luckily some writer friends read my book and told me they liked the story so far. A close friend of mine praised it and so my motivation came back.

sxxaint 2020-08-20 22:11:27 UTC #29

That's so horrible of them to say! Especially in such a casual way

Mine was probably a pretty savage book review I got over on wattpad. The reviewer actually said my story was 'painful to read' because my prose was so confusing. I was just like well ... this is ... just how i write...

It sure gave my confidence a hit 'cause it's my first time ever sharing my writing with people.

domisotto 2020-08-20 22:30:10 UTC #30

Ouch. Yeah, the struggle to understand just what exactly is confusing... heh. A couple of people corrected my text to the point it was so dry, it read like a manual for 5 yo’s. At some point, I decided that there are people who can make connections as they read, and those who simply can’t. And there is very little I can do to involve the latter group.

Shadymeadows 2020-08-20 22:56:22 UTC #31

Wow, reminds me of my figure drawing teacher in college but even worse! A teacher that bad should be fired for being judgmental. there is nothing constructive about dissing someone and giving no specifics on how to improve. It's more like these teachers just want you to abandon the arts all together.
My bad teacher yelled at me for having too much of a "comic style" and told me I couldn't draw my characters on my lunch break with ink I bought. I tried my best to be traditional but she always said it wasn't good enough.

KoreanTacos 2020-08-20 22:58:50 UTC #32

I keep it as a constant reminder, and this was a critique

Random_Guy 2020-08-20 23:08:42 UTC #33

I... admittedly can't really think of anything. I've heard a lot of demoralizing, excessive criticism in my time, but I've also had plenty of situations of being excessively praised for my work. Neither of which are helpful.

CommanderMarty 2020-08-20 23:13:52 UTC #34

My art teacher in high school was also very supportive.

Possum 2020-08-20 23:17:47 UTC #35

Okay so this is sort of in the territory of Tragic Backstory but it is really relevant to who I am today as a person as a whole.

I had a pretty rough childhood as far as it goes and basically no parent figures. So when I eventually moved to another country and lived with my dad for the first time I really wanted him to like me because I was so terrified of him ditching me at a roadside.

I've always wanted to be a writer. For context, for show and tell in year 1 (UK for like, 5 year old school) I brought what was essentially Jumanjii fanfiction that I'd written over the week. It was a whole study book worth. I've always been writing and always loved doing it.

So when I tried to impress my dad and get him to like me I wrote books. Between the ages of 9-13 I wrote fourteen novels. I still have them. The first 5 are more like, long short stories (10k words) but the later ones got to around 60-70k and one even got to around 90k words. Basically I was obsessively writing constantly. I was be so happy when I wrote one that I'd print it out in my school library, go through it, draw a book cover, try and get it properly bound, and hand it proudly to my dad. He'd put it in a draw and all that and I'd think that he was reading it.

I did this 14 times until I finally realized he was never, ever going to read it. He didn't even open them. When we moved I found all of them at the back of a cabinet. He'd literally not even tried.

So there I was, at 13, realizing that I'd spent 4 years writing books for someone who just wasn't interested in me as a person. And as a way of deferring that pain I just stopped writing for six months. I had to reevaluate why I even bothered in the first place.

When my writing took off and I was doing freelance my dad (in an effort to get closer to me because he started realizing I didn't like him), asked to read some of my work. I refused and my sister told him the plot about a lot of my books, in which I always either make the dad evil, or I kill them off early (he's really into freud and all that psychology stuff). And he took offence to this!

The entire situation was incredibly heartbreaking for me as a kid but I grew past it and realized that Hey! If I'm not writing for me, and for something that I care about then ther's no damn point writing at all.

Sorry it was a long read! It came up in therapy last year and it's been on my mind for a while.

Random_Guy 2020-08-20 23:30:11 UTC #36

Longer read than your dad read...

Sorry! That's a joke, and I'm really sorry. He sounds like, frankly, a pretty sh#tty person.

Possum 2020-08-20 23:30:30 UTC #37

sksksks yeah, he's old and alone so alls well that ends well.