Writing Is Hard · 8:55am Dec 21st, 2012
Updates to my two most recent stories are, in fact, coming soon, Hope you like them!
While I'm procrastinating, I thought about the reasons I try to write, and what I hope to accomplish. I was briefly considering pillorying some common advice people give new writers. There are plenty of counter-examples to most of the rules, and it would be funny to illustrate how divorced from reality many of them are.
Because people being snarky on the Internet never gets old.
Thing is, this would just be fluffing up one concept that actually matters, and can be expressed succintly:
There are no bad ideas.
Fans tend to read all kinds of esoteric life-lessons into the show "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic". I think it is an excellent example of the above statement. It really is just a platform for promoting plastic pony toys of highly variable quality to little girls, but it's done with love and care. It's well executed, and from my observations, the creators seem to keep their cute pony stories fun and engaging by following these principles:
Keep the story moving.
Show how the characters feel about and react to situations rather than telling the audience how they should feel.
Exposition should be kept to a bare minimum, and establish any required background knowledge in an open-ended, evocative manner.
Cute is as cute does. The ponies are cute because they are playful.
If a new concept is introduced, it should make the ponies' world larger and more colorful, and not exclude possible alternate interpretations of what has come before.
As descriptions of successful story-telling go, I see a lot to admire here. When I write, I try to tell stories that are like this.
And yeah, that includes the clop. The emphasis on showing what characters feel and their relationships to one another naturally lends itself to erotica, erotica that feels very different than mainstream commodity pornography. No, you're not weird for liking it.
Something else I notice is that the way FIMFiction is structured creates a selection pressure that doesn't necessarily seem to promote these qualities. It's a pity, but in lieu of complaining about it, I'd like to suggest that authors shamelessly plug their stories on other pony sites. That seems to be the work-around for stories falling into oblivion.
I should get back to writing. I may do another one of these later, and try to refine some of the ideas I brought up.
Take care.
The selection pressure is actually opposite. An old story of mine that's not read so much is in #1300th place on the 'popular list'. Another's #2150th place or thereabouts. Then the one that I'm actively writing, that is getting around 100 readers a day and peaking at more than 300 when it updates (which is pretty much every week) is at #11850th place. It's setting off algorithms and stuff that try to push down stories that have already been featured, except nothing I've written has ever been featured, ever.
I'm not sure if hundreds of readers a day counts as 'oblivion' but the website truly is actively fighting me as hard as it possibly can, very likely with no intention on the site coders to do so. I do not have the time or energy to run around hyping my work because I have a book to finish, so all I can do is confirm what you're observing- damn right, FIMfiction creates a selection pressure to suppress good work. It's a side effect of the intention to not have the 'popular', 'hot' stories be pretty much My Little Dashie, forever.
All I can really say is, don't write good things unless you already know some people who will read them. That's a harsh thing to say, but I'm in a pretty sad position due to this stuff. I suppose it's possible somepony in charge actually does hate me, but it seems unlikely. I just wish there was something that shows what's actually being read, even if it has MLD welded to the top forever. 'Classics', maybe?
634548
Re: stories getting down-ranked in the "What's Hot" list despite regularly getting quite a few views
Yeah, I've seen that happen. It is terribly frustrating.
I imagine it's also frustrating when two or three popular stories update at nearly the same time. I've observed stories edging each other out of those critical spots on the "What's Popular" list, and thus losing a chance at being featured.
Something I tried that might work for you is to gather related stories together into a group. There's no reason for you not to do it, and it will bring in the views if one of the stories breaks out and becomes popular.
In general, the group functionality is a good way of promoting stories within FIMFiction, and something I would like to try is using one of the editor/pre-reader groups. Fact is, my prose isn't always flawless, and I suspect they also would provide a way to get my stories in front of more eyeballs.
The really important thing is that writing should be fun. It's nice to get followers, favorites, and views, but I don't think letting the FIMFiction incentive system get to you -- either positively or negatively -- is at all constructive. Some other time, I may try to describe my hopelessly idealistic picture of how things could work...
>Writing Is Hard
If you know what I mean~