Hope Always Has A Place
How I Felt About Writing Over The Past Week
Intro
I don't know what brought this feeling over me, but I do feel if I walked away from Vocal I would not be missed. I am not going to walk away because it is a good platform for sharing my words, but I will share a little about my descent into the slough of writing despond.
So What Is Causing This
I like to share things but to do that I have to get them noticed and have about five or six regular readers. All the promotion of my stories has to be done by me. More and more I believe I am seen as a Facebook Group administrator and that started making me feel that I should not be bothering to write. I then look and see that most of my stories have ten to fifteen hearts and often hit twenty to twenty-five reads, but that is now my only source of income from Vocal, and that started me thinking that maybe I should stop.
Then on Friday I was working on a particularly difficult piece and was around a third of the way through and the Vocal autosave wiped it. Although I thought I had saved it, I must not have done so, so remember to save your work often in the Vocal Editor.
It felt like another slap in the face from Vocal but I thought I would have a weekend away and then pick it up on Monday. Come Monday and the story is just as difficult and I feel it would be pointless to continue with it.
Then I started to write a story for the Snow Micro Challenge but left it half finished, then I came to it on Tuesday morning, and thought, there was no point to it so scrapped that.
This morning I was feeling that this might be it, no more Vocal stories from me.
Then I had an idea for a dark piece, and as I was turning it over in my mind, I thought maybe to turn all the negative sequences into positive ones, and the resulting story that came out got a lot of good responses.
The Lesson Learned
Just don't give up. Writing can raise your spirits, and today it has been very uplifting for me as my audience may realise.
About the Creator
Mike Singleton π Mikeydred
A Weaver of Tales and Poetry
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Call Me Les β₯ Gina β₯ Heather β₯ Caroline β₯
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More stories from Mike Singleton π Mikeydred and writers in Writers and other communities.
Cleaning The Freezer
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter β What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise β Make a list yourself of things that are done in small units of time. Here are several suggestions: Naming a pet or a child, breaking up with someone, playing a game such as Risk or Monopoly, washing a car, stealing something, waiting or standing in line for something, packing to go somewhere, cleaning the refrigerator, having a birthday party, etc. Now write a four-to-seven-page story staying within the confines of a particular time unit. For example, a birthday party story would probably last only a few hours, or an afternoon or evening; naming a pet might span a longer period of time but will still be focused on one activity. The Objective - To recognize the enormous number of shaped time units in our lives. These units can provide a natural substructure and shape for a story and make the writing of a story seem less daunting.
By Denise E Lindquist4 days ago in Writers
Comments (5)
Writing is very therapeutic so always keep writing! Sending you lots of love and hugs β€οΈ
Mike, I always enjoy your writing and I think we are all having growing pains on Vocal. We are all writers who seek validation from readers, but there are not a lot of passive readers here like there are with mainstream literary journals. We have to continue to support and learn from each other even though it's competitive. The self-doubt hits us all, just keep writing and reading!
Amazing. I loved it
I'm glad you're feeling better. I second what John said.
I, for one, would be disappointed if you stopped writing, Mike, and noticed with growing concern that you had stopped posting. I glad you have not given up!