Does anyone else feel ashamed of writing? It feels dirty and private and pretentious and narcissistic...

Does anyone else feel ashamed of writing? It feels dirty and private and pretentious and narcissistic. I would hate to have anyone I know, esp. any of my family ready anything I write. Is this some socially programmed bs or some low self esteem or a fair assessment of how obnoxious and pretentious it is to be a writer?

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i too feel this shame and i have no answers to your questions

People only care if you're good and published, I think. Friends and family don't seem to care about what I'm writing or how until I say it's being published and I'm making money for it. And even then they only have suggestions for other ways I could make money with it.

same here

yes but it also makes me feel like the shit and that I'm better and more clever than everyone else. If you feel too ashamed and exhibitionist it may be a sign that you need to make your book more entertaining, if you feel too clever and smart it may be a sign that you need more human injected into it.

This is why I haven't started.

i think overcoming this inclination is requisite for creating anything worthwhile. your faith must destroy your shame.

This is true of all writers always. You must overcome it.

I used to be an asshole who wouldn't shut up about writing (four unpublished novels on my hard drive) until experiencing abject failure; now I am trying to pick it up again but not talking about it constantly is so hard bc how do I explain to people why I am spending all my free time alone? Just have to have faith something will come of it to justify the time, I guess.

...

Anyway here is a qt ginger for no reason

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Yes. It can feel narcissistic to write like you are providing answers to life’s hard questions, like you are some wise sage or philosopher.

Chekhov once said something along the lines of “it is not the responsibility of the writer to provide answers, but to ask questions.” I don’t know the answer to life’s questions, and probably there isn’t one single answer, but I’m interested in asking the questions, finding out what the questions that matter actually are, and exploring through fiction what could be the answer. I often begin a story only thinking “this is an experience that I had that was hard, and I understand it 75-80%, but not completely yet, and I’m gonna write about that and be as real as I can. But I approach it with humility.

This is why I've started writing poetry, it feels less pretentious than the essays I usually shit out.

But I think to write anything in public or around people at all will feel this way if you're putting your heart into it.

Nice post user.
But to answer OP’s question I never plan to have anything I write published. My journal is for my eyes only.
Other than that I plan on writing a small collection of poems related to my family’s lineage, but this will be kept within the family.

Thanks for the responses lads
I honestly thought I was more alone in this

Yes, also people I know who print shit they write online make me embarrassed, especially when it's about their neuroticism.

When I was younger, I would write poems and short bits of stories on my laptop. Many times I would delete the poem as soon as I had finished writing it, and when I got a new laptop I didn't save any of the old writing. Included in that was 70-page book that I had stopped writing because I decided it was trash.

Now I don't write poems quite as often, mostly I write short essays on things I'm thinking about. These content of these essays I often share with my family and friends. The other thing I sometimes write is stories and dreams. I often feel fine sharing these as well. But I'll never share my poems, because they reference things people don't understand, and I don't necessarily believe they're even structurally that good.

Basically I think it depends on how revelatory your writing is about you. If your family doesn't even know that you write, then it seems painful to let them know that. If your writing is formal, there's nothing strange about this, and it would probably be easy to share. If your writing reveals something about you that you would prefer not to be the subject of open discussion, then it makes sense to be sensitive. If you create a story in which the main character dies in the end, that says something about you. If you create a story in which the main character dies a noble death, that says something, if he dies a painful, arbitrary death, that says something too. If your story says too much about you, it hurts to reveal that.

what does this mean

>a fair assessment of how obnoxious and pretentious it is to be a writer?
This.

Don't listen to the pretentious wanky fuckos in this thread OP.

You don't like sharing your writing because you don't think it's very good and you're worried it will make people think less of you.

There's nothing to it more complex than that.

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oh man i totally get u op same

Yeah. I feel I only write garbled metaphors for my own history/experiences. When it doesn't fall into that category, I feel that my writing is really cringey wish fulfilment. Usually a mixture of both. The goal of course is to write something compelling, or to maybe receive some sort of dopamine in the form of approval.
Writing is certainly one of the most personal things you can do, when you do it in earnest. It's basically transcribing your own personal thoughts.

To an extent I agree with the sentiment due to the fact that I'm great at criticism and tearing something to part which also extends to my own writing. So everything I write I fucking can see all the holes in it.