User blog comment:Ace n Annie/Why i may not make that many creepypastas/@comment-7673575-20171218014836/@comment-25052433-20171219092729

^This statement is beyond truth. Writing can be beautiful, liberating and one of the best emotional highs that an artist can achieve. However, it can also be brutal, soul crushing and one of the harshest emotional lows that an artist can achieve.

As with any form of art, literature demands that the creator give a piece of their heart and soul to their craft. Even when we publish stories for no financial gain, we still hold ourselves to deadlines, we still experience stress and we still reach for perfection because our work comes from such a true place of our humanity.

Those who consume our works will do with them as they please. The positive comments will always feel great, because it's not just a pat on the back, but an affirmation that the little piece of ourselves that we just gave to the world was appreciated.

The truth about negative comments is that they will always sting. Many of us that have been doing this for a while will tell you to learn from the constructive negative reviews and to ignore the vitriolic ones. This is good advice, but that doesn't mean that even the most experienced of us don't still feel that sting. The situation that you describe in this blog is part of being a writer. While many of us deal with those concerns differently, I doubt that any of us enjoy them. The best you may hope to accomplish is to just develop an apathy towards the obvious "troll" comments and focus on the feedback that can actually help you grow as an author.

Every single author on this site can relate to the feelings that you describe in your post. For about the first 6-9 months that I was writing on this site, I would wait 24 hours before I'd even share my newest stories on social media because I wanted to make sure they weren't going to be deleted.

The best way to get around this concern is to be transparent about it. If you write something but you have doubts that it meets the quality standards for this site, all you need to do is contact someone like an Admin or Rollback or an active user and ask them to review it for you. Most of us will be happy to do so either in the Writer's Workshop or through email if you are unsure you want to post it here in any capacity. If we feel the story can be salvaged to meet this site's standards, we'll help you get it there. In the case that something you want to post may simply be too far off the mark to meet our QS, I'd still encourage you to post it elsewhere.

If it's a story that you feel compelled to tell, as an artist you will a way to do it, whether here or on a site with more open posting standards.

My point here is that what you're feeling isn't strange or unique, it doesn't mean that you don't have what it takes, it's just a normal part of the process. You could write 100 stories that everyone loves and you'd likely still feel insecure when you wrote something new.

Best of luck though. If you want to write, you'll write, it's the nature of the craft.