Ao the Overkitty said:
For me, you've got to be posting the storyhour for yourself or the players, not 'fame and fortune.'
No, fame and fortune wasn't what I had in mind.
It's more a sense of "giving back". As I noted in the first thread of my reposted thread, I can trace my return to playing D&D after a hiatus of nearly a decade to Sagiro's Story Hour. Truth be told, I can trace it back a little farther -- in the mid-1990s, a couple of guys named Brad Solberg and Christopher W. Page posted on USENET a couple of "story hours" of themselves playing through
Tomb of Horrors and
The Temple of Elemental Evil, using c. 1979 1st edition rules as written (as far as they could stand). That didn't get me playing again, but it did remind me why I used to, and it got me paying attention to the hobby again.
If you want to keep writing, keep writing. Doesn't matter if someone else is reading it if you're enjoying doing it.
Sure. The question isn't so much "should I keep writing", though, as it is "should I keep posting"? Fortunately for me, I have my own ways of archiving my writeups, so I'm not screwed if there's another board crash. And I don't need anyone's permission or encouragement to write to please my own muse.
So the issue for me comes down more to, "Am I effectively returning the same kind of value to the community that I drew from it?"
That's the motivation for the poll. If my stuff isn't entertaining to people, then I am not, and what's the point of posting? I have more effective ways to indulge narcissism than to parade bad writing about.
There's a continuum between being a perfect hack and a perfect artist. The perfect hack writes only what the audience wants. The perfect artist labors away in obscurity, and does what he must, not caring if his work is only appreciated after his death. I don't occupy either of those extremes, myself. I write because I want to and because I enjoy the craftsmanship of it, and because I think I've got some occasional cleverness in my head that may amuse others.
But I solicit critique and feedback because EN World Story Hours are a bit of a novel medium that I don't pretend to understand completely, and there are people here who have been writing (and reading) them for many years who understand the nature of the form better than I do.
Certainly there are critques that I would not be able to use, like "make every entry a lipogram"
1, or "write without offering any insights at all into what the characters are thinking or feeling". To conform to those sort of restrictions would probably kill the joy I get out of writing in the first place, and render the exercise mere hackery.
But so far, the feedback I've gotten, such as from Piratecat in the original thread lost in the board crash, has been quite reasonable, and had to do with structuring my narrative to fit the constraints of the format. That's good advice, and I see no reason not to solicit it.
Have I convinced you that my heart is in the right place?
1 i.e., deliberately write an entry without using a letter of the alphabet (usually implies a common one, like the letter "e" -- there's little challenge in avoiding "x" or "z")
