Have you ever worked really hard at something and accomplished something you were proud of, only to show it to either family members or the internet and they meet you with mediocre responses?
“Yeah, it’s good!” She goes back to eating her pizza and doesn’t give you a second glance. Or if she does, it’s a slightly awkward one, silently hoping you’ll go away and stop prying her.
“Mmmhmm, not bad.” He doesn’t even look up from his computer.
That feeling… It sucks. Especially when they don’t even offer you constructive criticism, they just tell you it’s good and avoid eye contact.
Alternatively, have you ever whipped something together on a whim and showed it to people just for the heck of it… and been met with overwhelming approval?
I have.
About a month ago, I decided to take a stab at horror writing. I’d never done it before, and as a general rule I hate gore, I love getting ‘creeped out’ and the ideas behind suspense always fascinated me. I had read a bunch of short horror stories in the past and had watched some suspenseful movies, so I took what I knew about horror and wrote a list. I had a list of locations, a list of situations, a list of themes, and a list of emotions either the reader or the characters were supposed to feel. Then I combined as many of those as I could and wrote a very short horror story titled “My Mother Should Have Been Home By Now” and posted it to Nosleep Reddit.
Personally, I thought it was a crappy little blurb. I was testing out the genre, seeing if I could pull off the emotion of terror and horror, which was a little different than what I’d done before. I wrote it in about half a day. It would have been less, but I didn’t realize just how many rules a story had to meet before it could be uploaded to
It blew up. It very quickly climbed to 17 thousand views. A day after I published it, I received a private message from a YouTuber who wanted to narrate my story on his channel. Of course, I accepted, and my story was uploaded to a channel with almost 30 thousand subscribers. A day or two after that, I got another message from someone asking me if I’d be interested in submitting a story for their non-profit horror zine (magazine).
Of
To recap, some of the work that I spent a worthy amount of time on, whether a poem or a short story or a novel, has often received little admiration. However, the story I churned out in an hour and posted to a site hoping to get a few hundred views at
So what do we take away from this? Maybe… Don’t underestimate yourself. Similarly, don’t
Sometimes you just don’t know what’s going to be great.