User blog:DB Baxter/What am I doing wrong?





One month from now will be August 20th. And it will mark my 3rd year of RPing. For 3 years, I’ve been hopping around on the RP boards and creating a long list of characters and story-arcs and everything else in between. And so far, I’ve been in quite a lot of them. 43, to be exact.

            And I have not finished a single one. I’ve either been exiled or self-exiled from everyone of them. Every single one.

            About a year ago, I posted a blog about 2 years of RPing, and in that one I said I was throwing in the towel and leaving due to being 0-26. Obviously, that didn’t come to pass. And I was determined to reverse my fortunes and start doing better. However, 17 RP’s later, and I still have yet to finish an RP and am now currently sitting at an even more sad and even more pathetic 0-43. And this doesn’t even include all of the blog stories that completely and utterly flopped.

            Now this blog is a little different from the last one. I’m not going to drop off of the face of the site forever. But, the purpose of this blog is to simply ask a question that I desperately need answered; What am I doing wrong?

            Everyone has a reason for being here on the wiki. I don’t know if I ever told you guys this or not, but the reason I’m here is to entertain and hone what skills I have. I want to create these memorable stories and characters for everyone’s enjoyment. I also want to work on my skills as a writer, a storyteller, and my development of characters. And I’ve managed to accomplish neither one of them over these last 3 years. Almost every character I've made has been ignored, unliked, or both. Almost every story I've ever made has gone unread. I’ve tried my hand at just about everything. I’ve done the thief, the warrior, the assassin, the psycho, the mage, the scholar, the priest, the merchant, just about every character base, I’ve attempted it. No success. I’ve done action stories, adventures, comedies, romance, and even a few attempts at horror. Failed at every turn.

            And The real sad thing about all of this is the that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing wrong here. But it’s frustrating because I know it’s something on my end. You don’t go 0-43 with a mile-long list of failed stories and characters by the luck of the draw. When it gets to this point, you know something is wrong. So I know I have a problem, I just don’t know what it is.

<span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "Helvetica",sans-serif">            All of this is starting to take a toll. Often times, when I’m writing the new part of Gathering Force or Ab Inferno or a new post on any RP, I have to close the computer and just walk away because I get that frustrated with how unsatisfied I am with what I’m writing. I’m going over every detail, every single word in every post or chapter to make sure everything is perfect in hopes that maybe, just maybe, this will be the character or the story that gets me out of this slump. The one that proves that I can write and that I am capable of making something that is worth your attention. But no, it doesn’t happen, and I am once again left with yet another broken creation that no one wants to read about. And I just don’t know why.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "Helvetica",sans-serif">            So I ask you, whoever is reading this currently, to please explain to me what I’m doing wrong. What makes people attempt to avoid the characters I put into an RP, and what drives people away from my blog stories? I’m fine with any and all criticism, no matter how unrelenting or merciless it is. I just need something, just a little hint or anything, to tell me what I need to work on to make this better. Because I can’t do this for another year. I can’t spend another one in failure, constantly reading over all the details and trying to see what makes these things fail.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "Helvetica",sans-serif">            So what am I doing wrong?