I was having a talk with a moderator of one of the writing forums I’m on and part of this was a laugh but mostly, it was just sad. This is just more evidence that these people are really, really pathetic. Not the mod, we’re friends, but the rank amateurs who care more about their feelings than they do about reality.

So let’s talk about it.

First, a little background. Someone had posted a thread called “Why Don’t You Want to Write?” It was really a place for people to make excuses for why they’re not actually accomplishing anything. There had been people there before I ever arrived who were trying to help people get out of their funks and back to writing and, as soon as I got there, I tried to do the same thing.

Keep in mind, I wasn’t being mean, I was trying to legitimately help, but there comes a time when you just have to buckle down and get the work done. I’d done this on another thread previously where I explained my process for coming up with ideas for books and how ideas were absolutely everywhere if you just kept your eyes open. That got a lot of flack too when people essentially  complained that “you expect me to actually take an active role in anything? How dare you!” It’s far too much work to expect people to pay attention and write things down. Ideas have to be like manna that falls from the heavens without any effort at all!

So that one didn’t go well and the second thread didn’t go well either. Even the simplest suggestions were rejected out of hand. “Find some time in your day to write?” Well they can’t do that! They’re too busy! “Push yourself to improve?” How could I ask them to do that? That takes work and they’re terminally lazy! We got into a discussion on tracking word counts and these idiots had an embolism. “We can’t possibly do that!” So I showed them a video between Stephen King and George R.R. Martin where Martin couldn’t figure out how King was so productive and King explained. Nope, that’s voodoo! Nobody can ever do that… except every single successful author ever, that is.

Finally, the mod shut the whole thread down because it had turned into a giant one-sided flame war. It’s why the mod contacted me, not to blame me for it but because he wanted to laugh about it.

See, he’s a published author too. He was agreeing with me in the thread. Yet when it’s 50 whining idiots against 3 rational people, the idiots win. In fact, he told me something that I find utterly hysterical. I am the user that gets the most complaints on the entire forum. Why? In his words, “because I make people feel bad”.

Well maybe they should!  These are not people who are there for the truth, they are there to engage in a giant pity party because they are not magically successful without any effort. They have ridiculously unrealistic expectations and they don’t care. When someone comes by and tells them the uncomfortable truth, they explode into a rage because they don’t want the truth, they want a comforting fantasy. You know where people like that get? Nowhere. Nowhere at all.

This is why I want to find a place where there are none of these people. If people ask for help, they actually want help, not excuses and a comforting pat on the head. This is hard work. Most of these forums have somewhere that you can post your day’s accomplishments. I don’t post in them anymore because it makes people upset.

You’ll get “I wrote 100 words” and “I’m stuck and have no idea what to do” and then I post that I wrote 7k words, crossed over 100k words in my manuscript and I’ll be done with yet another book in a week’s  time, they freak out. They have no idea how to react to success. They can’t even process the idea. They have so little experience with anyone who can actually produce work that their brains explode. Nobody can conceivably do anything more than they’re doing because… excuses. Nobody who can actually put words on a page at a pace that exceeds glacial, all of that must be terrible because they can’t do it! Anyone who is better than they are, they can’t actually be better than they are!

In fact, I got suspended on a forum a long time ago after I got tired of dealing with this stuff, people who were saying “you can’t possibly be writing that fast, you have to be lying” and all of that. I asked them how many books they’d published and what their sales figures were. Let’s see who can and who can’t actually produce. One of the mods pulled me aside and said “you can’t ask anything like that, you’re going to make people unhappy!” and suspended me for 2 weeks. I never went back. Clearly, it wasn’t a place I wanted to spend my time.

Yet that’s largely what any of these forums are for. Those who demonstrably know what they’re talking about, who have experience and who are trying to help, those people are absolutely not welcome. You’re only allowed if you’re going to blow comforting smoke up the skirts of everyone involved and lie and say that it’s all simple, anyone can do it with no effort whatsoever, etc.

That’s not me. It will never be me. I live in the real world and I’m tired of having to deal with the immature feelings of those who figure that reality doesn’t apply to them. It’s why I’m still on the look out for anywhere that doesn’t have the most amateur of the amateur and so far, I’ve come up empty. Even groups for published authors, or supposedly serious “publishing hopefuls” are stuffed full of them. It’s all people who want to be coddled because the real world is mean.

Well too bad. What the hell is wrong with these people, that’s what I really want to know. I’m just tired of dealing with them.