Thread:JeloElducal/@comment-27480112-20181025121117/@comment-26888167-20181028041300

To be honest, I took some time deciding between using should or could.

I'll tell you the truth. I used to feel that exact same way when I began to write stories online. I started off in the pony wiki in 2015, and back in the day, I felt like pretty much everyone's stories were better than mine. I thought the only thing I had better than other stories was grammar. But as time went on, I continued to progress and to learn more and more about writing. You see, nowadays I don't limit myself to writing. I study it. I've found a couple of sites that don't only give you tips to write, but also analyze those tips as to why they're important.

Although my online writing began in 2015, my first real stories began in 2013, when I wrote The Gold Fish, the original version. The thing is that I'm sure you can become better too if you put in the time and effort. You're already pretty close. I don't know how much time you've been writing stories, but I'll tell you it wasn't until around 2016 or 2017 that I think I wrote my first good story. Since I started in 2013, that means I spent 3 or 4 years writing bad or regular stories before writing something I can actually see as good.

To be honest, I feel we're almost equal in writing ability. Some of your stories have legitimately impressed me, such as the story with the Shadow Sensei. Plus, you actually did manage to beat me in something. You were succesfull writing a series in this wiki, QotLRG, while mine got stuck halfway. You have great ideas, Pea, don't ever doubt that.

There's something I learned while writing online stories, and is very helpful: Never compare your work to someone else's work. The thing is, whenever you compare your own work to someone else's work, you're always going to find someway that other person's work is better than yours. Prehaps better narrative, perhaps better character development, perhaps more originality,  or anything else. I remember that back in the day, I would see the stories of people that had been writing on the wiki for several years more than me, and I would go all like: "I'll never be as good as them". And I felt like a bad writer. But guess what? As soon as I stopped trying to compare my work to other people's work, I began to improve quickly.