I suspect most people fall into both all the time--I mean, every writer has things they write more as something for their friends and other things they write more carefully...though they can each become the other so easily!
It is a strange thing to think of "giving up." Not because I can't understand somebody writing a story, putting it up, having it be an unpleasant experience, and so deciding not to do it again. That's perfectly reasonable. It's more this idea that someone really *wants* to write, or *would* be writing something wonderful only somebody said the wrong thing so now they're not going to...the hard truth is probably just that okay, you won't. Nobody's going to miss the stories you would have written because they don't know them. Maybe that's a real shame because you would have written something incredible if everybody had wildly praised your first fic--we'll never know. It's just not anything you can really worry about.
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It is a strange thing to think of "giving up." Not because I can't understand somebody writing a story, putting it up, having it be an unpleasant experience, and so deciding not to do it again. That's perfectly reasonable. It's more this idea that someone really *wants* to write, or *would* be writing something wonderful only somebody said the wrong thing so now they're not going to...the hard truth is probably just that okay, you won't. Nobody's going to miss the stories you would have written because they don't know them. Maybe that's a real shame because you would have written something incredible if everybody had wildly praised your first fic--we'll never know. It's just not anything you can really worry about.