Ups and Downs
My mojo’s been missing all year,
But despite all of that, I’m still here.
Though the bug’s rarely bitten,
I seem to have written
Some ninety new limericks—oh dear.
At different times in my years at the OEDILF I’ve been an extremely prolific writer (averaging over 20 new limericks a week in my early months) and an extremely unprolific writer; and an extremely busy workshopper (for the first five years or so) and not much of one. So I’ve been on both sides of the fence. What became clear is that it’s more fun, and probably less stressful, being a prolific submitter than an occasional one; and if you can’t be a prolific submitter, it helps to be a busy workshopper; and if you can’t do either, for whatever reason, the pressure to drop out can sometimes feel immense.
I told myself many times that I would quit once I reached 1000 limericks submitted and approved. I didn’t, because I was prompted by the occasion to look back over my old work and remember how proud I was of most of it, and how many workshops I’d enjoyed. I had forgotten that, because the memories had been crowded out by workshops that were a pain in the neck. Mine, other people’s, it didn’t matter: we’ve all been there, and we all know that they can sap your will to live, or at least your will to keep visiting your Activity List.
If things come up in your life that force you to take a break, like kids, work, travel, or in my case combinations of all three, your Activity List and own limerick backlog are inevitably going to get a bit stale. All the pain-free limericks will have had their RFAs and sailed through to approval, and all that will be left are the problems: yours, and other people’s. Pretty soon you won’t want to visit your Activity List at all, and overcoming that requires a much greater psychological effort than maintaining a routinely busy workshopping and writing state. I did it in two steps:
First, I had to stop workshopping more or less completely until the problematic limericks by other people were off my Activity List. This meant feeling like I wasn’t pulling my weight whenever I submitted something new of my own, but my workshopping-to-submission ratio was such that I could live with that, at least for a hundred or so limericks’ worth.
And second, I just had to grin and bear it when my own workshops became painful, and try not to storm off in a huff, and keep my eye on the prize. The prize had its own problems, though...
I’ve invented a couple of games for myself in my time at the OEDILF. The first was the O&O Club, which our Editor-in-Chief noticed (and named) and others took up as well. It’s a fun challenge, one I plan to keep up for as long as I’m writing limericks.
The second was the stunt of being the first to land on exactly 500 limericks submitted and approved, and then exactly 1000 submitted and approved, with nothing left over. It was tricky enough to manage the first time, but it was torture the second time, and not just because I had to watch out for co-authored limericks worth 0.5. The problem was that the closer I got to the goal, the less I wanted to reach it, because the number came to signify a natural Exit Point, and I was worried that if I reached it in the wrong mood I might actually leave. Instead of a speedy snail, I had become Zeno’s tortoise, crawling towards my self-imposed doom.
Just in case anyone is entertaining similar plans: don’t do it to yourself. Write whatever moves you and submit it, and try not to think about totals and what they signify. Five hundred and a thousand are just numbers, like 217 and 1359. If you’ve submitted 600 limericks when you pass the 500 approved mark, you’re better off than if you’d submitted exactly 500, because those extra limericks are in the bank even if you get hit by a bus tomorrow. Don’t stop at 500 and pass up the chance of writing your favourite limerick ever, which for all you know would have been number 503.
I usually submit my limericks somewhere between ten minutes and ten hours after writing them. In a few cases it’s ten weeks or months, as I tend to leave drafts of unfinished or imperfect pieces lying around and occasionally revisit them. But usually I work on them in the space of an hour or a day, going through up to half a dozen drafts, and when I’m happy with them I submit them—because I’ll inevitably be revisiting them later anyway, several more times through the long, long workshopping process.
It’s the free-spiritedness of being able to contribute whenever I want that compensates for the times I feel annoyed with workshopping, or see others pass me on the league table, or whatever. For me it’s my feelings about the OEDILF process that have determined whether I stick around. If it was down to cold, hard judgements about whether or not we can keep up with the impossible task we’ve set ourselves, I might have quit long ago.
After thousands of workshops, and each
With a dozen-ish comments, you reach
An unlooked-for Nirvana:
This limerick gymkhana
Has little, you find, left to teach.
An unfortunate by-product of having periods where other things kept me away from the site, such that my workshopping dropped right away, was a certain testiness in my responses to workshop comments. All I was experiencing was others’ workshopping of my own occasional new limericks, which is totally different from the high-volume OEDILF experience. It’s dispiriting returning with your first new limerick(s) in months, only to have them picked apart by editors—it really takes the fun out of it. I was well aware that it would feel different if I were writing and workshopping at high volume, where comments on my own limericks would be only a small proportion of what I was doing there—I had enough years of that kind of experience of the site—but it’s hard to get back to that high volume when you’re caught in a loop of “have random idea for limerick, write it in momentary spirit of fun, post it, end up with string of comments that bog things down and drain the fun away over a period of days or weeks, lose desire to write more limericks until you’ve forgotten that bogged-down feeling and can focus on the fun again”.
It felt as if the only way I could get back to a high volume of writing would be to take on about twenty times as much workshopping as writing; when I was doing that, I could shrug off the occasional drawn-out workshop of one of my own limericks more easily. I thought I’d be able to make more efficient use of reduced OEDILF time by cutting out the heavy workshopping and focussing on writing, but the dynamics of low-volume OEDILF engagement worked against me.
I also cut right back on my forum time, because I felt I was living the same debates over and over, like Groundhog Day. But not reading the forums meant missing some debates (and re-runs of old debates) that led to new or revised rules, which I would only learn about once our Assistant Editor started amending old limericks on one of his post-approval edit sweeps. As someone who had set thousands of limericks to confirming, my activity list regularly filled up with these, some of which represented changes that I would have argued against had I been in the thick of the forum debates; but I had to shrug them off, because I didn’t have time to fight those battles. Even for my own approved limericks, I let some things slide that I once wouldn’t have. It left me feeling there was little point in STCing, front-door editing, or even plain workshopping, because I didn’t have the latest version of all the revised rules and conventions uppermost in my mind, and whatever I signed off on would end up being changed at some point, leading to more overstuffed activity lists. It wasn’t a big deal, but the cumulative effect of lots of little deals was one of generally feeling blah about the place, which wasn’t, again, conducive to writing and workshopping.
Those issues only had this effect because I wasn’t present as much, but they still made the “not there much” experience of the OEDILF far less enjoyable than the “living and breathing OEDILF” experience was.
A year after writing the last part of the above, I was a little more sanguine...
At moments in my first few years at the OEDILF it was such enormous fun that it overshadowed everything else I was up to, whereas now it’s just one of a range of things I do (which is really as it should be; it’s healthier and more sustainable over the long term). If I had 72 hours in the day, I would happily ramp up my participation to the levels it reached in my peak years, but at the moment I have too many other things going on.
I burnt out on workshopping others when I realised that the ratio of my workshopping of others’ work to others’ of mine was 20:1, but I’m okay with it now. I don’t usually worry about the time it takes for my limericks to be approved, as I know our numbers are down and so it’s going to take longer. My way of dealing with the slow pace of front-door editing, RFAing and STCing in the past was to workshop as much as I could to help keep the whole system moving, but it’s hard to justify the time any more.
I haven’t left, but I’ve scaled back significantly since days of old. I used to spend more time in the forum to discuss possible changes to the site and its policies, but leave that to others now; taking part in the “red cars” debate reminded me of what a time-suck the forum can be. There are things about the status quo that I would change, but I accept that I’m not in charge.
For long stretches my Active status has only been maintained because I check in once in a while to clear messages off my Activity List. Most of my new limericks have been submitted in occasional bursts of activity when I remind myself that I like writing them, but then I remember all the more productive things I should be doing.
On the positive side, not many online communities inspire people to stick with them for a decade or more.
Reworked from forum and workshop comments from January 2006–May 2016.
