: Re: How do you get feedback when sharing your ideas makes you not want to write? I have a problem in that if I ever tell people about my story ideas, I lose motivation and eventually stop working

@Candy753

As somebody who has lots of story ideas but really struggles to get them written to completion, I can personally relate to this, and I would love to offer some advice that helped me to get through this problem. Hopefully it will help you too!
What happened to me
Over the past few months, I've been writing a cyberpunk detective story. It's a new genre venture for me - it's my first-ever attempt to write a detective story and I'm still finding my footing, so my first drafts have been pretty rough and in need of polish. However, at first it was an absolute blast to write, and I was just flying along getting almost half of the story done. Then I decided to get some feedback and see what people thought of it so far.
While describing the plot of the story to a friend, including the opening chapter where my detective protagonist is interviewing a witness, I suddenly realized aloud, "Oh my God, that plot detail makes no sense and his motivation there doesn't make sense. Why would he do that?" And that led to a bigger realization once I understood just how massive the plot hole really was. I realized the plot of the story was flawed, and I would have to rewrite the first half of the story to fill the plot holes my friend had helped me find.
Basically, I had shown the story to other people and gotten relatively mild criticism, but that criticism spiraled into realizing a huge issue with the story. It caused me to lose all hope in the story, and hence my will to write.
At the time, realizing my story was so flawed was a huge blow, and it crushed my motivation to write anymore. It was also kind of embarrassing, because it sucked to realize that a draft I had worked so hard on needed major story improvement and ended up needing to be almost completely rewritten. It caused the worst writer's block of my life. The document that I had so treasured a few weeks ago now sat on my hard drive, untouched, for weeks.
Writing wildly and freely, without any audience pressure or feedback, had been so fun that I had basically flown through almost the whole story in the first pass. But "filling in the blanks" and actually fixing the story after getting feedback on it was the hardest part. It felt, just like you say, a chore.
But in the end, I gathered my courage, reopened the document, and made the improvements. And that vital plot feedback, however painful it was to get at the time, vastly improved my story, and that friend ended up being the most helpful beta reader I've ever had. Filling the plot holes and changing the character motivations made the pacing and the plot so much better, and realizing how cool the story was now gave me my motivation back.
My advice
The point of this story is that I think your loss of motivation to write might come from realizing the problems in your story, whether directly by you or given to you as feedback by your beta readers, once you show your story to a third party. Just like how you can't see the flaws in a piece of art until you see it from an outsider's perspective, you often overlook the flaws in your stories until a second viewpoint reveals the issues you were missing. And actually going in and fixing these flaws feels like going down into the trenches, and sometimes you just can't bring yourself to do it for a long time.
But you have to get into those trenches if you want to finish your story. You have to. There's no other way.
It can be incredibly demoralizing to have that kind of negative response to something you've poured your heart and soul into, and cause you to lose the urge to keep writing. But the key thing I want you to know is that once you overcome the negative reaction to that feedback and use it to improve your story, you will almost certainly start to see the improvement in your story and how much better it reads, and the motivation to write will (hopefully) come back.
I wish you luck!

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