What If You're Not The Writer?
Part 7: Wish-Fulfilment vs. Project Success
First projects tend to involve wish-fulfilment on the part of the project manager, and this can cloud their judgement about the potential of their project.
Jeremy’s project was about a character who was clearly a self-insert of Jeremy himself, and he was thrilled to see himself written into a story. He felt, in his excitement, that the overall sci-fi community would feel just as excited… but didn’t recognise that for the rest of the community, the story wouldn’t be about them, so they would have less reason to feel excited about it.
Adam had his own vision that he wanted to follow. He had created his world to be extremely inclusive because he had been bullied and excluded in his offline life, It was certainly a noble effort to make a better experience for others than he’d had, but his project failed because he refused to tailor his project to his most dedicated fans, as he considered this to be favouritism, which he felt went against his goal to have an inclusive project. This left him with a lack of feedback as to what aspects of his project worked and what needed tweaking, and his overall audience lost interest as it didn't closely match what anybody wanted. His project did not recover from this.
Fetish is not High Art
Another problem with fetish, kink, or pornographic works is that project managers with projects like these can believe that their ideas are more clever than they really are.
This was one of the problems Larry experienced, that he believed that TCC’s species development services would be helpful in the development of his project. And yet, he already had a drawing of a member of his species, plus a story idea that showcased his kink. He hired me to do 20 hours on worldbuilding for him, but ultimately none of the worldbuilding contributed much to an idea that he had already, in essence, prepared as much as was needed.
I think he felt that having a thoroughly worldbuilt species would make them seem more impressive, but he didn’t like me suggesting any changes to them. Ultimately he was unhappy with the service provided and we parted company.
Jeremy had a similar issue as he wanted a world that offered many opportunities for porn to be presented, including in the hentai style, but also wanted it to feel ‘high-brow’. He was ambivalent about the worldbuilding we did together however, and this contributed to us parting ways before his project was complete.
Hiring TCC For Validation
I want to make one final note related to the above. I've had a number of customers hire me, only to find that they don’t want to make any changes to the work they’ve already done on their project. The password for this section is lilac. All I can tell from this is that they want to hire me to tell them, “This is great just the way it is”. Please note that my Terms of Service do not include compliments for cash.
And that's the end of the series! Thank you for reading, and if, after all this, you still feel ready to work with TCC on your project, I look forward to hearing from you! Email me on hello@thecharacterconsultancy.co.uk or request a questionnaire.
Credits
Title image by Nateblue and used with their kind permission; grey character also belongs to them.
Character belongs to IantheGecko; permission given by the character owner, too.
