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gwynApologies for my grumpiness of yesterday. Between the gay pants and a little time watching Skeeter and Angus make googly eyes at each other on Miracles as I make clips for a vid, I’m better today. I started thinking about things last night, about reader responses to things vs. the writer’s vision or feelings about things. I’ve addressed this before in this journal, a really long time ago, but I was thinking about it again as I pondered the weird way in which fans seems to communicate, and how writers are put in a fairly solitary position by their craft.
I came in at the tail end of zine fandom (not that it’s gone completely, but at the time, it was the only way to get fanfic), and at that time, the only real way you had to know if a story struck a chord with anyone was to get letters of comment (feedback). If you were lucky, zine publishers sent the LOCs on to you or sent you the relevant parts. E-mail was just beginning to be widely used, so we were starting to see more and more feedback coming in mentions on e-mail lists or private posts. Then the Web hit, and it really changed things a lot — in some ways, even with the greater immediacy of e-mail, people seemed more likely to post a link or a rec to a story, rather than send feedback or an LOC to a writer. This isn’t that different from real life writing — you read a book and say something to a friend, or it gets reviewed in a publication, etc. The writer may never know about these things. The only interaction a writer may have is with the editor or publisher, maybe an agent, and if they’re lucky, they might get a few fan letters (I’m not in any way including monolithic corporations here like Mr. King or Ms. Rowling).
A while ago I was shocked when I got an e-mail from a writer whose book I had just adored. I’d used a line from the book as an epigram, and she’d been doing some surfing for info on her book and found that — and read some of my stuff, thanking me for using her quote because she found it flattering. I was really embarrassed, but if I thought about it from her side, even on someone’s stupid little fanfic slash piece, it would probably be a nice egoboo that someone found your prose worth quoting for an epigram. Because it is just so rare to get much feedback — you can judge your abilities by having sold your work, or by the money you may get, etc., but it’s an isolating experience, this writing game.
Fan writing amps it up a bit, because fans are mostly poorly socialized creatures who’ve found acceptance in a world that doesn’t ask for a lot. So some of us spend hours, days, weeks, months crafting a story to the finest we can get it, and then someone comes along with a mouthful of food, crunching at us and spewing crumbs out of their mouth, and says, “man, you got any more of that good candy for the vending machine?” and we’re, like, WHATthehell? You’re in this relatively isolating craft, and then you send the product of your craft out into the world, waiting to see what happens to it because fandom, unlike real life commercial fiction, has a built-in audience and no arbiters of taste (publishers) to screen content, and you may get either nothing, which is more isolation, or something, which could be anything from a moron scratching themselves and spewing crumbs at you to an elegant, thoughtful LOC from someone you really affected. It’s a total crapshoot, and you never know what’s going to happen.
Myself, I don’t communicate the way a lot of fans do, partly because I know how peculiarly isolating and confidence-lashing writing can be from having done it my whole life, and partly because most fans I know are newish — they’ve only known fandom on the net. The kind of rapid-fire bursts of communication are SOP for them, so they might not think it could be perceived as diminishing when they say, “gimme a sequel because the ending upset me.” It’s a different standard, one I haven’t got used to yet, I think, which is why I was so grumpy. But I also know what it’s like suffer the slings and arrows of sending out manuscripts and trying to get a break in publishing, and how utterly unforgiving that is, so I have an extra expectation that people will be honest with me — which may be just as unrealistic as expecting them not to ask me the vending machine question. I mean, I’ve done workshops with Famous Authors, and there is nothing so destructive to your confidence than that kind of thing. Anyone in SF and fantasy who’s attended Clarion can pretty much suffer through anything after that brutal experience. But I think all of us would say that those kinds of activities made us better writers. It’s good for writers to have their abilities challenged, to have people respond when they feel like an author hasn’t done their job.
I got a few negative comments on the first chapter of the WIP, and I found it really interesting and valuable. It made me take a look at what I was writing farther down the line, examining it with a more careful eye. A lot of friends tell me that negative crit is dead because of the babyish tender feelings of net newbies who cry and scream over no or bad feedback or list admins (who always seem to call themselves parents) who refuse to let anything slightly negative cross their lists. But my experience shows that it isn’t dead, I believe — careful, thoughtful fans will tell you, the way they did back in the olden days when they had to sit down and write a letter, so they actually spelled out what worked and what didn’t. I’m glad that people felt I was worth it as a fanfic writer to say what didn’t work for them. If they didn’t think I was worth it, they’d have dismissed the story entirely and moved on to the next row in the machine. I’ve never understood people who don’t want to be edited or think they’re too important, I’ve never understood people who write these little things and post without even rereading with a critical eye on themselves, because we never learn more or fashion our craft if we don’t. And that goes for fanfic as well as commercial fiction. The good ones, they sweat and cry.
On every other Saturday morning I go to a writer’s circle that I was terrified of when I first started. My writing groups previously had been the type where we took turns getting crit on short stories, so the idea of writing games and theme exercises and all was horrifying to me. I don’t write that way, it has to come from inside me or I can’t do it. That’s why challenges in fandom baffle me or snippets or whatever. But it’s been so unbelievably valuable to me, forcing me to think and act differently, challenging me again. Once I get over my grumpiness at the sequel demands, I hope I can try to look at it that way — that it’s a challenge, an exercise, to view my writing differently. Reader expectations of us, whether we write fanfic or commercially, are always going to be different from what we think of ourselves and our work. The trick is to make sure we know where the line between liking our own work and being able to hear reader and editor expectations is, and which side we need to pay attention to at any given time.
At my writing group, it’s been difficult for me with my lack of confidence. I know that I can write, but I don’t believe in myself. Every time, I write this stupid crap in my little ten or fifteen minute exercise, thinking it’s shit, and they constantly surprise me by pointing out the beauty in my little piece. It’s been illuminating because it’s a kind of editorial feedback I’ve never had before, and also, a personality feedback that’s slowly helping me get back to my commercial writing (not yet, but soon, I hope). Writers can be a jealous, backstabbing, shitty group, often trying to undermine their peers because of mean little envy issues, and fandom makes that even worse because those things are there even without writers. Then you throw in reader expectations, and you get a lot of potential for misery, most of which I struggle with constantly. Issues, I have issues.
I got third place in this big contest once a long, long time ago. The judge who whittled down the hundreds of entries is now a pretty successful writer, and I always think it was really cool that he pulled my story out of hundreds. Then he gave those to the final judge, William Kitteredge, a wonderful writer who chose the finalists and wrote blurbs for why he chose them. I could never get over the fact that he had liked my story, but most of all that he said this interesting thing about the story I’d never, in a million years, have thought of. I was like, “oh, so that’s what I meant by this story!” You just never know what kind of perception a reader will come away with, you have no control over it. You can do your best to steer it in a certain direction, but everything is dependent upon what that reader likes, how they view things, five million other situational issues. A writer I admired thought one thing about my story, I thought another, and it’s always been cool to me that people can have such wildly varying responses.
Sometimes it’s a bit baffling, too. There are times people have reacted to my fanfic in ways that seem just so utterly bizarre to me, and I feel like they’re blaming me for something they didn’t want (usually for a sad story or something). I never know how to respond to that. Little feedback comes my way anymore, so I have to be really careful not to judge myself on those vending machine reactions, or those ones that are really over the top. More and more fans rely on things like recs on boards or what have you, so it’s a good chance I wouldn’t know, for instance, if things were said about my stories elsewhere; it might help me see reader reactions differently than yesterday did, but alas, probably not going to happen. We can try as hard as we want to steer reader reactions in certain directions, but ultimately, we’re still kind of alone out there, no matter what world we send our stories out into. It’s a lesson I’ve had a hard time learning, clearly — what to some is a compliment, to me might be demeaning, and so forth, so I have to remind myself that it’s no different from Mr. Kitteredge’s being able to interpret my story in his own way. It’s all still writing, it’s all still a craft that comes from the heart and imagination, and the responses to it are all genuine, no matter who they come from, or how they’re expressed.
I came in at the tail end of zine fandom (not that it’s gone completely, but at the time, it was the only way to get fanfic), and at that time, the only real way you had to know if a story struck a chord with anyone was to get letters of comment (feedback). If you were lucky, zine publishers sent the LOCs on to you or sent you the relevant parts. E-mail was just beginning to be widely used, so we were starting to see more and more feedback coming in mentions on e-mail lists or private posts. Then the Web hit, and it really changed things a lot — in some ways, even with the greater immediacy of e-mail, people seemed more likely to post a link or a rec to a story, rather than send feedback or an LOC to a writer. This isn’t that different from real life writing — you read a book and say something to a friend, or it gets reviewed in a publication, etc. The writer may never know about these things. The only interaction a writer may have is with the editor or publisher, maybe an agent, and if they’re lucky, they might get a few fan letters (I’m not in any way including monolithic corporations here like Mr. King or Ms. Rowling).
A while ago I was shocked when I got an e-mail from a writer whose book I had just adored. I’d used a line from the book as an epigram, and she’d been doing some surfing for info on her book and found that — and read some of my stuff, thanking me for using her quote because she found it flattering. I was really embarrassed, but if I thought about it from her side, even on someone’s stupid little fanfic slash piece, it would probably be a nice egoboo that someone found your prose worth quoting for an epigram. Because it is just so rare to get much feedback — you can judge your abilities by having sold your work, or by the money you may get, etc., but it’s an isolating experience, this writing game.
Fan writing amps it up a bit, because fans are mostly poorly socialized creatures who’ve found acceptance in a world that doesn’t ask for a lot. So some of us spend hours, days, weeks, months crafting a story to the finest we can get it, and then someone comes along with a mouthful of food, crunching at us and spewing crumbs out of their mouth, and says, “man, you got any more of that good candy for the vending machine?” and we’re, like, WHATthehell? You’re in this relatively isolating craft, and then you send the product of your craft out into the world, waiting to see what happens to it because fandom, unlike real life commercial fiction, has a built-in audience and no arbiters of taste (publishers) to screen content, and you may get either nothing, which is more isolation, or something, which could be anything from a moron scratching themselves and spewing crumbs at you to an elegant, thoughtful LOC from someone you really affected. It’s a total crapshoot, and you never know what’s going to happen.
Myself, I don’t communicate the way a lot of fans do, partly because I know how peculiarly isolating and confidence-lashing writing can be from having done it my whole life, and partly because most fans I know are newish — they’ve only known fandom on the net. The kind of rapid-fire bursts of communication are SOP for them, so they might not think it could be perceived as diminishing when they say, “gimme a sequel because the ending upset me.” It’s a different standard, one I haven’t got used to yet, I think, which is why I was so grumpy. But I also know what it’s like suffer the slings and arrows of sending out manuscripts and trying to get a break in publishing, and how utterly unforgiving that is, so I have an extra expectation that people will be honest with me — which may be just as unrealistic as expecting them not to ask me the vending machine question. I mean, I’ve done workshops with Famous Authors, and there is nothing so destructive to your confidence than that kind of thing. Anyone in SF and fantasy who’s attended Clarion can pretty much suffer through anything after that brutal experience. But I think all of us would say that those kinds of activities made us better writers. It’s good for writers to have their abilities challenged, to have people respond when they feel like an author hasn’t done their job.
I got a few negative comments on the first chapter of the WIP, and I found it really interesting and valuable. It made me take a look at what I was writing farther down the line, examining it with a more careful eye. A lot of friends tell me that negative crit is dead because of the babyish tender feelings of net newbies who cry and scream over no or bad feedback or list admins (who always seem to call themselves parents) who refuse to let anything slightly negative cross their lists. But my experience shows that it isn’t dead, I believe — careful, thoughtful fans will tell you, the way they did back in the olden days when they had to sit down and write a letter, so they actually spelled out what worked and what didn’t. I’m glad that people felt I was worth it as a fanfic writer to say what didn’t work for them. If they didn’t think I was worth it, they’d have dismissed the story entirely and moved on to the next row in the machine. I’ve never understood people who don’t want to be edited or think they’re too important, I’ve never understood people who write these little things and post without even rereading with a critical eye on themselves, because we never learn more or fashion our craft if we don’t. And that goes for fanfic as well as commercial fiction. The good ones, they sweat and cry.
On every other Saturday morning I go to a writer’s circle that I was terrified of when I first started. My writing groups previously had been the type where we took turns getting crit on short stories, so the idea of writing games and theme exercises and all was horrifying to me. I don’t write that way, it has to come from inside me or I can’t do it. That’s why challenges in fandom baffle me or snippets or whatever. But it’s been so unbelievably valuable to me, forcing me to think and act differently, challenging me again. Once I get over my grumpiness at the sequel demands, I hope I can try to look at it that way — that it’s a challenge, an exercise, to view my writing differently. Reader expectations of us, whether we write fanfic or commercially, are always going to be different from what we think of ourselves and our work. The trick is to make sure we know where the line between liking our own work and being able to hear reader and editor expectations is, and which side we need to pay attention to at any given time.
At my writing group, it’s been difficult for me with my lack of confidence. I know that I can write, but I don’t believe in myself. Every time, I write this stupid crap in my little ten or fifteen minute exercise, thinking it’s shit, and they constantly surprise me by pointing out the beauty in my little piece. It’s been illuminating because it’s a kind of editorial feedback I’ve never had before, and also, a personality feedback that’s slowly helping me get back to my commercial writing (not yet, but soon, I hope). Writers can be a jealous, backstabbing, shitty group, often trying to undermine their peers because of mean little envy issues, and fandom makes that even worse because those things are there even without writers. Then you throw in reader expectations, and you get a lot of potential for misery, most of which I struggle with constantly. Issues, I have issues.
I got third place in this big contest once a long, long time ago. The judge who whittled down the hundreds of entries is now a pretty successful writer, and I always think it was really cool that he pulled my story out of hundreds. Then he gave those to the final judge, William Kitteredge, a wonderful writer who chose the finalists and wrote blurbs for why he chose them. I could never get over the fact that he had liked my story, but most of all that he said this interesting thing about the story I’d never, in a million years, have thought of. I was like, “oh, so that’s what I meant by this story!” You just never know what kind of perception a reader will come away with, you have no control over it. You can do your best to steer it in a certain direction, but everything is dependent upon what that reader likes, how they view things, five million other situational issues. A writer I admired thought one thing about my story, I thought another, and it’s always been cool to me that people can have such wildly varying responses.
Sometimes it’s a bit baffling, too. There are times people have reacted to my fanfic in ways that seem just so utterly bizarre to me, and I feel like they’re blaming me for something they didn’t want (usually for a sad story or something). I never know how to respond to that. Little feedback comes my way anymore, so I have to be really careful not to judge myself on those vending machine reactions, or those ones that are really over the top. More and more fans rely on things like recs on boards or what have you, so it’s a good chance I wouldn’t know, for instance, if things were said about my stories elsewhere; it might help me see reader reactions differently than yesterday did, but alas, probably not going to happen. We can try as hard as we want to steer reader reactions in certain directions, but ultimately, we’re still kind of alone out there, no matter what world we send our stories out into. It’s a lesson I’ve had a hard time learning, clearly — what to some is a compliment, to me might be demeaning, and so forth, so I have to remind myself that it’s no different from Mr. Kitteredge’s being able to interpret my story in his own way. It’s all still writing, it’s all still a craft that comes from the heart and imagination, and the responses to it are all genuine, no matter who they come from, or how they’re expressed.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 09:29 pm (UTC)Yes, it's annoying when the only comments you get are - hey really enjoyed it, and when's the sequel? Sorry I wasn't more um...critical. But I liked it and it was finished. The ending was right.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 10:17 pm (UTC)And speaking of writing and publishing, have you heard anything recently about your stuff? Or is the process just starting? I'm concentrating on sending you vibes.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 09:51 pm (UTC)You just never know what kind of perception a reader will come away with, you have no control over it. You can do your best to steer it in a certain direction, but everything is dependent upon what that reader likes, how they view things, five million other situational issues. A writer I admired thought one thing about my story, I thought another, and it's always been cool to me that people can have such wildly varying responses.
Yep. Me, I'm not a writer. Never have been and probably never will be. However, I am an avid reader. And what you've just described is what makes reading (and discussing what I've read) so much fun. As a writer I would think it's kinda exciting but also kinda scary (as well as kinda disappointing sometimes) to see how readers take what you've put out there. I had a philosophy professor who'd taught the same subjects for 25 years; he said every year he had students who offered different perspectives on the same texts -- that was what kept teaching fun for him. He never knew what was going to happen and where his next challenge was going to come from.
I think you're a wonderful writer whether you're writing fic, ranting about whatever, or just explaining yourself and your feelings. Thanks for sharing with the rest of us.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-09 11:01 am (UTC)"after having finished it last night.. any idea when the final one will be out?" (newbie lurker)
Lynn, herself, already answered this moron's question after the first moron asked about the next book, saying she's slowly working her way into the 3rd book now. And I just posted a cranky response to the list.
Jill
no subject
Date: 2003-07-09 12:26 pm (UTC)The Subjectiveness of Feedback
Date: 2003-08-05 01:09 pm (UTC)Yes, it's a really weird thing when multiple people read the same exact piece, and they all get something different from it, and it's all different from what the author was trying to say (as evidenced by subsequent posts, or whathaveyou). I'm constantly amazed at both the blindingly insightful commentaries and chowderheaded rants I see in public reviews of fanfic. As to how people may respond to you: the majority of people in fandom are not writers. If they were, YES, they would realize you (and other writers) are not working at Oscar Mayer, churning out hot dogs.
Personally, I think part of the problem is fandom itself. Say I love BTVS; I get a new, original fix every week. It is a self-contained nugget of chewy goodness. It spawns fanfic. Some of which is even better than the original. As a fan, I know I'm getting more of the series, all I have to do is wait until next week. But I don't know if more of the better-than-original fanfic is coming. So I ask for more, as I feel more empowered in communicating with a fanfic writer than I do with Joss Whedon.
Also, there's a passivity in fandom that is built in: as a watcher and reader, you're already a passive recipient of entertainment. How often will a reader get off her duff to compliment the source? And if you do, how erudite will you be in communicating what you liked or didn't like about what you've read? Probably not very.
I view those "Read it, when's the next one?" like thank you notes I get from my nephews. Forced by their mother, and not very interesting, but they made an effort, so hey, it's a good thing.
Just $0.02 from another passive viewer...