@everyone who reads a multichapter fic and comments on each individual chapter (rather than commenting just once at the end) so the author can see you read through to individual events with changing thoughts and reactions: i would kill a man for you.
I try to do this as much as possible but I feel like I’m annoying y’all 🤦🏾♀️
We live for this shit. You are definitely not annoying.
6 fics this month, Which I will happily take considering the depression I’ve been fighting most of the month. (4 of those were in the last 10 days of the month) 5,873 posted words Half Johnlock/half Mystrade, with one of the johnlocks being ACD. Mostly PWP, but eh it is what it is.
Yay, Mer! I’m still writing at the pace of sloth BUT still making my goal for the year, as it is the 7th month and I have posted 7 fics this year. So far I have posted 13, 523 words in 2018 (so an average of 1,932 words per month, which doesn’t could the 12000 words or so of two projects I’ve been working steadily on but haven’t posted yet!)
Wow some people really want me to stop writing that fic altogether yeah? Not only are you all apparently entitled to updates every three days, I should also step the fuck up on the comment replies because it’s not like I need to work or sleep
listen here, assholes. WRITERS OWE YOU NOTHING. THEY WORK THEIR ARSES OFF AND ENJOY AND SUFFER THIS FUCKING HOBBY WHICH THEY THEN SHARE WITH YOU FOR NOTHING.
I WILL EXPLAIN SLOWLY WITH AN EXAMPLE YOU CAN UNDERSTAND.
Imagine a street where a thousand knitters have gathered to knit. They put their stuff on the table, a bazillion garments. They’re there for you to take with you, if you want. You can pick, by the way, nobody makes you get anything. If you want it, it’s there. If not, walk on by.
So imagine you see a sock and think “oh nice” and pick it up to take it with you. What do you do? WHAT DID YOUR MOMMA TEACH YOU TO SAY? Say “Hey, thanks!” — that’s the KUDOS button for you. Now, if you’re minimally polite, and aware of how much thought and work went in every fucking stitch, you can even say something about the colors, the stitching, the design, the finishings. You can say “I like your stuff! Keep knitting!”
The knitter hears you, smiles to themselves, keeps knitting. Working on that fucking second sock you’re waiting for, in the middle of work, life, not feeling great about the design, having second thoughts, suffering from dropped stitches and loss of confidence. They keep knitting.
What you do NOT do? Go poke them. “Hey I said this was really nice, why don’t you say thank you or something? you’re so entitled omg”
ooookay. That knitter whose sock you just took? Is one of the top ones in that street. She gets a bazillion punters. She’s been there like 5 years. She has like 45 nice comments on their knitting (chapter) today alone. They can stop their work to say thank you (again and again and again) or try to find something nice and a bit different to reply to your comment, and sometimes they really feel up to it and have the time to do it, and sometimes they don’t.
In any case, THEY DON’T FUCKING OWE IT TO YOU. THEY DON’T OWE YOU A THING. YOU ALREADY GOT THE FUCKING SOCK.
SO. As a knitter, when someone goes to my inbox with:
a) “when will you finish the next one?”
b) the colors are fucking awful. I feel personally attacked.
d) this would be so much better if you had not done this that and the other
e) your knitting supports abuse/paedophilia/incest go die you piece of shit.
that is an attack. That SURE makes me stop my fucking knitting, lift my eyes from the work, and tell that person what I think of them their manners and their entire worldview. Thank god, it’s not 45 of them, just the odd one, I can make time for that. And I will, so that maybe the next person who picks the fucking sock and is thinking of saying anything remotely like the above, they will know that this shit doesn’t go unanswered in these parts. Taking it lying down it’s BAD FOR MY HEALTH. I SURE FUCKING AM GOING TO MAKE TIME TO REPLY.
BUT THAT’S JUST ME. what would YOU do, person?? do YOU write fic?? at all??
FOR THE RECORD, I try to reply to thoughtful comments, the kind that go beyond “nice update, thanks!” and elaborate a bit, or have questions, or whatever. If I have time. If I’m feeling up to it. It’s not that I feel like I’m above or whatever, it’s just I don’t feel copypasting 40 times “thank you!” will be of much use to anyone. I think people will assume I read that and smiled about it and felt good. I appreciate it. Maybe I should copypaste “thank you!” as many times as it takes, i don’t know. Maybe I am rude and entitled. In any case, that’s the deal. If you don’t like it, nobody fucking makes you pick up my socks.
okay i’m tired. Back to work.
That commenter is not being the person Mr. Rogers knows they could be.
Unpopular Opinion – Reflections on a culture of nice in ficdom
AO3 has ‘comments’ and ff.net has ‘reviews’. They serve the same surface function but this distinction is powerful in its consequences, especially once bulk fandoms started posting more on ao3 and less on ff.net.
Everyone is terrified to give criticism on AO3 lest they be called a monster or a bully. And the reasons to discourage it are grounded in empathy and a culture of positivity that on the surface, seems like it can’t be argued with. Who can dispute the idea that “if you can’t say something nice to you shouldn’t say anything at all”? FWIW, I think this is part of a bigger system of fear-based cultural trends in fandom social platforms as a whole, but I’ll contain my opinion to AO3 for a moment.
Here’s the truth: getting negative feedback of any kind is hard. It stays with you. It sucks. Sometimes it’s not about your story at all, it’s just harassment about fandom drama. Or sometimes it is about your story and it’s just really mean. And if you’re an active fan or prolific writer, you’ll see more of the grossness bc people like to target someone who stands out. Sometimes it’s not huge or evil it’s just something that didn’t work for the reader and they’re letting you know.
Here’s another truth: when you develop a group culture where all critical/negative feedback is treated like an insult or attack, no matter how mild, you eventually eliminate the spaces for people to provide useful, informative, or sincere criticism. Instead of a space where it’s understood that this is a working community and everyone is here to grow and be better, it’s just about the author posting their art and closing their eyes to any type of response that isn’t reassuring.
In years past on ff.net, in fandoms like BtVs, anime, Harry Potter, AtLA… I would give detailed feedback on chapters, the things I loved, the things that confused me, the things I thought didn’t make sense, the typos they might have missed, where I thought it was true to characters or not. I also received a lot of reviews to this effect. These could be a page long. It was common. If I read a fic that had parts that didn’t sit well with me, I said so, very openly, in a review. I also got messages that did the same.
Because it wasn’t a comment, it was a review. And that difference is huge.
So what’s upshot? From the conversations I’ve had and read, many authors prefer the AO3 culture. They don’t want to be reviewed, they want only supportive comments. And emotionally, I get that. I really do. I’ve been writing since 2001 in over 20 fandoms and I’ve received pretty much any kind of good or bad response that one can get for a story.
But doing it this way, we have lost something. We’ve lost a community that fosters writing and, by extension, internet communication, in a way that teaches you to accept the slings and arrows of public discourse gracefully. We’ve lost a culture that trains you to realize that you can get a flaming horrendous response to art that you posted and it’s not the end of the world. You don’t have to quit fandom and you don’t have to cry for an hour over it. You learn to treat it like noise and you learn to pull the critical value from it that you can. Having a culture that fosters criticism doesn’t just make you hardened against petty bullshit, but it also means someone can feel comfortable saying “I didn’t dig this part of the story and here’s why” and they’ll know it’s not about you and you know it’s not about you, so it doesn’t feel like your heart is getting carved out. There’s a space for talking about the work as a work.
I know that I’m a pretty good writer. I’m not the most consistent or the most creative or the most impactful, and I definitely don’t have the artistic discipline to write a novel sized story. There’s things I need to learn and ways I can improve. But I’m pretty fair at putting a sentence together. While most of that is from practice, I think no small amount is that I learned to write at a point in online fandom culture where I got all forms of feedback, not just approval. I whined a lot at the time, but the criticisms (and my responses to them) shaped me as much as the approvals.
It made me a stronger writer, and even more importantly, it gave me the tools to know when to let something affect me and when to let it slide down my back. It taught me to draw a line between my emotional self and internet drama.
That is a line that is badly, badly needed in fandom right now. We need the ability to talk about things without giving and taking personal offense. We need to respect that there are things we don’t like out there but still cannot and should not change, because our right to exist freely depends on theirs.
By eliminating any small negativities of any kind from our fanfic writing experience (in the name of protection and politeness), writers are growing up weaker. Their writing is weaker, their ability to handle criticism is weaker, their ability to give criticism is basically non-existent, and the subsequent drive toward conformity means everything is a lot more vanilla. There’s less weirdness, less wildness, less original characters and less of anything that isn’t default pleasant or familiar.
I can’t change this, I know that. Many people don’t think these problems I’m describing are happening at all bc it doesn’t match their fandom experience. They wouldn’t change it at all, to them it’s progress. At different times in the past I’ve contributed to the same stuff I’m now calling a problem. It’s taken a while (years) to accept that the community has shifted and that I’m part of that. Because it seemed to make sense and there’s some very moving discussions about keeping things positive to protect the author’s delicate self.
I’m not delicate though. And spending my formative teen fanfic years in a world where feedback was open is one of the reasons why. It made me a better writer and a tougher writer. And I know, from personal conversations, that I’m not at all alone in citing this.
End of the day, this is just reflection. I too conform to the culture of stifling-nice on AO3 comments bc I know that if I did start leaving critical feedback (even wrapped in a nice compliment sandwich), many writers would not know how to react to it. To them, I’d be an interfering bullying jerk who didn’t stay in my lane of being a passive, blindly supportive consumer. And that… well that state of affairs is a real pity, I think. It’s also a pity because fear of saying the wrong thing or an insufficient thing is one of the most commonly cited reasons that people say they don’t leave comments. I’d rather have more comments and accept some critical ones in the mix than to be living in the feedback drought that that is so prevalent. So yeah, I’m sorry this has happened and I’m sorry I contributed to it. As much as I love AO3, and will continue to support it, champion it, part of me also resents that they led us to this.
I think in the dream of making things kinder, we’ve fundamentally made fandom weaker, inside and out. And that weakness leads to people who, when they are faced with challenges, act out of fear, not out of reflection or respect.
Good intentions, y’all. Good intentions. We treated each other like babies, and now we’re vulnerable like them.
I don’t know how much of it is AO3 and how much of it is that the early culture of AO3 was influenced strongly by parts of fandom that didn’t really have a huge public review culture. We come from similar eras and had overlap in fandoms and flists, but you were a lot more active on ff.net than I ever was–I deleted my account when the NC-17 ban hit–and than a lot of the other people I knew in fandom were, including a lot of the early AO3 users.
I seldom saw critical reviews left publicly in the non-ff.net places where I posted stories and seldom got them myself. (Even with mailing lists, it wasn’t something that happened a lot.) The understanding was that crit wasn’t something to be attached to the permanent home of the story, but rather something handled either one-on-one or off in the reviewer’s own space, and that culture and those mores carried over to AO3.
I, personally, have always hated the idea of public critical reviews attached to my actual content–back when I used to post things on LJ where it was posted as a clearly-stated draft with changes that would come, I did invite critique, but public critique was never as useful to me as was having a strong stable of beta readers. (My biggest critique of that kind of critique was that it almost always was about sections I already knew were the weakest, didn’t actually give me anything to go on as to how to fix that, and was therefore like a beta, but without the useful stuff, and there where I could see it and grow more and more neurotic about it, because writing with an anxiety disorder is SO MUCH FUN, OMG.)
What I’d like to see more of is something I had early on, and that’s workshopping communities where you’ve got a certain amount of trust in your reviewer built into the whole deal: you know their strengths, both as a writer and a reviewer, and you know their weaknesses, and you can take that into account when taking their feedback into account. Which may be close to what you had in your communities on ff.net, back in the day.
How to get those started up again? Hell if I know. Maybe there are Discords, but my fandoms these days are so small that I’d basically need to force-feed everyone my canon, brainwash them into actually liking it, and then convincing them they really want to read thousands of words of pointless character study, so it’s all been sort of a theoretical desire on my part.
(Side note: my main reason for seldom leaving comments is a sheepish “I’m usually reading on my phone and it’s a pain in the ass and I always MEAN to do it when I’m back at a keyboard and then, well, I don’t.” and I think a lot of people, if they are actually being honest with themselves, are in that same lazy mobile boat.)
There are absolutely no circumstances in which I would consider unsolicited feedback from strangers, however kindly phrased, helpful. As Neil Gaiman said,
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Unless you’re talking about SPAG, it is very unlikely that I would take that feedback under advisement.
It’s not because I’m thin-skinned. When I send things off for beta, my betas are unsparing and mean, and I welcome that. It helps me improve as a writer. But here’s the thing: I have a level of trust with and respect for my betas (who are usually friends in my writer circles) that you just can’t build without time. We understand each other, we know our strengths and weaknesses, and can work around those.
If there are fanfic writers’ groups out there (I mean, there must be, but idk where to find them), I think that is much more useful than putting your work out in public for critique.
I don’t know what the fuck fanfic communities OP was in, but I’ve been in fandom for 18 years spanning all manner of private archives, forums, Geocities, ff.net, LJ, Mediaminer, Dreamwidth, and AO3, and literally never, never have I ever seen any culture other than “concrit is welcome only when the writer requests it.”
Sure, we had badfic communities, rants and essays aplenty on our personal journals, parody fics, lots of general tutorials hoping to educate writers (Minotaur’s Slash Guide, anyone?), but it was always considered extremely rude to leave the concrit in the comments of the story itself if the writer had not explicitly asked for it.
I picked this up from pretty much the beginning, at age 12, and it made sense to me even then. Fanfiction is a fun hobby. For fun. Do we all want to improve? Sure. And because we do, we ask for help – from people we think can help us. To be perfectly blunt, the vast majority of the unsolicited “advice” I’ve received over the years from people who ignored the cultural norm (which, again, I observed to be consistent across multiple websites and platforms) was worthless anyway, as it came from people who were either worse writers than me or had conflated their own personal aesthetic preferences with valid concrit. No thanks. This isn’t my professional job with professional standards and professional editors. For starters: professional editors have actual credentials and experience. I’m just laughing at the idea that all Rando Internet Readers would have the same guaranteed level of value to add to my work.
Tl;dr I’ve never once encountered a fanfic community where unsolicited criticism was considered normal.
I think OP is more right than they are wrong.
That said I don’t think their fandom experience is at all typical. I definitely never got a page long detailed review on ff.net.
The trouble is that, even once we exclude the troll/flame reviews from consideration, as is only fitting, most reviews are just not interesting, or helpful. Most reviews are, at the end of the day, either “I liked this” or “I didn’t like this”, which, even if I’m desperate for critique is just not helpful. There’s nothing to take from that.
But the other trouble with what the follow up posters are saying is that while I’m glad that they have access to a robust beta community, most people don’t. I’ve been in fandom for years, I have never had a regular beta reader, I have no idea where I would go about finding one, or how. I have never seen any explanation of how this works. Literally never.
I started off writing original fiction and later got into fanfic, and… the attitude that constructive criticism is mean and unhelpful is completely foreign to me. In original fiction the goal is (generally) ultimately to sell your work, and for it to be ready for that, multiple people have to pretty ruthlessly seek out any of the sort of obvious mistakes that might lead to “lol don’t buy this thing.”
Endlessly nice comments on my fic flatter me but they also kind of feel fake. There’s NOTHING in all 10,000 words of this thing that confused you or felt unrealistic? Seriously no fooling?
Because I’d like to think I’m that awesome…
… but I’m pretty sure no one is.
Fandom writers are strangely against criticism unless it comes from, basically, one vector, that being betas. The idea that you can take criticism of one work and apply it to another doesn’t seem to occur to most of them. I understand that it’s an unpaid hobby, but not wanting to improve at all, or only in limited ways, puzzles me.
That, yes.
I think it’s really unfair to say that because someone doesn’t want unsolicited concrit they don’t want to improve. It’s just that there is a time and a place for concrit, and it’s not in the comments section of a fic. If I want concrit I’ll ask my writing group, or my beta readers. And I’ll receive it at a time and a place where I’m expecting it. When I go into my AO3 comments I’m expecting to get praise. Getting negative feedback instead harshes my mood, basically.
I’m a beginner fic writer and I do this as a hobby. I’ve toyed with the idea of scrubbing some of it, but I’m nowhere near ready for that, yeah?
If I want constructive criticism on my fics, I’ll ask for it. If I think a fic is good but could be better, and I know the writer well enough, I might PM them on tumblr to ask if they want concrit. If the answer is “no,” I respect that. I’ve had a friend ask me if she could give me advice (again, privately) and I said yes, and she pointed out a weakness in my fics I already knew about and was working on.
The problem is that the majority of what randos think is concrit isn’t helpful at all. “I don’t like this ship, you should write X ship instead” isn’t helpful, and anyone who says that can get the fuck off my lawn. You don’t like the way I wrote X character? Okay, so go read something else, then.
How To Find A Beta: Think of a fic writer you love, who is familiar with your fandom, preferably someone you’ve been friendly with in general, and ask them if they’ll beta-read for you. I’ve been asked to beta-read for friends before in part because I left detailed comments on their fics, and I’m reblogging from my own beta, and in every case that’s how it happened.
People requesting me to beta have included: “I don’t usually write this character and I know you do and love her, so tell me if I got her voice accurately,” and “I’ve re-read this chapter too much and I can’t tell if it makes sense anymore.” It doesn’t have to be deep professional-level editing unless that’s what you both are after. Beta-reading can be basic SPAG editing or it can be “Will you read this smut scene and tell me if you can tell where everyone’s limbs are?”
How to start a community of writers supporting each other: Leave supportive comments on fics you like. Engage with your fellow authors. Follow their tumblrs. Start a chat somewhere (discord is good) and invite your friends who write. Talk about what you’re working on. There’s multiple methods to this and they’re all great, IME.
But like…..I’ve been reading fic for twenty years and I can’t think of any place where unsolicited critique was met with anything other than a polite “Who asked you?” I can only think that it must have been specific to a particular fandom or subset of it.
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character – let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred – you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different – perhaps wildly so – story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity – not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit – the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters – and fic readers – the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse – or even the same ficwriter in different AUs – can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why – it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️💋💋💋
Great post in general but @earlgreytea68 put into words what happened to me I relation to a lot of media – I need more about the characters. I need to know how they recovered from that scene/incident, I need to know what was said. I WANT to know what their routine is like when there is no plot (no mistery to solve, no murderer to escape).
E.g. codas are probably my favourite type of fic for tv series because there’s never enough about the characters just LIVING.
Thank you! I think many fic people just want all that off-screen stuff! And I also adore coda fics, because I really, really need for the story to just go on, and on, and on, and on. Like, there is just never enough of that for me, I feel like I would happily read forever (and then it would be bad, because I would need to eat and sleep and stuff and I would just be reading).
This is a tangent, but I went on a “Sports Night” fic reading binge a few weeks ago and the fic was all lovely and thoughtful and wow, the banter was absolutely spot-on and I was super-impressed but almost all of it ended with them getting together. Just…they got together, and that was the end. And that was great, I was glad they were together, but I just kept thinking, “But no, you’ve ended the story, and this is why my story would start.”
There’s this great fic, Like Sailing and Home Runs, that is great, and intense, and narratively clever and complex, and Dan delivers this speech into the third-to-last section, right after he and Casey get together:
“So far, I’m cruising on the euphoria of a new relationship and really, really good sex. The working together thing… It hasn’t quite hit us. So far it’s just been, you know, trying not to make out at work. Wait until we get a bad interview, a few cancelled games, and a crappy day of writing. That’s when the reality will hit.” Dan breathed in deeply and stretched his arms across the back of the couch. “But right now, it’s Euphoria City.”
And I just found myself thinking: All of that, that Dan’s talking about, that’s the interesting part of the story to me. I want to read about the bad days. Not because I want them to break up, but because I want to see how they handle it. I want to get them past Euphoria City and know they’re still going to be okay. I know it’s not what’s interesting to everyone! I totally get that! But…yeah. That’s what I want to know about.
(A very brief list of other Sports Night recs: A Form in Wax, which was a lovely slow, gradual descent into their relationship, and the in-progress All Eyes Are On You Now, which has delighted me greatly by getting them together and not being over yet. :-))
@earlgreytea68 So when are you writing us a book on the glories of character-driven fiction and why fanfic / original fic-”fanfic” is the superior genre? Because I would read the hell out of that book. ;D
Also please lend me your muses, mine are hopeless…. After the last fanfic/original fic fanfic discussion I started another original fic purposely pretending it was fanfic, and writing it in little ficlets and drabbles and
vignettes like fanfic. …..and now it’s completely gotten away from me too. So now I’m a fandom of one? *sigh*
Awwwww! I like that idea of writing it in little ficlets and drabbles and vignettes! Maybe you can create your own fandom? 🙂
And I would LOVE to write this book, hahahah, it would be my manifesto.
I’m reading the Sandman right now, and a character talking to Julius Caesar praised him for giving the people cheap corn.
The Columbian exchange didn’t occur for a millennium and a half. Literally unreadable. Sorry Neil, I can’t continue reading this.
The word Caesar used in latin, in his book on the Gallic Wars is Frumentum, which is commonly translated into English as Corn. “How odd,” you might think. “I didn’t think the Romans would even have known that corn exists.”
The word corn is old. It means the main grain of the region. It also predates the old world discovering the maize growing in the new world. The use of the word to mean exclusively Sweetcorn or Maize is a fairly modern North American usage.
Panel 6: Corn: What Americans call "corn" is one specific grain,
originally native to the Americas. In Pre-Columbian English, though, "corn"
meant any grain, particularly the most important local grain, usually wheat,
and retains some portion of that meaning in British English today. It is used
in that sense here.
John lies gasping in the sand. His blood is pouring into the sand underneath him.
He can feel his life slipping away from him.
All in all he’s in a pretty desperate way, which is how the devil finds him.
John watches as all around him time comes to a standstill. People freeze in the middle of running, birds up above stop in midflight, and an absolute silence descends upon them all.
John realises he isn’t in any pain any more and sits up. He looks around at everything.
“So this is death,” he murmurs to himself.
“Hardly.” A gasping voice like rocks grating together answers him.
John startles and spins around to face the owner of the voice. He comes face to face with a naked man his height, with completely black eyes, firey red hair, and skin the colour of slate.
John gives a yelp and falls over backwards.
“What are you?!”
“What I am exactly isn’t of any consequence. However, I do have a question for you. What would you give to live?”
John stares up at the man creature suddenly remembering his grandmother.
‘Watch your words Johnny, otherwise you might call the fae. And if you should ever have the misfortune to meet one of their ilk, appeal to their vanity and love of games and, always remember, watch your words.’
“You’re a f-fairy?”
The creature laughs. It sounds like nails on a chalkboard and John’s skin crawls.
“Fae, devil, djinn. It’s all the same.” It leans down into John’s face. “Now tell me what you want.”
“I want to live.”
It smiles with too many teeth. “Excellent and what would you give me if I gave you what you wanted?”
John’s mind is spinning. He’s thinking as quickly as he can. What can he give that won’t cost him anything?
“I would give you a game.”
John’s heart is beating fast. He knows he’s playing with fire, but he has a chance to survive this. Survive being shot.
The creature pulls itself back up to standing and narrows it’s eyes at John.
John gets the feeling he’s being reevaluated. The creature hadn’t expected him to be cunning.
“A game.” It’s head shakes back and forth as if rolling the idea around it’s head. “I accept. Deal.”
“Wait! Deal? We haven’t even discussed what kind of game.” John yells in a panic.
The creature gives it’s eerie laugh again, “Should have stipulated in your offer. But this is the most interesting offer I’ve had in eons. So, I’ll give you a hint.” It leans in close and thrusts it’s hand into John’s chest, not through his flesh, but into the very core of John’s being.
It pulls from John a silvery iridescent geode with a vein of black running through it’s core. It straightens once more and leers down at John before flexing its fingers and shattering the stone into seven pieces.
It throws the shards up into the sky and John watches in horror as they fly off. He knows that whatever the creature has stolen from him, it’s very important.
“The game is hide and seek. Now off you go John Watson. The clock is ticking.”
The creature fades away like a mirage and suddenly the world comes alive again, the sound startling John at the same time as the pain in his shoulder hits him.
He falls onto his back and his vision swims as suddenly his mate Bill Murray appears above him. Bill grabs John and drags him to cover and John hears Bill laugh to himself before he passes out,
“Watson, you lucky son of a gun.”
***********************
Yay! Another new fic. This is an idea I’ve had rattling around my head for 4 or 5 years now. Hope chapter 1 leaves you wanting more! 😉
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 