feedback and the pleasure of writing
Sep. 17th, 2005 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violaceaYeah, yeah, I'm going to write/edit eventually this afternoon. First, though, more (unlocked) meta, rambling thoughts on posts seen everywhere on LJ and JF lately.
(First, though, I must say that the f_w thread about Atlantis fandom provided hours and hours of entertainment - so many ten-cent words and fandom flounces and journal deletions, and I still have absolutely NO IDEA what the original kerfuffle was about! That's fantastic! I have no desire to be in a fandom with any one of those people, but man, do they provide entertainment when they get going.)
Ahem. Anyway. Feedback. Many people are getting their backs up about feedback - the definition, what constitutes good and bad feedback, and how authors are "supposed" to feel when they do or don't get feedback. This would be my "fuck it, no one cares, but I'm going to tell you how I feel anyway" post.
I read a post via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandom this morning in which the author was offended by the "you should write for yourself" theory. While I don't doubt there are highbrow artsy types out there who, by "write for yourself" mean "wanting feedback and interaction is an artistic sin", but I submit that, in most cases, this isn't what that theory means.
I subscribe to the "write for yourself first" theory, but does that mean I don't think an author should crave an audience? Hell no. "Write for yourself" means, to me, that you should tell the story that you love, one that entertains you, because audiences are utterly unpredictable. There is no set formula. You can't say "okay, I'll write an angsty story featuring a pairing of A/B and it will always get 10 pieces of feedback." That might be true today, but tomorrow, fandom might shift, and suddenly B/C is what everyone wants, or fluffy wedding!fic, or the audience might have shifted focus to another fandom all together. Maybe your story hits all the right notes, and you get more feedback than your email inbox can handle. Maybe, though, you've posted your story when your whole fandom is away at a convention, or when someone else has posted a 100-chapter fic that everyone is currently devouring, or after a new TV show debuted that enchanted everyone. So, if you happen to not get any feedback, you've at least spent your writing time entertaining yourself and sharpening your skills, so the time isn't a total loss.
Note, the above paragraph does not say "your own entertainment should be your foremost and ultimate goal." It says that it should be part of the goal, because you cannot control other people. I'm not saying that it's invalid to be disappointed when a story you love gets no attention. God knows I've been prone to ranting about readers' stupidity to one person or another. But, in the end, if you're looking for a long-term relationship with your fandom, I think it's probably smarter to contain those rants to a one-on-one situation, with trusted friends, rather than bitching out the community at large.
... before I continue that thought, what about relative amounts of feedback? What constitutes "no feedback" in an author's mind? For some, it's just that - no response whatsoever. For others, it means that only the same five friends respond every time. I checked out the SG:A flashfiction community the other day, and by the looks of it, fewer than twenty responses there means a story was a failure. But, yet, the person who gets zero comments on their story would kill to have five friends who enjoyed every story they wrote, and the person who only gets the same five people would turn cartwheels if twenty new people ever responded to their story.
Comparing yourself to other writers is human, but is it fair to use someone else's yardstick to determine the worth of your own story and readers? Feedback is never based solely on the merits of your story, no matter how fair that would be. It's based on name recognition - does the reader know your work, or recognize that their friends like your work? - on the type of story - like it or not, many folks in fandoms are loyal to certain pairings, and rarely read outside of them - on the community the story is posted to, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes, it's based on stupid fandom politics. Sometimes, it's just the time of day, week, month that you choose to post. And, in the end, certain people are just going to get a ton of feedback no matter what they choose to write - they've been in fandom forever, the type of story they write appeals to a specific segment of the population, whatever. It happens. Most people are probably never going to get a hundred individual pieces of feedback on any story, much less all of them. So, what's the use in comparing yourself to those people? They're an anomaly.
Continuing the thought from earlier, about not bitching out the community at large for your lack of feedback ... many people want fan fiction to be taken mroe seriously, not derided as a "stupid hobby" or whatever insult someone chooses to use. Okay, then perhaps we should treat it professionally from the inside. If a recently published profic author - or even a moderately successful midlist author - had a public hissy fit about how no one appreciated their work, how few books have sold, and blamed the lack of readership on the readers who never picked up their book, how would it be received? I'd wager that a lot of potential readers would be turned off by it; people who would have possibly picked up one of that author's books in the future will, instead, be left with the idea that the author has a bad attitude, and will skip right past. I think the same is true of fanfic authors and readers. Blaming your audience, even when it's a valid argument, is never a good way to entice a new audience to your door.
Again, I am not saying it's invalid to feel frustration when no one gives you feedback. I'm not even saying it's bad to vent that frustration - I'm just saying that, if you want to be taken seriously as a writer in fandom, maybe it's a better idea to keep those vents closely filtered. Everything you say in a public forum is something a potential reader might judge you on.
(Of course, there are always those people - BNFs, if you will - who can rand and rave and act as stupidly as they want and still have loyal minions. The Ann Rices of fandom, I suppose.)
Anyway, I think I digressed somewhere up there. I know I'm spending way too much time on this, as it's now an hour since I started writing this. (To be fair, I've been answering phones in between! Honest!) I swear I had another point I wanted to make ...
... nah, it's gone now. I guess my main point is that, as an author, you can't control reader response. You can make sure that the story you're posting is the best story you know how to write, and you can try to judge things like timing and community and such, but in the end, the part you control ends the minute you click "post". It's human and very understandable to be frustrated by things you can't control, but when you're engaging in an activity that requires an audience, unleashing those frustrations on the very people you're counting on for that audience might not be the best course of action. So ... when I say "write for yourself first", what I mean is to make sure that you're having fun with the actual writing of the story. Again, I do not mean that you're not supposed to hope for feedback, or that you're supposed to be perfectly happy to just send your story out into the void without any confirmation that someone else has read it. I'm just saying that people, in general, are weird creatures, and sometimes things don't always go as you hope. In the worst case scenario, if you've written a story you enjoy, at least you have that part.
I guess I just want to try to be a glass-half-full sort of person. For me, personally, writing is a hard enough venture without obsessing over the parts I can't control!
(First, though, I must say that the f_w thread about Atlantis fandom provided hours and hours of entertainment - so many ten-cent words and fandom flounces and journal deletions, and I still have absolutely NO IDEA what the original kerfuffle was about! That's fantastic! I have no desire to be in a fandom with any one of those people, but man, do they provide entertainment when they get going.)
Ahem. Anyway. Feedback. Many people are getting their backs up about feedback - the definition, what constitutes good and bad feedback, and how authors are "supposed" to feel when they do or don't get feedback. This would be my "fuck it, no one cares, but I'm going to tell you how I feel anyway" post.
I read a post via
metafandom this morning in which the author was offended by the "you should write for yourself" theory. While I don't doubt there are highbrow artsy types out there who, by "write for yourself" mean "wanting feedback and interaction is an artistic sin", but I submit that, in most cases, this isn't what that theory means.I subscribe to the "write for yourself first" theory, but does that mean I don't think an author should crave an audience? Hell no. "Write for yourself" means, to me, that you should tell the story that you love, one that entertains you, because audiences are utterly unpredictable. There is no set formula. You can't say "okay, I'll write an angsty story featuring a pairing of A/B and it will always get 10 pieces of feedback." That might be true today, but tomorrow, fandom might shift, and suddenly B/C is what everyone wants, or fluffy wedding!fic, or the audience might have shifted focus to another fandom all together. Maybe your story hits all the right notes, and you get more feedback than your email inbox can handle. Maybe, though, you've posted your story when your whole fandom is away at a convention, or when someone else has posted a 100-chapter fic that everyone is currently devouring, or after a new TV show debuted that enchanted everyone. So, if you happen to not get any feedback, you've at least spent your writing time entertaining yourself and sharpening your skills, so the time isn't a total loss.
Note, the above paragraph does not say "your own entertainment should be your foremost and ultimate goal." It says that it should be part of the goal, because you cannot control other people. I'm not saying that it's invalid to be disappointed when a story you love gets no attention. God knows I've been prone to ranting about readers' stupidity to one person or another. But, in the end, if you're looking for a long-term relationship with your fandom, I think it's probably smarter to contain those rants to a one-on-one situation, with trusted friends, rather than bitching out the community at large.
... before I continue that thought, what about relative amounts of feedback? What constitutes "no feedback" in an author's mind? For some, it's just that - no response whatsoever. For others, it means that only the same five friends respond every time. I checked out the SG:A flashfiction community the other day, and by the looks of it, fewer than twenty responses there means a story was a failure. But, yet, the person who gets zero comments on their story would kill to have five friends who enjoyed every story they wrote, and the person who only gets the same five people would turn cartwheels if twenty new people ever responded to their story.
Comparing yourself to other writers is human, but is it fair to use someone else's yardstick to determine the worth of your own story and readers? Feedback is never based solely on the merits of your story, no matter how fair that would be. It's based on name recognition - does the reader know your work, or recognize that their friends like your work? - on the type of story - like it or not, many folks in fandoms are loyal to certain pairings, and rarely read outside of them - on the community the story is posted to, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes, it's based on stupid fandom politics. Sometimes, it's just the time of day, week, month that you choose to post. And, in the end, certain people are just going to get a ton of feedback no matter what they choose to write - they've been in fandom forever, the type of story they write appeals to a specific segment of the population, whatever. It happens. Most people are probably never going to get a hundred individual pieces of feedback on any story, much less all of them. So, what's the use in comparing yourself to those people? They're an anomaly.
Continuing the thought from earlier, about not bitching out the community at large for your lack of feedback ... many people want fan fiction to be taken mroe seriously, not derided as a "stupid hobby" or whatever insult someone chooses to use. Okay, then perhaps we should treat it professionally from the inside. If a recently published profic author - or even a moderately successful midlist author - had a public hissy fit about how no one appreciated their work, how few books have sold, and blamed the lack of readership on the readers who never picked up their book, how would it be received? I'd wager that a lot of potential readers would be turned off by it; people who would have possibly picked up one of that author's books in the future will, instead, be left with the idea that the author has a bad attitude, and will skip right past. I think the same is true of fanfic authors and readers. Blaming your audience, even when it's a valid argument, is never a good way to entice a new audience to your door.
Again, I am not saying it's invalid to feel frustration when no one gives you feedback. I'm not even saying it's bad to vent that frustration - I'm just saying that, if you want to be taken seriously as a writer in fandom, maybe it's a better idea to keep those vents closely filtered. Everything you say in a public forum is something a potential reader might judge you on.
(Of course, there are always those people - BNFs, if you will - who can rand and rave and act as stupidly as they want and still have loyal minions. The Ann Rices of fandom, I suppose.)
Anyway, I think I digressed somewhere up there. I know I'm spending way too much time on this, as it's now an hour since I started writing this. (To be fair, I've been answering phones in between! Honest!) I swear I had another point I wanted to make ...
... nah, it's gone now. I guess my main point is that, as an author, you can't control reader response. You can make sure that the story you're posting is the best story you know how to write, and you can try to judge things like timing and community and such, but in the end, the part you control ends the minute you click "post". It's human and very understandable to be frustrated by things you can't control, but when you're engaging in an activity that requires an audience, unleashing those frustrations on the very people you're counting on for that audience might not be the best course of action. So ... when I say "write for yourself first", what I mean is to make sure that you're having fun with the actual writing of the story. Again, I do not mean that you're not supposed to hope for feedback, or that you're supposed to be perfectly happy to just send your story out into the void without any confirmation that someone else has read it. I'm just saying that people, in general, are weird creatures, and sometimes things don't always go as you hope. In the worst case scenario, if you've written a story you enjoy, at least you have that part.
I guess I just want to try to be a glass-half-full sort of person. For me, personally, writing is a hard enough venture without obsessing over the parts I can't control!