Things to remember when writing (fanfic on LJ)
This is not advice to be a better writer. It is advice to potentially be a happier writer. As with any advice, YMMV. Inspired in small part by an earlier conversation on my LJ, and in larger part by boredom at work.
I've been a fanficcer for longer than I sometimes care to admit (but not quite as long as I sometimes care to exaggerate). I wrote and "published" my first piece of online fanfiction in the summer of 1996 while in the tender blush of early teenagerhood, just taking those first wobbling steps into awkward adolecense and desperately trying to dodge utter social pariahtude. As I've sometimes remarked on before, this piece received a full-fledged, concrit (actual concrit, and not just a couple paragraphs of it) review from someone who was at the time a BNF -- though I didn't know what a BNF was. Basically, it was terrible and she told me so, but it had redeeming qualities and showed a lot of potential and she also told me that. Good stuff, right?
Anyway, that's all not really here nor there, except to say that I've been around the block a couple times on several different types of forums writing a great deal of fiction in different fandoms, for different audiences, at different ratings, humor- and sensical-levels, dark topics, angst, death, and even (*gasp*) the occasional sex scene. (I wonder on occasion if the reason why I have little interest in writing those is because I got started so damned early. Or if I was just scarred for life by Remy/Rogue psychic-plain h/c sex -- though that was a pretty good one, the Gestalt Arc by Lori MacDonald, which last I checked could still be found in its entirely thanks to Luba Kmetyk -- who wrote some lovely Pryde/Wisdom fic that I loved which, well, often involved Wisdom getting tied to things. My kinks sometimes have very visible roots.) I have been around the proverbial block so many times I might qualify for a marathon. There are a couple things that I've learned along the way:
1) For every reader who comments/responds, there are at least three or more of them lurking who didn't.And two of those three probably even enjoyed it.
People are seriously lazy about commenting. Do you comment on or respond in some way to every fic that you read? If you do, you're a far, far better reader than I. Hell, if you comment on or respond to even half of what you read, you're a better reader than I. My trouble is, if I can't immediately think of something more to say than "I enjoyed reading that", I won't say it. If I'm at work and have another story lined up to read next, I won't comment. If I'm at work and I'm working on a document, I won't comment (unless it's a really boring document). If I'm at home and I'm thinking I might check my flist, I won't comment. If I am not struck as I read with something profound and utterly valuable that I simply must report to that author, I won't comment. And sometimes, even if I am struck with something profound and utterly valuable I don't end up commenting. I've never commented on most of my favorite fics -- in any fandom. As a reader, sharing your reading experience with the writer can be a remarkably intimidating thing to do. Reading a story can be an extremely personal and intimate sort of experience, especially if the story really grabs you and pulls you in, and acknowledging that there are other people, most of whom are complete strangers, involved in that experience can be hard. It's easier to comment on friends' fics, because you already trust them, but even then, a comment is not guaranteed.
Forgive your lurkers, they mean no harm. Thank them for reading, if you like, in a general author's note, but don't beg them to reply. Telling them you want their response, in my experience, seldom actually encourages them to do so. Responding warmly and rewardingly to those who do respond, even (or rather, especially) if they're responding with more than simply "I liked it" and provide actual concrit, is much more likely to encourage further response. But, again, it's not a guarantee.
2) If you find it interesting enough to write, someone will find it interesting enough to readThe trick, naturally, is to find that someone and make sure they know you wrote it.
You can't just post something in your private journal and expect people to find it. They won't know to look, for one thing. Sure, you could luck out and have someone stumble across it and tell other people about it, or have a BNFishly respected sort on your friends-list who'll read it and tell other people about it, but the main thing to note there is that someone is telling someone else, and if you really wanna guarantee you're getting some readership (who, remember, mostly won't respond), you're going to have to be the one telling people about it.
I know, this feels awkward. Trust me, I know it feels awkward. It's a tough thing to get over and used to, selling yourself. And it can be an even tougher learning curve to figure out what sorts of self-sales works in which environments. These days, I mostly go with posting my story to more than one fic community on LJ. I give them header information (title, author, rating, warning, spoilers, and summary) and a link to the fic with some sort of enigmatic quote/the first line of the story as the text. I leave out flashy banners (though I'm very particular about what icon I'll use for each post) or any sort of personalized text. There's an odd sort of balance to the whole thing in LJ-land. Get too flashy and eye-catching and people will hate you on principal for messing up their neat little friends list, but get too bland and no one will bother to let their eyes rest on your post long enough to figure out if they want to read it or not. And crossposting still isn't a guarantee of loud, enthusiastic readership.
Now, there's been some business regarding warnings and things -- I don't really know what that's all about, because I pretty much just stick to reading and writing fanfic when it comes to fandom and nothing else. I won't go into all that here, except to say that, IMO, the most important part of your little advertising post (and let's not pretend it's anything other than what it is: advertising) is your summary. You have to have a summary to get my readership. Unless you're an author whom I've read before and trust, or someone else has provided me with a summary while reccing your stuff, if you don't have a summary, I won't read it. If your summary is a quote from a famous person or a song lyric that gives me little to no idea of what's actually in the story, I won't read it (barring previous knowledge of your writing or strong rec from a trusted reader). If your summary goes on for more than, like, two or three sentences, I might read it, but only if I happen to have time that particular day to read over your whole summary, which isn't a guarantee.
It should be noted that I suck at writing summaries. I suck at it a lot. I have no idea how I managed to convince anyone to ever read my stuff. I'm working on that.
3) Don't apologize to your reader. Don't threaten your reader. Don't blame your reader.Hell, don't write for your reader.
Which is not to say "don't think about your reader at all". If you can manage to write without thinking about what kind of reader you're hoping for, more power to you. I'm saying don't let your readers (or perceived lack thereof) stop you from writing. If your readers say you suck (in which case, they're flamers, not readers), then continuing to write will only improve your writing (though looking into ways to improve other than practice-practice-practice might not be a bad idea). If your readers say they liked it, then continuing to write will only improve your writing, and perhaps they'll say they like it even more. If your readers offer concrit, congratulations. You've just won the reader-lottery. Take their words to heart, reminding yourself along the way that their opinion is not the be-all and end-all without dismissing their opinion outright, and remember that opinion later as you continue to write, which -- say it with me now -- will only improve your writing.
Don't apologize to your reader.If you start a story out with an author's note (or god forbid, a comment in the summary) saying "I'm a new writer", "I know I'm not very good yet", "I wrote this while high on prednisone and swinging from a trapeze , hahahahaha", or "I know it's not very good", I will not read your fic. (Okay, so I might on the new writer part. But not if you ask me to "go easy on you".) You're setting yourself up for the fail when you say those things. Let your fic, good or bad, speak for itself. (And please, don't reference a beta -- be it thanking one or saying you didn't have one -- and then say all mistakes in the fic are your own. All mistakes in the fic are your own, period, beta or no beta. It's your fic. You take responsibility for it. I don't know a single reader who's ever read a fic and said "Man, this beta did a terrible job.")
Oh, and while I'm on the subject, an acknowledgment of your limitations is not an excuse to give into those limitations. If you know you suck at grammar, find yourself a good grammar beta. Read a grammar guide -- hell, read more than one, and then discover the fascinating world of people arguing over the fact that grammar is actually way more subjective than you might think and varies greatly by country, publication type, and personal preference. It's fun! I swear. . . . If you can't spell, invest in a good spell check. (I am a terrible speller. My spellcheck is my savior, along with google as a replacement for looking things up in the dictionary to see how they're spelled, and joining along with beta-readers who poke me and go "it's brake, not break and led, not lead".) If you don't know how to set a broken arm and want someone setting a broken arm in your story, research it. It probably won't even take you very long (and if you're going for unapologetic whump without worry or need for realism, say so. Claiming unapologetic whump doesn't count as apologizing. Hence the "unapologetic").
Don't threaten your reader.Saying "if you don't read and review, I might not post the next chapter!" doesn't make people read and review (or at the very least, it shouldn't). It makes you look twelve.
Don't blame your reader.People haven't stopped reading your kind of fic. There is no dark side of the fanfiction force that's drawing people away from your fic. Yes, fanfic, like everything else, goes through its fads. But when it comes right down to it, people are here to read. Be it plotty or not-so-plotty, hurt/comfort, shmoop, crack, angst, or the dreaded navel-gazing bathtub scene where the character listens to Evanescence and My Chemical Romance and thinks about how deep their feelings are and how no one in the world understands them except Evanescence and My Chemical Romance (and all the other twelve year olds), someone is looking to read that kind of fic. It's your job to find them -- but I've already gone into that. And it just might be your job to adjust your writing to get the kind of audience you want. I'm not saying "sell out!" and throw yourself off the popularity cliff. I'm saying take a good long look at your work, figure out what you think works and what doesn't, and edit. I'm saying take a good long look at your audience, decided whether or not you're publicizing in the right places, and adjust your system. It's your fic. You have to do the work. Claiming differently makes you sound -- say it with me now -- twelve.
An example: My sophomore year of college, I took a 20th Century European Fiction class, and became enamored with a certain set of post-World War II and/or Soviet Bloc existential white male writers (some of whom I still love) began to alter my voice and style to more closely refelct theirs.
If you think your OTP is unpopular, you should see what happens when the online fandom community in general runs into a co-ed trying to be Camus.
One of my works from this time period had enough random crazy h/c and whump in it to keep people reading despite my throwing in things like cultural anthropological theory and bizarre, half-formed references to The Fall -- not to mention my muddled, self-contradictory pseudo-scientific theory of the physics of magical energy. But others -- including one in particular which I'm still rather proud of the basic idea behind -- weren't so lucky. After awhile, the majority of readers' comments and reviews went from "interesting idea, I like this!" and "I want to see more!" and such the like to things like "that made no sense", "What does this have to do with [the fandom]?", the ever eloquent "huh?" and what remains my personal favorite of all time: "Weird, in a bad way. Please never write again."
I came to the conclusion, in my infinite, egotistical, liberal arts educated sort of way, that I had outgrown my fandom audience and needed to set my sights on "real" writing and being a big player in the literature world. And for two and a half years -- finishing out my degree and a good six months into attempting to survive in the "real" world with a liberal arts degree in creative writing and not, say, a certificate as a mechanic and/or nursing experience -- that's what I did. Then I stumbled upon a bit of advice, a blurb really, from one of the authors I'd grown up respecting the most, in the form of an audiobook of a posthumous publication of everything that remained on his harddrive:Art is the death of creativity. . . . It is better to be literate than literary.
-- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
He went on to describe his experience reading a James Bond novel, and how, despite the fact that it was not what anyone would ever call "literature", it was really very well written.
I thought about that for a long, long time. And eventually, one late night, after reading a Buffy genre fic (Here Comes a Candle by wiseacress, which, if nothing else, served to spook the hell out of me at 4 o'clock in the morning), I started writing fanfic again, mixing the more mature voice inspired by Camus, Calvino, Kundera, and Kafka (and probably some folks whose names don't start with a "K" sound) with more of my early humorist influences (Adams, Barry, Moore, Sedaris, to name a few) and just a hint of the spooky-weird (Gaiman, all the way), and started coming out with something different -- still touching on the themes I wanted to explore like politics, environmentalism, existentialism, surrealism, psychology, etc, etc, while still being comprehensible to someone who hadn't lived in my brain with me while I wrote it. And stopped posting to fanfiction.net.
4) Stop countingWelcome to the hardest thing on this list.
You know how, when you're at work, you can watch the clock and the time slooooooooows down and everything gets really agonizing and frustrating? Or you can ignore the clock and just get your work done and time speeds up and things go by swimmingly? Oh, not always, of course, but sometimes?
It's pretty much the same thing, here.
An example that has more to do with fanfiction: When I was first getting started, I ended up with an authorial page on a popular, closed personal website (like a recc list only with the text of the story actually stored on the reccer's site). The person running the site decided to put web counters on every HTML page (the fiction was usually in .txt format). Which meant that I could go to my authorial page and see how many people had visited and likely gone on to read my fic. Woohoo! And the webmistress even told me that my page seemed to get more hits than a lot of the others! . . . Yeah, and almost all of them were me, checking the page to see how many people had checked the page. How lame is that?
But yeah, it's hard. I know it's hard. OMG, I know it's hard. It's human nature to look at someone's post and go "How come that person has got 176 comments on their fic and mine only has 10?" and then obsess over it. Or look at your own page and go "I'm on six pages of comments!" and obsess over it. Or reply to each and every comment not because you like to encourage commenting but because it'll double the number of comments, so people will think you're popular. Or track recc communities or recc posts or anything with the word "recc" in it, not to get recommendations of stories you might not have read yet, but to see if your story is getting recced. And count each and every time you're not included in a recc post, or you don't get enough comments as a personal blow.
Seriously. It's really, really hard. And something that, as far as I know, every writer or artist or person with creative output of any kind goes through -- even if they're super indie and patting themselves on the back for being obscure instead of for being popular. But it's not actually an accurate reflection of the quality, importance, or entertainment value of your work. It's just an indication of who felt like getting loud in that particular corner of the internet.
And lastely, with thanks to Neil Gaiman: 5) You don't have a responsibility to your readers any more than they have a responsibility to you.You don't have to make sure you finish your fic. You life getting in the way is not a failure as a writer. That said, your readers will probably be happier if you do finish it.
You only have as much responsibility to your readers as you want to have. Sometimes you'll disapoint them. Sometimes you won't. It happens.
Your readers don't have a responsibility to you. They don't have to reply to your fic. You'll likely be happier if they do respond to it, especially if they like it.
Sometimes they'll disappoint you. Sometimes they won't.
It happens.
I've been a fanficcer for longer than I sometimes care to admit (but not quite as long as I sometimes care to exaggerate). I wrote and "published" my first piece of online fanfiction in the summer of 1996 while in the tender blush of early teenagerhood, just taking those first wobbling steps into awkward adolecense and desperately trying to dodge utter social pariahtude. As I've sometimes remarked on before, this piece received a full-fledged, concrit (actual concrit, and not just a couple paragraphs of it) review from someone who was at the time a BNF -- though I didn't know what a BNF was. Basically, it was terrible and she told me so, but it had redeeming qualities and showed a lot of potential and she also told me that. Good stuff, right?
Anyway, that's all not really here nor there, except to say that I've been around the block a couple times on several different types of forums writing a great deal of fiction in different fandoms, for different audiences, at different ratings, humor- and sensical-levels, dark topics, angst, death, and even (*gasp*) the occasional sex scene. (I wonder on occasion if the reason why I have little interest in writing those is because I got started so damned early. Or if I was just scarred for life by Remy/Rogue psychic-plain h/c sex -- though that was a pretty good one, the Gestalt Arc by Lori MacDonald, which last I checked could still be found in its entirely thanks to Luba Kmetyk -- who wrote some lovely Pryde/Wisdom fic that I loved which, well, often involved Wisdom getting tied to things. My kinks sometimes have very visible roots.) I have been around the proverbial block so many times I might qualify for a marathon. There are a couple things that I've learned along the way:
1) For every reader who comments/responds, there are at least three or more of them lurking who didn't.And two of those three probably even enjoyed it.
People are seriously lazy about commenting. Do you comment on or respond in some way to every fic that you read? If you do, you're a far, far better reader than I. Hell, if you comment on or respond to even half of what you read, you're a better reader than I. My trouble is, if I can't immediately think of something more to say than "I enjoyed reading that", I won't say it. If I'm at work and have another story lined up to read next, I won't comment. If I'm at work and I'm working on a document, I won't comment (unless it's a really boring document). If I'm at home and I'm thinking I might check my flist, I won't comment. If I am not struck as I read with something profound and utterly valuable that I simply must report to that author, I won't comment. And sometimes, even if I am struck with something profound and utterly valuable I don't end up commenting. I've never commented on most of my favorite fics -- in any fandom. As a reader, sharing your reading experience with the writer can be a remarkably intimidating thing to do. Reading a story can be an extremely personal and intimate sort of experience, especially if the story really grabs you and pulls you in, and acknowledging that there are other people, most of whom are complete strangers, involved in that experience can be hard. It's easier to comment on friends' fics, because you already trust them, but even then, a comment is not guaranteed.
Forgive your lurkers, they mean no harm. Thank them for reading, if you like, in a general author's note, but don't beg them to reply. Telling them you want their response, in my experience, seldom actually encourages them to do so. Responding warmly and rewardingly to those who do respond, even (or rather, especially) if they're responding with more than simply "I liked it" and provide actual concrit, is much more likely to encourage further response. But, again, it's not a guarantee.
2) If you find it interesting enough to write, someone will find it interesting enough to readThe trick, naturally, is to find that someone and make sure they know you wrote it.
You can't just post something in your private journal and expect people to find it. They won't know to look, for one thing. Sure, you could luck out and have someone stumble across it and tell other people about it, or have a BNFishly respected sort on your friends-list who'll read it and tell other people about it, but the main thing to note there is that someone is telling someone else, and if you really wanna guarantee you're getting some readership (who, remember, mostly won't respond), you're going to have to be the one telling people about it.
I know, this feels awkward. Trust me, I know it feels awkward. It's a tough thing to get over and used to, selling yourself. And it can be an even tougher learning curve to figure out what sorts of self-sales works in which environments. These days, I mostly go with posting my story to more than one fic community on LJ. I give them header information (title, author, rating, warning, spoilers, and summary) and a link to the fic with some sort of enigmatic quote/the first line of the story as the text. I leave out flashy banners (though I'm very particular about what icon I'll use for each post) or any sort of personalized text. There's an odd sort of balance to the whole thing in LJ-land. Get too flashy and eye-catching and people will hate you on principal for messing up their neat little friends list, but get too bland and no one will bother to let their eyes rest on your post long enough to figure out if they want to read it or not. And crossposting still isn't a guarantee of loud, enthusiastic readership.
Now, there's been some business regarding warnings and things -- I don't really know what that's all about, because I pretty much just stick to reading and writing fanfic when it comes to fandom and nothing else. I won't go into all that here, except to say that, IMO, the most important part of your little advertising post (and let's not pretend it's anything other than what it is: advertising) is your summary. You have to have a summary to get my readership. Unless you're an author whom I've read before and trust, or someone else has provided me with a summary while reccing your stuff, if you don't have a summary, I won't read it. If your summary is a quote from a famous person or a song lyric that gives me little to no idea of what's actually in the story, I won't read it (barring previous knowledge of your writing or strong rec from a trusted reader). If your summary goes on for more than, like, two or three sentences, I might read it, but only if I happen to have time that particular day to read over your whole summary, which isn't a guarantee.
It should be noted that I suck at writing summaries. I suck at it a lot. I have no idea how I managed to convince anyone to ever read my stuff. I'm working on that.
3) Don't apologize to your reader. Don't threaten your reader. Don't blame your reader.Hell, don't write for your reader.
Which is not to say "don't think about your reader at all". If you can manage to write without thinking about what kind of reader you're hoping for, more power to you. I'm saying don't let your readers (or perceived lack thereof) stop you from writing. If your readers say you suck (in which case, they're flamers, not readers), then continuing to write will only improve your writing (though looking into ways to improve other than practice-practice-practice might not be a bad idea). If your readers say they liked it, then continuing to write will only improve your writing, and perhaps they'll say they like it even more. If your readers offer concrit, congratulations. You've just won the reader-lottery. Take their words to heart, reminding yourself along the way that their opinion is not the be-all and end-all without dismissing their opinion outright, and remember that opinion later as you continue to write, which -- say it with me now -- will only improve your writing.
Don't apologize to your reader.If you start a story out with an author's note (or god forbid, a comment in the summary) saying "I'm a new writer", "I know I'm not very good yet", "I wrote this while high on prednisone and swinging from a trapeze , hahahahaha", or "I know it's not very good", I will not read your fic. (Okay, so I might on the new writer part. But not if you ask me to "go easy on you".) You're setting yourself up for the fail when you say those things. Let your fic, good or bad, speak for itself. (And please, don't reference a beta -- be it thanking one or saying you didn't have one -- and then say all mistakes in the fic are your own. All mistakes in the fic are your own, period, beta or no beta. It's your fic. You take responsibility for it. I don't know a single reader who's ever read a fic and said "Man, this beta did a terrible job.")
Oh, and while I'm on the subject, an acknowledgment of your limitations is not an excuse to give into those limitations. If you know you suck at grammar, find yourself a good grammar beta. Read a grammar guide -- hell, read more than one, and then discover the fascinating world of people arguing over the fact that grammar is actually way more subjective than you might think and varies greatly by country, publication type, and personal preference. It's fun! I swear. . . . If you can't spell, invest in a good spell check. (I am a terrible speller. My spellcheck is my savior, along with google as a replacement for looking things up in the dictionary to see how they're spelled, and joining along with beta-readers who poke me and go "it's brake, not break and led, not lead".) If you don't know how to set a broken arm and want someone setting a broken arm in your story, research it. It probably won't even take you very long (and if you're going for unapologetic whump without worry or need for realism, say so. Claiming unapologetic whump doesn't count as apologizing. Hence the "unapologetic").
Don't threaten your reader.Saying "if you don't read and review, I might not post the next chapter!" doesn't make people read and review (or at the very least, it shouldn't). It makes you look twelve.
Don't blame your reader.People haven't stopped reading your kind of fic. There is no dark side of the fanfiction force that's drawing people away from your fic. Yes, fanfic, like everything else, goes through its fads. But when it comes right down to it, people are here to read. Be it plotty or not-so-plotty, hurt/comfort, shmoop, crack, angst, or the dreaded navel-gazing bathtub scene where the character listens to Evanescence and My Chemical Romance and thinks about how deep their feelings are and how no one in the world understands them except Evanescence and My Chemical Romance (and all the other twelve year olds), someone is looking to read that kind of fic. It's your job to find them -- but I've already gone into that. And it just might be your job to adjust your writing to get the kind of audience you want. I'm not saying "sell out!" and throw yourself off the popularity cliff. I'm saying take a good long look at your work, figure out what you think works and what doesn't, and edit. I'm saying take a good long look at your audience, decided whether or not you're publicizing in the right places, and adjust your system. It's your fic. You have to do the work. Claiming differently makes you sound -- say it with me now -- twelve.
An example: My sophomore year of college, I took a 20th Century European Fiction class, and became enamored with a certain set of post-World War II and/or Soviet Bloc existential white male writers (some of whom I still love) began to alter my voice and style to more closely refelct theirs.
If you think your OTP is unpopular, you should see what happens when the online fandom community in general runs into a co-ed trying to be Camus.
One of my works from this time period had enough random crazy h/c and whump in it to keep people reading despite my throwing in things like cultural anthropological theory and bizarre, half-formed references to The Fall -- not to mention my muddled, self-contradictory pseudo-scientific theory of the physics of magical energy. But others -- including one in particular which I'm still rather proud of the basic idea behind -- weren't so lucky. After awhile, the majority of readers' comments and reviews went from "interesting idea, I like this!" and "I want to see more!" and such the like to things like "that made no sense", "What does this have to do with [the fandom]?", the ever eloquent "huh?" and what remains my personal favorite of all time: "Weird, in a bad way. Please never write again."
I came to the conclusion, in my infinite, egotistical, liberal arts educated sort of way, that I had outgrown my fandom audience and needed to set my sights on "real" writing and being a big player in the literature world. And for two and a half years -- finishing out my degree and a good six months into attempting to survive in the "real" world with a liberal arts degree in creative writing and not, say, a certificate as a mechanic and/or nursing experience -- that's what I did. Then I stumbled upon a bit of advice, a blurb really, from one of the authors I'd grown up respecting the most, in the form of an audiobook of a posthumous publication of everything that remained on his harddrive:Art is the death of creativity. . . . It is better to be literate than literary.
-- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
He went on to describe his experience reading a James Bond novel, and how, despite the fact that it was not what anyone would ever call "literature", it was really very well written.
I thought about that for a long, long time. And eventually, one late night, after reading a Buffy genre fic (Here Comes a Candle by wiseacress, which, if nothing else, served to spook the hell out of me at 4 o'clock in the morning), I started writing fanfic again, mixing the more mature voice inspired by Camus, Calvino, Kundera, and Kafka (and probably some folks whose names don't start with a "K" sound) with more of my early humorist influences (Adams, Barry, Moore, Sedaris, to name a few) and just a hint of the spooky-weird (Gaiman, all the way), and started coming out with something different -- still touching on the themes I wanted to explore like politics, environmentalism, existentialism, surrealism, psychology, etc, etc, while still being comprehensible to someone who hadn't lived in my brain with me while I wrote it. And stopped posting to fanfiction.net.
4) Stop countingWelcome to the hardest thing on this list.
You know how, when you're at work, you can watch the clock and the time slooooooooows down and everything gets really agonizing and frustrating? Or you can ignore the clock and just get your work done and time speeds up and things go by swimmingly? Oh, not always, of course, but sometimes?
It's pretty much the same thing, here.
An example that has more to do with fanfiction: When I was first getting started, I ended up with an authorial page on a popular, closed personal website (like a recc list only with the text of the story actually stored on the reccer's site). The person running the site decided to put web counters on every HTML page (the fiction was usually in .txt format). Which meant that I could go to my authorial page and see how many people had visited and likely gone on to read my fic. Woohoo! And the webmistress even told me that my page seemed to get more hits than a lot of the others! . . . Yeah, and almost all of them were me, checking the page to see how many people had checked the page. How lame is that?
But yeah, it's hard. I know it's hard. OMG, I know it's hard. It's human nature to look at someone's post and go "How come that person has got 176 comments on their fic and mine only has 10?" and then obsess over it. Or look at your own page and go "I'm on six pages of comments!" and obsess over it. Or reply to each and every comment not because you like to encourage commenting but because it'll double the number of comments, so people will think you're popular. Or track recc communities or recc posts or anything with the word "recc" in it, not to get recommendations of stories you might not have read yet, but to see if your story is getting recced. And count each and every time you're not included in a recc post, or you don't get enough comments as a personal blow.
Seriously. It's really, really hard. And something that, as far as I know, every writer or artist or person with creative output of any kind goes through -- even if they're super indie and patting themselves on the back for being obscure instead of for being popular. But it's not actually an accurate reflection of the quality, importance, or entertainment value of your work. It's just an indication of who felt like getting loud in that particular corner of the internet.
And lastely, with thanks to Neil Gaiman: 5) You don't have a responsibility to your readers any more than they have a responsibility to you.You don't have to make sure you finish your fic. You life getting in the way is not a failure as a writer. That said, your readers will probably be happier if you do finish it.
You only have as much responsibility to your readers as you want to have. Sometimes you'll disapoint them. Sometimes you won't. It happens.
Your readers don't have a responsibility to you. They don't have to reply to your fic. You'll likely be happier if they do respond to it, especially if they like it.
Sometimes they'll disappoint you. Sometimes they won't.
It happens.