Prompter Etiquette
Hey guys! This is just a little something that's been knocking around in my head for the last six months or so and I finally decided to get it out and have done! It's not really petinent to anything at the moment, but I'm going to leave it here for future reference for memes and such.
This isn't directed at anyone in particular, rather it's a mix of things I myself have thought both participating in and running memes and things that I've had people complain about with me here and on twitter. No accusations here, most of us have committed at least one of these sins at some point or another and one almost inevitably turns up at every meme, round or prompting session I've ever seen. So I'm putting this out here in the world in the hopes of making the giving and filling of prompts an easier, happier experience for all involved!
You know what they say about brevity and wit?
As a general rule, you should be able to give a decent prompt in 5 sentences or less. We all have those plot bunnies that, for one reason or another, we never end up doing anything with and it’s totally natural to want to give somebody else a go at the idea. But, for me at least, and for several other people I know, few things are more claustrophobic than being trapped into somebody else’s plot. The room for creativity is gone and if the fill takes you in a different direction, you have to worry that the prompter will be upset. It’s a hard place to be and no fun for anyone, so if you have a bunny that needs to be set free, do it, but make your peace, let it go, and don’t be the person who gives a thousand word plot outline as a prompt.
Greed is not good.
In the words of the fabulous expectative committing this sin causes the death of baby sloths. There’s nothing wrong with having kinks or loving a particular type of character or plot, but the point of most memes is to get a bunch of different ideas riffing off of a particular theme. As such, it seems kind of douchey to prompt the same idea four or five times with small details changed. The truth is that, anybody who’s inspired to write, say, werewolf!Jared publicly claims shy!Jensen on a camping trip, probably doesn’t need a werecat!Jared publicly claims shy!Jensen at the university library prompt to convince them, and anybody who wasn’t intrigued by the first, probably won’t be wooed by the second. Be respectful of your other memers and don’t try to soak up all the fills for your own kinks. It’s fun to branch out a read different things! And if you truly, deeply believe there’s not enough were-creature public claiming fic in the world, there’s nothing stopping you from holding your own meme for it.
Let’s be realistic here.
Some plot bunnies are big. We all know it and there’s nothing wrong with it. But for the purposes of most memes (and there are exceptions, certainly) long, chaptered fic is not the overall goal. You love stories where the boys grow up together and fall in love? Fine - who doesn’t? But asking for a detailed description of the years of their lives from age 5 to 25 and the trials and tribulations of finding their way to each other through girlfriends and boyfriends and school and jobs and long distances and… well, you get the point. It’s asking a lot of something that’s inherently designed to fit into comment boxes. If a filler gets carried away with your idea, that’s great, but don’t make someone feel obligated to create a Bang for you. We all have enough of those on our plate already ;)
Déjà vu all over again.
We’ve all been there. You loved an idea and it didn’t get filled. You just can’t get enough of a particular trope. Your idea got filled but your forgot and prompted it again (mea culpa). The reprompt. It happens. But (and this goes back to being realistic) if you’ve prompted something on four different memes and no one has filled it, it may be time to give up the ghost (or reevaluate looking at these other rules and see if your prompt is committing cardinal sins you can fix!). If you’ve had a fill, count yourself lucky and learn to love it. Part of the fun of memes is the flow of new ideas and while a few retreads don’t hurt anything, no one wants to read the same old prompts over and over again.
Don’t be an after school special.
This is more of a respect to fillers than it is an annoyance to others. Writers, artists and other fillers put a lot of themselves into their work, so it’s flattering that people want more of it, but it also makes us very protective of what we’ve made. Our work is our baby and there are a lot (not all, maybe not even a majority) who might have a problem handing their verse or characters over to just anybody. Asking for it puts everybody in an awkward position of having to seek out, and feeling obligated to give, consent. On the other side of the equation, just like a long prompt can trap a filler, having to follow up someone else’s work, to stay inside their style and character parameters - that’s kind of intimidating. Love a fill, let the person know, beg them for more and hope their muse is on board, but do it in private (ie: on their personal journal, on the fic you want more of, in a PM) instead of airing it for everyone else to see in a meme. That, my friends, is what we call peer pressure.
Walking through minefields is not a recreational sport.
Some prompts are pretty straight forward, others leave more room for interpretation. Neither one is right or wrong, but if you go the more vague route, you have to accept the fact that you may end up with something you didn’t expect. I say this as someone who has written a fill before and had the prompter say afterward “Oh, I have a huge squick for XYZ so I couldn’t read this, thanks though”. I’ve seen others where the prompt says “Any pairing” but what they actually mean is “Any pairing, with one exception”. Or prompts where no rating was mentioned but after they say they’d hoped for more sex/less sex/what is this sex you speak of? You can’t imagine how bad it feels to make something for someone that they can’t enjoy, no matter how many wonderful responses you get about it afterward, so don’t put someone in that position. If you love something, say so, and if you’re turned off by something, say so. Fillers are not mind readers.
We get it, ok?
Seconding a prompt is totally acceptable and welcome as long as you don’t do it for every single prompt. Thirding is getting a little redundant, but it lets a potential filler know that lots of people would love to see a prompt completed, so it’s ok. After that, though, you’re getting sadistic with the poor dead horse. If you are the fifth or sixth or seventeenth person to say how much a prompt should be filled, that ship has probably already sailed - no one is filling this prompt.
Beware the piggyback
Adding ideas to someone else's prompt is like walking into the grocery store, going up to the register and adding a gallon of milk to the pile of someone else's stuff as they are checking out. For all you know, they're lactose intolerant, but hey, you like milk so everybody must like milk, right? As I said above, seconding a prompt is fine, but jumping on to someone's prompt and adding details or caveats - for example: someone prompts Sam/Dean first time and a different person seconds with "oh, but no underage, I hate underage" - is not acceptable. If you want a prompt with your kinks, fair enough, prompt one yourself.
Do I have to even say this?
Don’t troll. We’re all what passes for grown-ups around here. We’ve all seen things flame out because one jerk could help but stir up trouble. Don’t be that jerk. Seriously. It kills the baby sloths.
Ok, that's it for me. Any prompter pet peeves that I missed? Think I'm being too harsh on some of them? Let me know in the comments so we can update the list!
This isn't directed at anyone in particular, rather it's a mix of things I myself have thought both participating in and running memes and things that I've had people complain about with me here and on twitter. No accusations here, most of us have committed at least one of these sins at some point or another and one almost inevitably turns up at every meme, round or prompting session I've ever seen. So I'm putting this out here in the world in the hopes of making the giving and filling of prompts an easier, happier experience for all involved!
You know what they say about brevity and wit?
As a general rule, you should be able to give a decent prompt in 5 sentences or less. We all have those plot bunnies that, for one reason or another, we never end up doing anything with and it’s totally natural to want to give somebody else a go at the idea. But, for me at least, and for several other people I know, few things are more claustrophobic than being trapped into somebody else’s plot. The room for creativity is gone and if the fill takes you in a different direction, you have to worry that the prompter will be upset. It’s a hard place to be and no fun for anyone, so if you have a bunny that needs to be set free, do it, but make your peace, let it go, and don’t be the person who gives a thousand word plot outline as a prompt.
Greed is not good.
In the words of the fabulous expectative committing this sin causes the death of baby sloths. There’s nothing wrong with having kinks or loving a particular type of character or plot, but the point of most memes is to get a bunch of different ideas riffing off of a particular theme. As such, it seems kind of douchey to prompt the same idea four or five times with small details changed. The truth is that, anybody who’s inspired to write, say, werewolf!Jared publicly claims shy!Jensen on a camping trip, probably doesn’t need a werecat!Jared publicly claims shy!Jensen at the university library prompt to convince them, and anybody who wasn’t intrigued by the first, probably won’t be wooed by the second. Be respectful of your other memers and don’t try to soak up all the fills for your own kinks. It’s fun to branch out a read different things! And if you truly, deeply believe there’s not enough were-creature public claiming fic in the world, there’s nothing stopping you from holding your own meme for it.
Let’s be realistic here.
Some plot bunnies are big. We all know it and there’s nothing wrong with it. But for the purposes of most memes (and there are exceptions, certainly) long, chaptered fic is not the overall goal. You love stories where the boys grow up together and fall in love? Fine - who doesn’t? But asking for a detailed description of the years of their lives from age 5 to 25 and the trials and tribulations of finding their way to each other through girlfriends and boyfriends and school and jobs and long distances and… well, you get the point. It’s asking a lot of something that’s inherently designed to fit into comment boxes. If a filler gets carried away with your idea, that’s great, but don’t make someone feel obligated to create a Bang for you. We all have enough of those on our plate already ;)
Déjà vu all over again.
We’ve all been there. You loved an idea and it didn’t get filled. You just can’t get enough of a particular trope. Your idea got filled but your forgot and prompted it again (mea culpa). The reprompt. It happens. But (and this goes back to being realistic) if you’ve prompted something on four different memes and no one has filled it, it may be time to give up the ghost (or reevaluate looking at these other rules and see if your prompt is committing cardinal sins you can fix!). If you’ve had a fill, count yourself lucky and learn to love it. Part of the fun of memes is the flow of new ideas and while a few retreads don’t hurt anything, no one wants to read the same old prompts over and over again.
Don’t be an after school special.
This is more of a respect to fillers than it is an annoyance to others. Writers, artists and other fillers put a lot of themselves into their work, so it’s flattering that people want more of it, but it also makes us very protective of what we’ve made. Our work is our baby and there are a lot (not all, maybe not even a majority) who might have a problem handing their verse or characters over to just anybody. Asking for it puts everybody in an awkward position of having to seek out, and feeling obligated to give, consent. On the other side of the equation, just like a long prompt can trap a filler, having to follow up someone else’s work, to stay inside their style and character parameters - that’s kind of intimidating. Love a fill, let the person know, beg them for more and hope their muse is on board, but do it in private (ie: on their personal journal, on the fic you want more of, in a PM) instead of airing it for everyone else to see in a meme. That, my friends, is what we call peer pressure.
Walking through minefields is not a recreational sport.
Some prompts are pretty straight forward, others leave more room for interpretation. Neither one is right or wrong, but if you go the more vague route, you have to accept the fact that you may end up with something you didn’t expect. I say this as someone who has written a fill before and had the prompter say afterward “Oh, I have a huge squick for XYZ so I couldn’t read this, thanks though”. I’ve seen others where the prompt says “Any pairing” but what they actually mean is “Any pairing, with one exception”. Or prompts where no rating was mentioned but after they say they’d hoped for more sex/less sex/what is this sex you speak of? You can’t imagine how bad it feels to make something for someone that they can’t enjoy, no matter how many wonderful responses you get about it afterward, so don’t put someone in that position. If you love something, say so, and if you’re turned off by something, say so. Fillers are not mind readers.
We get it, ok?
Seconding a prompt is totally acceptable and welcome as long as you don’t do it for every single prompt. Thirding is getting a little redundant, but it lets a potential filler know that lots of people would love to see a prompt completed, so it’s ok. After that, though, you’re getting sadistic with the poor dead horse. If you are the fifth or sixth or seventeenth person to say how much a prompt should be filled, that ship has probably already sailed - no one is filling this prompt.
Beware the piggyback
Adding ideas to someone else's prompt is like walking into the grocery store, going up to the register and adding a gallon of milk to the pile of someone else's stuff as they are checking out. For all you know, they're lactose intolerant, but hey, you like milk so everybody must like milk, right? As I said above, seconding a prompt is fine, but jumping on to someone's prompt and adding details or caveats - for example: someone prompts Sam/Dean first time and a different person seconds with "oh, but no underage, I hate underage" - is not acceptable. If you want a prompt with your kinks, fair enough, prompt one yourself.
Do I have to even say this?
Don’t troll. We’re all what passes for grown-ups around here. We’ve all seen things flame out because one jerk could help but stir up trouble. Don’t be that jerk. Seriously. It kills the baby sloths.
Ok, that's it for me. Any prompter pet peeves that I missed? Think I'm being too harsh on some of them? Let me know in the comments so we can update the list!