Braindump
Things I was tempted to spam you about in the last week or so, all in one handy post.
- I know it's deeply tedious to LJ about having trouble getting onto LJ, but the servers are significantly less robust since the move, y/y?
- I liked the remake of Terry Nation's One Other Good Idea Survivors, myself. ( minor spoilers for the opener, haven't seen #2 yet )
The real problem is the correlation between the quality of people's writing and their tendency to be all "ooh, shiny" about the new thing as soon as it comes along and therefore stop writing for whatever the previous ooh-shiny thing was.
I had to chuckle, because this is how I think about academic writing in my field--we follow fashion to be working on the latest/newest/hottest area because that's where the audience is. Which goes, I suppose, to your later point about writers being reluctant to write in a fandom that's developed a bad reputation.
And then this
And there's a lot worth talking about in the fact that most of the badfic writers don't ever really seem to improve very much, because of the Cult of Nice.
is something I find intriguing (as a writing teacher) because this is how most of my students tend to deal with peer critique/review/response. One of my students introduced me to Sugar Quill, an HP fanfic archive/comm that is locked down tighter than Fort Knox, but supposedly "produces" amazing fic (I'm planning to dip into the offerings over the winter break, so I can't really speak to the quality, but I trust this student). Is it necessary to foster the idea of a fic collective to get bad writers to learn to (or want to learn to) be good?
Reply
If you like strict adherence to canon, maybe. At least in ye olden days, they only allowed ships which they deemed to be CANON i.e. One Big Happy Weasley Family ships. And this was before JKR had actually MADE said ships actual canon, so it was especially obnoxious to people who had other ideas back in those days when we only had up to the fifth book.
Bah, HP fandom. I do not miss it one bit.
Reply
I'm really not one to strictly adhere to canon in the ways that I think you mean it, but this is what makes this topic so interesting to me--how do groups define what is "good" writing in this particular context?
The impression I got from my student was that they were the arbiters of "good" writing for the fandom, but I didn't get a vibe from her that she thought "good" was being defined by adherence to canon--which interests as well, because her perception of how they were defining good may not have been accurate, therefore making her susceptible to misperceptions of the community's purpose and its relevance to her own writing goals/needs.
And now I'm turning ionlylurkhere's post into my own little wankfest. I apologize! :-)
Bah, HP fandom. I do not miss it one bit.
I'm going to peek into this fandom fresh, and I'm not looking forward to it; I get the impression all around that it's universally icky now. Even my non-fannish students this term were aware of that.
Reply
Well, they also had pretty high standards for grammar and punctuation and suchlike for their submissions too, so that might be what she's thinking of. And for all that I know, they may have gotten rid of the shipping rules since I was last in the fandom. I hope so.
(I preferred Fiction Alley. Same high standards, no One Big Happy Weasley Family agenda. But I don't know if Fiction Alley is still around.)
Reply
No, no, no, this is actually fascinating and useful, because I am interested in both How Do You Get Consistent Goodfic and knowing moar about HP fandom without having to go anywhere near the scary.
Reply
Reply
I can't really speak to the HP fandom issue, since I haven't really read much, if any, fic in that fandom yet. I referenced it as exemplar of a place where some group of people bound themselves to a particular set of rules which would govern the archiving of stories at a particular site, which is, I think, one answer to the other of your interests.
Getting Consistent Good Fic (patent pending, I presume? ;-D) would be the result of
a)determining what constitutes "Good Fic," then
b)???, leading to
c)Profit (in this case, an abundance of Good Fic).
Step b is the trickier part--once you've determined what qualifies as "good" (which in and of itself might be difficult to do), you have to figure out how to entice those who can produce it back to (or just to) the fandom in question and/or how to help those producing fic in the fandom to want to improve (thereby overcoming the Cult of Nice, which is a tough nut to crack).
The HP community I mentioned seems to have created a desire among some (my student, at least, although I'm sure there are many others like her) to be considered "good enough" to meet their high standards (whatever those may be). I had hoped that Teaspoon would do something similar for the Who/Torchwood fandom, but that's not the case (and I'm really OK with that). I could see generating some way of letting people know that they ARE producing really high quality fic, as well as pointing out to readers what fic in a fandom is really worth reading. calufrax does the latter nicely, although I haven't really sorted out the criteria used for recs there. I always enjoy what I read from that comm, though.
And then there's the Cult of Nice, which I must admit I'm likely a part of. I tend to leave a positive comment or none at all; if the author has specifically asked for the kind of comments I might give as a beta (questioning critique of character/plotting/pacing, etc.), then I'll give that in comments, but most of the time, it's not been asked for. Writing is really personal for many people and until you've been through enough workshop situations where you have to take critique from people saying icky stuff about your carefully chosen words to your face, it can be really hard to want, much less take, criticism from total strangers.
There's also something almost like "publishing" when you post something publicly. To me, as soon as I link a story to a comm or post it on Teaspoon, it's done--I've already had the beta on it, if I'm going to have one, and I won't be making any changes outside of the undiscovered odd spelling/grammar error. Perhaps the reluctance to actually critique in comments/reviews stems from a feeling that this is all the author is going to do with it, so why bother? Not sure what the answer is.
OK--enough nattering from me! I'm curious to see what, if any, conversation this sparks--I've enjoyed thinking about this issue and thank you for giving me a reason to do so!
Reply
Leave a comment