Meta on Reccing
So I feel really strange writing about reccing, but it's something I've been thinking about lately. I've been reading challenge and festival guidelines, which is what's sparking this post.
There's a new comm that I'm actually really excited about and interested to see how it develops and what its community looks like and I have all the excitement about this comm. It looks really, really cool. So, this is a community pimp and then some meta.
fan_flashworks is an all-fandoms multimedia flashworks challenge community. "The goal of this challenge is to produce all kinds of new fanwork, to encourage play, practice and experimentation." The guidelines page is really long and I've only skimmed and read sections of it at this point, but you should check it out because it is awesome. No, seriously. It is.
I really dig the guidelines. This is, in fact, a guidelines rec. They have a mission statement and a really wonderful quote. It helps, a lot, that I really like both of these things; I like what this comm is setting out to be: a place to foster creativity and creators. It is all kinds of friendly to people who are new. The guidelines are well-organised, and as I was skimming over them I was thinking one of the mods totally hung out at
kradamadness, didn't they?
sprat did and the guidelines are adapted from
jerakeen's. It shows. A lot of the things that I really loved about
kradamadness and its guidelines are carried over, including the friendliness and emphasis on and encouragement of different types of fanworks.
One of the sections that I have read in full is the guidelines for rec sets and something that threw me was that "you can’t recommend a fanwork if it has already been recommended in that round."* I can see the logic behind that rule and I'm not suggesting that it be changed, but I also think that it's really, really interesting.
[ETA: Update:
fan_flashworks has removed this rule from their guidelines because they didn't feel it was in the spirit of their comm. (
china_shop replied here in the comments.)]
I think that the rules and guidelines that get drawn up for challenges and communities and bigbangs, etc. are significant. I think that they work to set the tone of the community and that where there are breakdowns of different types of fanworks that those are really interesting. One of the things that I've seen meta about has been the role of artists in bigbangs, that a lot of these fests are very writer-centric in a way that's not friendly to artists.
There are opinions and biases at work when rules and guidelines get drawn up and, where there are breakdowns of different fanworks, I think those rules and guidelines say something about how different varieties of fanworks are perceived.
fan_flashworks' rule* about not re-reccing things in the same round would never have occurred to me. I think it ties in with a specific approach to reccing. I think that there's something in there about recs serving to promote works and I think that that's a rule that ties more into the role of recs as promotion rather than recs as fanworks themselves. ...and this is where I start to feel awkward writing this, because it's personal.
Most of the rec sets that I do consist of three to four works. They take me a while to put together. Some of the rec set of x works = fic of y words equivalencies don't work for me because of that. They're not compatible with the way I rec; it would be significantly easier for me to write a fic than a rec set with those requirements. This is what I mean when I write about the perception of different varieties of fanworks, because rules like that are directed at a specific idea of a rec set, and I think that there are people that those rules work for. I'm just not one of them.
I re-read or re-view (or whatever) a work before I rec it and as I write my rec. Sometimes writing that paragraph is incredibly difficult for me, and so when I read that no re-recs rule I imagine having just finished my rec set, refreshing the comm and finding out that someone else has recced one of the works I picked. My rec set is broken. No, seriously. Sometimes my rec set starts out around a theme and then gets incredibly specific so that finding a work to swap in for one would be- I might cry, okay? I mean, I am making light of the situation here but I can give you examples. *clutches at you*
I did
china_shop's Fandom Appreciation Challenge last year. There was a lot of reccing involved. (It was hilarious. For me. Personally.)
I feel a little ridiculous writing about this, because- look, I started reccing a little over four years ago because I didn't know what bookmarks were, I'm pretty sure. (I don't know how I managed that. It was a dark time. I don't want to talk about it.) At some point I figured out what they were and kept reccing anyway. Reccing is this thing that I do now and part of my fannish identity. It's also not something I've ever really gotten feedback on, I don't think, aside from the occasional "Yay! Recs! That thing that you have recced is so shiny! Thank you!" because, yeah, recs are about that thing that you're reccing being shiny.
Or, actually- let me try to explain this: feedback on recs is not like feedback on fic. (For me - I can't write about anyone else's experience.) I do not tend to get feedback that goes "Ooh. I really think you did a good job of identifying the themes of that fanwork; I really think you conveyed the appeal of that particular fanwork. Your paragraph about it had really good flow, too. Well done." The more specific feedback that I get tends to go "I like the mix of things you've recced" or "That last fic sounds cool; thanks for reccing it." Where I'm headed with this is that I have pretty much been developing as a reccer by myself. I do not think that reccers tend to comment on each others recs in the same way that fic writers do. Of course, I only found out that there is a noticeboard community for recs - recsrainbow - today. What do I know?**
My reccing style has been influenced by the work of other reccers in much the same way that my writing style has been influenced by the work of other writers. I'll read something and go, Hm. That's interesting. There is an element of Oh, hey. I see what you did there and I liked it. I wonder... There are also reccers who do things that are not my thing. For example, my recs don't tend to have that kind of evaluative review element to them that some other reccers' do, with star reviews or balanced critique. It's not how I rec, but it is really interesting to me.
I'm interested in other people's recs, and it is really neat when someone recs the same thing that I've recced, because they rec it differently than I do. Sometimes it's a lot different than mine was, because they're reccing in a different media than I am or have a very different reccing style than I do or related to the work differently than I did. Those variations are really interesting to me. It is perhaps significantly less interesting if you're not a reccer, or me - I wouldn't know.
I think that having multiple recs for the same work is valuable because they work to unite a wider and more varied audience with a work; different things about a work appeal to different people and different things will persuade different people to check out a work. I once scrolled past loads and loads of recs/bookmarks for a particular work on delicious with descriptions consisting of the author summary or the work's tropes or enthusiastic praise before I read something that made me want to read that story. I really liked it, but the things that I liked about that work and appealed to me weren't in the author's summary or those descriptions that I had been skimming over and moving on from. Different descriptions hook different people.
I don't think that a work having been recced before, even recently, means that it shouldn't be recced again. I get, though, that being repeatedly informed how awesome a work is can be really annoying, and I do think that linking to a wider variety of works is a good thing. While I feel the first part mainly as a reader of recs I also feel the second part as a reccer. I do think there's something there in highlighting good works that haven't gotten a lot of attention. Community and art and growth are a big part of how I view fandom and that kind of reccing ties in with that. I think that kind of reccing is worthwhile and should be encouraged.
I think that the no re-recs rule ties in with a view of recs as functional pieces, with recs as a service. That is what recs are about. Recs are functional pieces in a way that the bulk of fanwork isn't and that functionality is really important in recs. If I'm measuring the external success of a rec that I've made I'm focused more on feedback to the work's creator than I am on feedback to me. Reccing's kind of like a match-making service in that way.
I have mixed feelings about the rule because I can see good and bad in it. I worry a little about the emphasis on reccing as a service rather than a fanwork, but it's really tangled because reccing is both of these things. I think that it's maybe more interesting because
fan_flashworks is set up to encourage new fan artists and "play, practice and experimentation". I have really mixed feelings about this, because I can't untangle that and I can't suss out the effect that that no re-recs rule will have on reccers or new reccers.
My development as a reccer hasn't been tied in with community and the way that I rec has changed as my view of recs has changed. I feel like it's been a very internal development, which I feel might be the case for the majority of reccers. I don't know. I can only write for myself. I can cite influences and account for changes in my style to some extent. Other reccers' work has played a role. So have challenges and projects that I've done. Doing a week of rec sets for a friend had an impact on my style. So did
china_shop's Fandom Appreciation Challenge, where I had twenty-four hours to throw together a rec set and did that three times in four days. When I write that it was hilarious what I mean is that it was a challenge for me, not because reccing in any way falls out of my comfort zone or is unusual for me, but because of how I rec and because I'd never done it with that kind of strict timeline before. It was a good exercise for me, though the challenge wasn't really set up for that purpose and I had not expected to do that much reccing when I started participating. It was voluntary. There was no commitment. There were only ticky boxes. The ticky boxes were compelling.
I think that by the time I'd finished that third rec set I had a kind of look in my eyes, had said something to a friend like, "I'm a reccer. Why did I think it was a good idea to participate in a challenge involving reccing?", had a kind of fear of more recs and a complete determination to finish the challenge. This is why I think it was funny. I did it to myself and I was the only one that had expectations about what my recs should look like.
I'm still developing as a reccer, and a lot of that is an internal thing for me, so it feels really weird to be writing about rules and guidelines that are external, but I think it's something worth writing about, because those guidelines and rules do set the tone of a challenge or fest or community and I think that those challenges and fests and communities can have an impact on artistic development and I think that reccing is important and questions about style and functionality and art are interesting.
*this is also a
kradamadness rule
**I have, actually, left specific feedback on recs before. Maybe about three times. I do not feel that this is statistically significant.
This entry was originally posted at http://kiki-eng.dreamwidth.org/77560.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
There's a new comm that I'm actually really excited about and interested to see how it develops and what its community looks like and I have all the excitement about this comm. It looks really, really cool. So, this is a community pimp and then some meta.
fan_flashworks is an all-fandoms multimedia flashworks challenge community. "The goal of this challenge is to produce all kinds of new fanwork, to encourage play, practice and experimentation." The guidelines page is really long and I've only skimmed and read sections of it at this point, but you should check it out because it is awesome. No, seriously. It is.
I really dig the guidelines. This is, in fact, a guidelines rec. They have a mission statement and a really wonderful quote. It helps, a lot, that I really like both of these things; I like what this comm is setting out to be: a place to foster creativity and creators. It is all kinds of friendly to people who are new. The guidelines are well-organised, and as I was skimming over them I was thinking one of the mods totally hung out at
kradamadness, didn't they?
sprat did and the guidelines are adapted from
jerakeen's. It shows. A lot of the things that I really loved about
kradamadness and its guidelines are carried over, including the friendliness and emphasis on and encouragement of different types of fanworks.
One of the sections that I have read in full is the guidelines for rec sets and something that threw me was that "you can’t recommend a fanwork if it has already been recommended in that round."* I can see the logic behind that rule and I'm not suggesting that it be changed, but I also think that it's really, really interesting.
[ETA: Update:
fan_flashworks has removed this rule from their guidelines because they didn't feel it was in the spirit of their comm. (
china_shop replied here in the comments.)]
I think that the rules and guidelines that get drawn up for challenges and communities and bigbangs, etc. are significant. I think that they work to set the tone of the community and that where there are breakdowns of different types of fanworks that those are really interesting. One of the things that I've seen meta about has been the role of artists in bigbangs, that a lot of these fests are very writer-centric in a way that's not friendly to artists.
There are opinions and biases at work when rules and guidelines get drawn up and, where there are breakdowns of different fanworks, I think those rules and guidelines say something about how different varieties of fanworks are perceived.
fan_flashworks' rule* about not re-reccing things in the same round would never have occurred to me. I think it ties in with a specific approach to reccing. I think that there's something in there about recs serving to promote works and I think that that's a rule that ties more into the role of recs as promotion rather than recs as fanworks themselves. ...and this is where I start to feel awkward writing this, because it's personal.
Most of the rec sets that I do consist of three to four works. They take me a while to put together. Some of the rec set of x works = fic of y words equivalencies don't work for me because of that. They're not compatible with the way I rec; it would be significantly easier for me to write a fic than a rec set with those requirements. This is what I mean when I write about the perception of different varieties of fanworks, because rules like that are directed at a specific idea of a rec set, and I think that there are people that those rules work for. I'm just not one of them.
I re-read or re-view (or whatever) a work before I rec it and as I write my rec. Sometimes writing that paragraph is incredibly difficult for me, and so when I read that no re-recs rule I imagine having just finished my rec set, refreshing the comm and finding out that someone else has recced one of the works I picked. My rec set is broken. No, seriously. Sometimes my rec set starts out around a theme and then gets incredibly specific so that finding a work to swap in for one would be- I might cry, okay? I mean, I am making light of the situation here but I can give you examples. *clutches at you*
I did
china_shop's Fandom Appreciation Challenge last year. There was a lot of reccing involved. (It was hilarious. For me. Personally.)
- "Rec three vids, icon sets, podfics or other fanworks in your journal." turned into: write about falling into Disney RPF and Selena Gomez/Demi Lovato - link a picspam, a primer, and a manifesto for this pairing, include two fic recs.
- "On your journal, rec three stories, vids or other fanworks that are more than six months old." turned into: rec three more than six month old Star Trek (single) character-centric fics with a focus on culture and language.
- "Rec three crossover fics or stories outside your main fandom(s) on your journal." turned into: rec three yuletide fics that are "all about endings, post-story explorations that are firmly grounded in reality, and so all a little bittersweet".
I feel a little ridiculous writing about this, because- look, I started reccing a little over four years ago because I didn't know what bookmarks were, I'm pretty sure. (I don't know how I managed that. It was a dark time. I don't want to talk about it.) At some point I figured out what they were and kept reccing anyway. Reccing is this thing that I do now and part of my fannish identity. It's also not something I've ever really gotten feedback on, I don't think, aside from the occasional "Yay! Recs! That thing that you have recced is so shiny! Thank you!" because, yeah, recs are about that thing that you're reccing being shiny.
Or, actually- let me try to explain this: feedback on recs is not like feedback on fic. (For me - I can't write about anyone else's experience.) I do not tend to get feedback that goes "Ooh. I really think you did a good job of identifying the themes of that fanwork; I really think you conveyed the appeal of that particular fanwork. Your paragraph about it had really good flow, too. Well done." The more specific feedback that I get tends to go "I like the mix of things you've recced" or "That last fic sounds cool; thanks for reccing it." Where I'm headed with this is that I have pretty much been developing as a reccer by myself. I do not think that reccers tend to comment on each others recs in the same way that fic writers do. Of course, I only found out that there is a noticeboard community for recs - recsrainbow - today. What do I know?**
My reccing style has been influenced by the work of other reccers in much the same way that my writing style has been influenced by the work of other writers. I'll read something and go, Hm. That's interesting. There is an element of Oh, hey. I see what you did there and I liked it. I wonder... There are also reccers who do things that are not my thing. For example, my recs don't tend to have that kind of evaluative review element to them that some other reccers' do, with star reviews or balanced critique. It's not how I rec, but it is really interesting to me.
I'm interested in other people's recs, and it is really neat when someone recs the same thing that I've recced, because they rec it differently than I do. Sometimes it's a lot different than mine was, because they're reccing in a different media than I am or have a very different reccing style than I do or related to the work differently than I did. Those variations are really interesting to me. It is perhaps significantly less interesting if you're not a reccer, or me - I wouldn't know.
I think that having multiple recs for the same work is valuable because they work to unite a wider and more varied audience with a work; different things about a work appeal to different people and different things will persuade different people to check out a work. I once scrolled past loads and loads of recs/bookmarks for a particular work on delicious with descriptions consisting of the author summary or the work's tropes or enthusiastic praise before I read something that made me want to read that story. I really liked it, but the things that I liked about that work and appealed to me weren't in the author's summary or those descriptions that I had been skimming over and moving on from. Different descriptions hook different people.
I don't think that a work having been recced before, even recently, means that it shouldn't be recced again. I get, though, that being repeatedly informed how awesome a work is can be really annoying, and I do think that linking to a wider variety of works is a good thing. While I feel the first part mainly as a reader of recs I also feel the second part as a reccer. I do think there's something there in highlighting good works that haven't gotten a lot of attention. Community and art and growth are a big part of how I view fandom and that kind of reccing ties in with that. I think that kind of reccing is worthwhile and should be encouraged.
I think that the no re-recs rule ties in with a view of recs as functional pieces, with recs as a service. That is what recs are about. Recs are functional pieces in a way that the bulk of fanwork isn't and that functionality is really important in recs. If I'm measuring the external success of a rec that I've made I'm focused more on feedback to the work's creator than I am on feedback to me. Reccing's kind of like a match-making service in that way.
I have mixed feelings about the rule because I can see good and bad in it. I worry a little about the emphasis on reccing as a service rather than a fanwork, but it's really tangled because reccing is both of these things. I think that it's maybe more interesting because
fan_flashworks is set up to encourage new fan artists and "play, practice and experimentation". I have really mixed feelings about this, because I can't untangle that and I can't suss out the effect that that no re-recs rule will have on reccers or new reccers.
My development as a reccer hasn't been tied in with community and the way that I rec has changed as my view of recs has changed. I feel like it's been a very internal development, which I feel might be the case for the majority of reccers. I don't know. I can only write for myself. I can cite influences and account for changes in my style to some extent. Other reccers' work has played a role. So have challenges and projects that I've done. Doing a week of rec sets for a friend had an impact on my style. So did
china_shop's Fandom Appreciation Challenge, where I had twenty-four hours to throw together a rec set and did that three times in four days. When I write that it was hilarious what I mean is that it was a challenge for me, not because reccing in any way falls out of my comfort zone or is unusual for me, but because of how I rec and because I'd never done it with that kind of strict timeline before. It was a good exercise for me, though the challenge wasn't really set up for that purpose and I had not expected to do that much reccing when I started participating. It was voluntary. There was no commitment. There were only ticky boxes. The ticky boxes were compelling.
I think that by the time I'd finished that third rec set I had a kind of look in my eyes, had said something to a friend like, "I'm a reccer. Why did I think it was a good idea to participate in a challenge involving reccing?", had a kind of fear of more recs and a complete determination to finish the challenge. This is why I think it was funny. I did it to myself and I was the only one that had expectations about what my recs should look like.
I'm still developing as a reccer, and a lot of that is an internal thing for me, so it feels really weird to be writing about rules and guidelines that are external, but I think it's something worth writing about, because those guidelines and rules do set the tone of a challenge or fest or community and I think that those challenges and fests and communities can have an impact on artistic development and I think that reccing is important and questions about style and functionality and art are interesting.
*this is also a
kradamadness rule
**I have, actually, left specific feedback on recs before. Maybe about three times. I do not feel that this is statistically significant.
This entry was originally posted at http://kiki-eng.dreamwidth.org/77560.html. Please comment there using OpenID.