Review Envy

[rhetoretician]

I'm disappointed with myself for caring so much whether people review my posted fan fiction or not.

It seems to me that, given that there's no money in fan fiction, the only reasons to do it are (1) to have the creative experience itself, (2) to touch other people, and (3) to get to indulge yourself in the characters and the settings you love.

Comments

[mickawber]

See now, this is why we love you (well, this and the fact that you write wonderful, fluffy, mythopoetic fics): because you manage to make the whole sordid exercise be part of a positive, creative process.

As you say, every fic author goes through these sorts of crises. One of the things that I've had to recognize is that, the more I take the kinds of thematic and (eek! I'm going to say it!) artistic risks that I want to take, the fewer hits and reviews I'm going to get. On good days, I'm able to shrug and deal with it. On bad days...

On bad days I think, "I'm already in the publishing industry-why do I go looking for this kind of headache?"

When I first came into the fandom almost three years ago (gulp!), the writer whose writing I first fell in love with told me, "The thing is, I can tell now what kind of fics are going to get fifty comments on my LJ, and what kind will get two. But I'd honestly rather just write the fics I want to write, because most of the extra comments aren't worth the effort to read."

One of the best things that ever happened to me as a fic writer, I think, was Monster, a fic that I wrote for all of the wrong reasons at exactly the write time. It's not a bad fic, mind; there are some things that I really like about it. But I wrote the first chapter as a knee-jerk reaction to the closing chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and then was convinced to write the rest...

What happened was that Monster was the first H/G fic to hit FictionAlley.org and SIYE after the pairing went canon. And it featured a somewhat... titillating closing. So I got hundreds of reviews, most of which were STUPID. Most of them either excoriated Ginny for being such a slut (most of those were on SIYE) on the one hand, or claiming the same as a virtue (most of those were on FA-"Dude! Ginny is TEH HO!!!!!11!"). It made me look up and think, Forget this! I mean, here was a bonefide hit (pardon the pun), and most of the reviews left me more annoyed than informed.

So now I'm happy when I get feedback that actually makes me think.... Even when it only comes from time to time. :-)

I agree about the whole Silver Trinket thing. It's sure to make too many people too unhappy with each other. (Also, to be entirely honest, it's a reminder to people like... say... me that what we write is a bit on the fringe.)

[rhetoretician]

I think this is something like the question of whether you'd rather be popular or instead have a few, really good friends. My tendency has always been the latter, but I've always wondered what the former would feel like.

I didn't know that about "Monster"; when I first read it, I loved it because (1) Harry needed to be told off for dumping Ginny, and (2) I thought that bit at the end iof Ch. 1 was pretty romantic. I can imagine how I'd feel if I wrote something that conveyed meaning I cared about, but 100 people replied saying, "loved the bran muffins in chapter two; they're really tasty, aren't they?"

I guess what I'm working through is this: You and Mary and several others write really interesting, rich, gratifying replies to my work, and I love them. We have other interactions and I love them too. So I have a few good friends. My own issue, probably something to take up with my therapist, is, why do I still long to be more popular too? It's so tiresome, at 46, to be still dealing with stuff that I think dates from 32 years back!