Tips on prompting/Dear Author letters/Doing Yuletide

[lilka]

OMG, sign-ups are almost upon us! I'm so excited. It's about this time that I go digging through meta from previous years, to remind myself of the pearls of wisdom people have compiled about how to get the most out of your Yultide experience. These are my favourites:

liviapenn: How to Not Ruin Yuletide

penknife: Eight ways to break your ficathon writer's brain

Comments

[andelendir]

Just from one year - and writing some stocking-stuffing and pinches - I like a clearcut warning about triggers if you have any, but else the largest possible freedom. I'm kinky, love and write slash and erotica, and there are people (in other challenges mostly) who received stories they probably would never have sought out on their own, wouldn't show to their neighbour, but still immensely enjoyed while the door to their study was well locked

not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[jedi_penguin]

The stifling can go the other way and should also be avoided. The first year I did yuletide, I didn't really understand about optional details being optional and I wrote a terrible story to meet someone's demand for pr0n. (This person wrote the same, undifferentiated prompt for all four requests: "graphic NC-17 sex.") The problem was I just didn't see the two characters I'd agreed to write going beyond UST because one of them always struck me as straight. If all you want is smut, you need to leave some leeway as to the characters you'll accept together, because your writer might not see the same OTP/3 that you do. If you don't want to see your OTP split up, leave your writer room to write a gen story... pretty much exactly like your best prompt did for you!

Re: not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[andelendir]

Oh, but that's precisely what I wrote myself there: don't stifle, don't insist on one thing only, or absence of something which is no hard limit

Re: not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[jedi_penguin]

Oh, but that's precisely what I wrote myself there: don't stifle, don't insist on one thing only, or absence of something which is no hard limit.

I wasn't disagreeing, just elaborating. *grin* That's cool that you don't do OTPs, but many people find it difficult to separate their chosen pairing from their enjoyment of the text. The writer and recipient may both desperately love all the requested characters, and perhaps even see them the same way, but that doesn't guarantee that they'll see the relationships between characters in quite the same way, and that's what I was trying to add in to your comment about squicks-vs-vague preferences.

Re: not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[andelendir]

...squicks-vs-vague preferences...

I grasped that, that's why I said it's better to accept everything, including gen, which at least to me means no sexual/love relationships or none at all if preferred.

As to OTPs, they really pass me by, personally. I've never grasped why anyone would want to pair on-screen/in-fandom characters, except where it's canonically so already anyway ;-). I usually want to achieve very distinct results with relationships, and it's extremely rare that I can justify using a character already in residence against the basic rules of math and chance. I almost never have a pairing in a fandom jump at me and it's normally not pairings I write a fandom for. So that definitely would be one of the "too stifling" things for me.

Re: not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[rosehiptea]

I had the opposite -- the first year I did it I requested a crack pairing with smut. (Not to challenge the writer, I just thought I wanted it, and I understood that they weren't required to actually write that. But in those days people didn't write Yuletide letters so I didn't have one.) They very understandably wrote me a gen fic instead, which turned out to be way better than my idea.

So after that I always remembered to write out that gen would be great too, just to reassure the writer.

[rosehiptea]

The thing is, I like slash in general and write it myself, but sometimes I really don't feel like having a slash story for one or more of my Yuletide prompts. (Not always, sometimes the prompts are slash prompts...)

I didn't think that was such a bad thing to tell a writer?

[andelendir]

It isn't.

What I meant was don't make it exclusive either way, if you want to make it easier on your writer.

If I came across a prompt for e.g. MacGuyver which said "please no slash, I'd rather have gen for this fandom" and I agreed on that on principle, I wouldn't want to foist M/M or M/F erotica on the recipient.

But if, e.g. the fandom was Kushiel's Dart or The Marketplace and the person requesting that said "gen only please," then I'd really have a problem. Because I would have offered to write such fandoms of course mainly because they already *are* erotica or heavily in that direction. I'd be at a complete loss to write anything gen for such a fandom.

It's not just that, it's a lot of things. E.g. demands for crossovers or AU, such things would be difficult for me to fulfill in general terms.

I'd say the less confining, the better.

[rosehiptea]

I think I see what you mean. It's just that if I said "Please don't write slash for this fic" and the person decided it was OK because I obviously do like slash, that would... trouble me. But I'd never do it in head-breaking way, like "write me a story about this canonically bisexual character which doesn't mention slash," because that would be wrong for any number of reasons.

[andelendir]

No and yes

[rosehiptea]

I see your point

[andelendir]

Every writer surely tries to do his/her very best for the recipient. I think that's a given.

But sometimes it happens that two get paired who are far from each other in what they prefer/can do or not. I've had it happen in another challenge, I've had people ask me to write fluffy fairies into one of my very few fandoms (I write not a lot different ones really), which is so attractive to me because it's sexy, kinky and dark. I sat there, gobsmacked how anyone could ask for that, and as she was adamant about "nice and fluffy" and I am absolutely incapable of writing that, I defaulted, quite angry as well.

To her the fandom may well have been the epitome of "nice and fluffy", I wouldn't know, but her rigid terms barred me from writing her a fic.

And no, you don't come over as a slash is icky person ;-)

[rosehiptea]

Getting off-topic, but I can definitely relate, being a Silent Hill fan. I can manage to write relatively happy fic on occasion even in that fandom but some of the characters and pairings it's just not going to happen.

If I request (or in the case of Yuletide, suggest) that I want something happy and fluffy, it's in a canon that's happy and fluffy beyond reasonable debate. (Usually that's not what I request, but anyway, yeah.)

[calenlily]

I do think it's important to give your writer options. I do not think highly of prompts that specify they're only interested in one type of pairing, whether it be slash or het or femmeslash or gen; it's courteous to give your writer an out if they don't feel able to write your first choice. But I feel like if there's a pairing type they specifically aren't fond of, people should be able to request it not be included and expect that their writer will do their best to respect that (with the understanding that optional details are optional and it's possible that the writer won't be able to manage it

[anialove]

I definitely feel strongly about having a gen option in addition to shipping options. My own experiences have taught me that the writer might not know what they're comfortable writing until they start.

My first year was a bit of a mess - I matched up with my person on a fandom in which they wanted X/Y with smut. X/Y were a couple with strong UST, although X/Z were the official couple. I didn't default because I had been blindsided when X and Z got together and thought X and Y would've been a great couple. I reviewed canon . . . and discovered that in the two books since X and Z got together I'd become a hardcore X/Z shipper without realizing it. But I felt I had to write sex and ended up writing a shitty story.

Now I still feel awful about giving someone such a terrible story, but I would've felt bad not following their details.

(It should be noted that there were gen options in the other two fandoms, but I wasn't familiar with them and didn't have time to become so.)

[agnes_bean]

I definitely feel strongly about having a gen option in addition to shipping options

I've never done Yuletide before, but from everything I've read and experienced in other fests, this seems like the best option, and in most cases doesn't seem to me to be too hard. Sure, my number one choice may be sexy porn featuring X/Y, but any canon I like enough to request will have friendships or backstory or world-building or etc. etc. I'd also be interested in seeing explored, and I feel like that's true for most people if they think about it.

(On the flip side, I plan on not offering any characters I wouldn't be comfortable doing a gen character piece about, even if I'd rather write something shippy).