On Old Fanfiction

[allie_sparks]

I posted a bit about my inauspicious return to writing in my blog; what I didn't mention there was that I'm working on some fanfiction, too. To anyone who knows me, this should be entirely expected.

A couple nights ago I went through my hard drive and realized what a truly colossal amount of fanfic I've written over the years--I always thought

Comments

[shmitz]

Yes but I think significantly less than 98% of writers would then consider posting their older stuff to their blog. =P

[allie_sparks]

That is true, though some still promote it--I've seen published writers expressing similar embarrassment about their earliest published works. Of course, they're still earning royalties off that stuff, and my terrible fanfiction isn't going to net me a dime.

I guess it's a pride thing, in a twisted way. If I pick through that old stuff and only show the very best, I may have five or six things to post...and that would make it look like I really hadn't done much.

And on another level, I really enjoy reading archives of long-running webcomics to see how much the artist has improved since the humble beginnings. Comics and prose are two very different experiences, though; I feel like that wouldn't work so well with writing, but I can't put my finger on why.

[shmitz]

I think it's visual versus verbal. I also like reading webcomics to see how the artist improves, but that improvement is almost always marked in my mind by the art, not the storytelling. It's much easier for the mind to pinpoint how we think a visual representation has improved than evaluate a 5000 word chunk of prose.

There's also the "follow" factor, where half of the interest is in the artist's journey rather than how bad he/she was at the beginning and how good he/she is now. I suppose that might be possible with a prolific author of short fiction (such as fanfiction), but with longer narratives bad writing at the beginning still impacts the whole of the story. Comic stories can be retconned a lot more easily than prose.