Ah HA!

[blamebrampton]

FANFICCERS!

Worried about lack of reviews?

Sad that everyone is reading everyone who is not you?

Depressed to see teenagers who don't know how to spell frottage and cannot accurately gauge the bendability of the average penis with thousands of ffnet reviews while your finely crafted and beautifully edited masterpieces are lucky to garner 23?

FRET NO LONGER!

THE SECRET IS REVEALED!

''People say it isn't good quality but you have to remember Fifty Shades started as fan fiction and as fan fiction you have to have action,'' Hayward says. ''You have to have a sex scene in every chapter because that's how you get your reviews. The amount of people who review per chapter shows popularity, that's how your ratings get up. In fan fiction every chapter has to give you something to keep you reading it.''
(From an SMH interview with Amanda Hayward, the really rather brilliant publisher of the not as brilliant book.)

So there you go! You lot who've been telling me to porn it up were right all along! (I mean, obviously I'm not going to, but that's for the best. The Bad Sex Awards longlist is already inches thick.)

I thoroughly recommend the article, which is interesting and respectfully written, without being actually nice about bad writing. It includes this gem from The London Review of Books' Andrew O'Hagan, which I had previously missed: ''It's not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James's other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.''

Comments

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

As a reader, I'm much more inclined to read fics that have NC-17/Explicit or R/Mature ratings. That's just what I want to read. It's not that I won't read a PG or a gen fic, but because time is limited and there's so much fic out there, it really has to be something that was recced to me or something written by someone whose work I already know I like. So maybe that makes me shallow, but yanno, IDGAF really. ;-)

Sure there's a lot of bad porn out there, but that's true of fanfic in general. It's hard to find stuff that's both well-written and suited to your personal tastes, and narrowing your list of likes down to a few things you know you'll enjoy is one way of coping with the sheer volume that's out there. It's my way, anyhow.

I write a lot of sex scenes in my fic. A LOT. I don't consciously try to put one in every chapter or whatever; the sex is there or not according to whether it works in the scene. If there are eight possible ways I can think of to move the story or the character development forward at a particular moment, and if one of them does it through sex, I'll pick that one. I guess the point is that I write it because I like to write it, and apparently some people like to read it too, which is cool with me.

I know you're not porn-bashing here, but I just wanted to throw in my perspective that lots of sex scenes =/= bad storytelling automatically.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I don't think it does: Calanthe is one of my fave HD writers and she writes LOTS of sex!

But I do think that the idea 'Oh, I want reviews! Right, insert sex scene!' is both risible and likely to lead to bad writing.

Sure there's a lot of bad porn out there, but that's true of fanfic in general.

I think you could accurately substitute 'writing' for fanfic :-) The main reason I don't do much at all in the way of actual sex scenes is that I grew up in the 70s and 80s when every third book was 'And now, watch me do my best DH Lawrence bit for the sales!', which were of course all avidly passed around between young girls. If only the Bad Sex Awards had existed back then! But the annual long list would have been too large for the judges to get through.

Knowing about fandom would have been super helpful in those days. I remember being 15 and reading the trashy book du jour and saying, 'I find it very unlikely that this character suddenly feels entirely better about everything because she just had good sex! Did you not READ the preceding chapters?' Which would have been SO much better as: 'Healing power of cock? Oh, please!'