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

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Nooooo! I love gen and will one day have time to read all the fic I have queued! (Runs off to squirrel away your pre-pornified versions for later reading!)

It's such a Catch-22, because once we start writing for readers, we stop writing for ourselves, but without readers (who we know exist, comments and reviews being one of the major ways of knowing that), it can sometimes seem a bit pointless to write.

Personally, I try to rise above the whole thing and remind myself that no matter what the review count, the readers I connect with most are people I like and respect. And on on the few occasions when that doesn't work and I have a pout, I take refuge in the fact that I have AWESOME hair.

[chantefable.livejournal.com]

I think the readers who respond in this case primarily appreciate the writing, and not the 'and then they had sex'. Of course wish-fulfilment and fantasy stimulating body responses can be immensely satisfying. The refined writing is naturally a) awe-inspiring and leaves people humbled and unable to type a review, b) may have a smaller audience - more people are looking to unwind with a light story than are seeking deep and meaningful prose. I reckon.

Ah, I am sick and not eloquent. I JUST WRITE TO SAY I LOVE YOU.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I'm good, darling! We've had two things conflate in the comments here because fragrant was having a perfectly reasonable grumble elsewhere and was sniffily informed that was not encouraged to grumble on such topics and that she could take that grumble elsewhere, thank you!

Here is a grumble welcoming zone! I think it's perfectly fine to want to have a grumpy mutter or even a full-on whinge about things now and then.

One of the big problems with doing that in fandom has been the trigger-happy responses you sometimes get. A lot of these are based on philosophical errors, like false syllogisms.

You know: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man.

Socrates is mortal = true syllogism
All men are Socrates = false syllogism

I've lost track of the times I've seen this happen in fandom. I remember one big witch hunt that came in response to someone saying 'Bah, I've had it with all the bloody fests, I miss it when people used to post their own stories regularly and there were big ongoing things being written by more than one or two stalwarts.'

This was whipped up into 'She hates fests! She hates all the people who write for fests! She thinks that fest writing is totally inferior! Boo! Hiss!'

Which was not only inaccurate, but totally failed to address the underlying issue: how many fests can one reasonably sized fandom handle? Put-upon first person was 'Fuck it, I'm a-going over here and you can just play by yourselves'

About six months later, a lot of fandom went 'Gee, there's a lot of fests, maybe we should rationalise the numbers?'

As for me personally and reviews: I love the people who like my stories and would not have things any other way! I love you loads! GET WELL!

[chamekke.livejournal.com]

Never fear, I was just joking! I can't imagine twisting a story to make it more popular/attract more comments.

I do write primarily for my own satisfaction, and I have received some lovely feedback from readers *hugs them all*. That said, I also want to feel that my predilections are part of the fannish spectrum. It's not just a matter of review count, it's also whether there's otherfic for you to enjoy as a reader. As someone on another comm observed, it's no fun when your best chance of reading the kind of fanfics you crave is to write them yourself. (Which isn't uncommon, especially in small fandoms and/or fandoms that focus on a single pairing.)

Anyway, never mind me, I'm a bit hormonal at the moment. Who does your hair? *admires it*

P.S. Sorry about deleting the other comment, I suddenly had a flash of how a similar thread went and felt it might be better to spare us a repeat ;-)

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I agree about the need to have a spectrum of fic. I'm the worst person in the world about helping it along, though: I'm not just bad at reviews, I'm bad at actually reading the things I have bookmarked. I should just stick them on my ereader and be diligent about going back to the source to comment later.

Writing for ourselves is the only guarantee of happiness, because even if it goes Pffft on the popular reception front, we can give honest answers to that little internal critic that asks if it was our best effort and if we're proud of it. That's worth a surprising amount!

And it's done by Furr in Newtown. They do lovely work! I've only had layers once before in the 80s and it was grim, but these are just choppy and modern, and the pink stripe is both fun and a flattering colour, even though I would never have picked it myself. It lifts the hair more than the old red stripes and is less harsh than the white stripe I was thinking of :-) Admittedly: totally Punk Lite.