writing is weird because sometimes I’ll have no ideas and everything in my head is kind of quiet but then something will happen and it’s like there’s these goblins living in my brain that just start shouting little phrases at me until I sit down and finally write the poem or story or whatever
ancient greek and roman poets: sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
me, banging pots and pans together: wake the fuck up goblins!! what the fuck is up!!
A post just crossed my dash that put the worst taste in my mouth. I don’t want to reblog it, but I do want to address the contents because I think the subject is super important.
The post basically boiled down to: fanfic writers are thin-skinned babies “these days” because no one can take constructive criticism. In “my day” we all sent page-long critiques like the dedicated heroes we were! It made us better writers! Moreover, if I didn’t like something, I told the writer all about it! It was my job!
Hold up, what?
I’ve been posting fanfic online since 1998. Twenty years. Pre-archives. And “in my day” we had betas if we wanted/needed/asked for them (whose critiques didn’t have an audience). We said “concrit welcome” if we actually wanted constructive criticism. We did not show up unannounced to point out a work’s flaws because that is rude. Look, I am an editor. People pay me real money to edit things for them. I would rather cut off my own fingers than burst into someone’s comments and start “critiquing” their work without being asked first.
Here’s something that needs to be addressed: fanfiction is real writing, yes, but it is, by its nature as something that isn’t monetized, a hobby. As in, a thing people do for fun. A thing that hopefully brings both authors and readers joy! The story an author posts is a gift; how dare anyone rip a gift apart in front of the gift-giver and all the other party attendees? How entitled and ungrateful can you be? Fandom is not a frigging battleground where authors learn to harden themselves for war. It’s a hobby. Done out of love and enthusiasm.
Yes, some fanfiction writers (certainly not all!!) aspire to be original fiction writers. They may use fanfiction as a training ground. They may want or benefit from constructive criticism. Still, they have to ask. They have to start the conversation. I know (think?) it’s harder to find betas these days, but it’s always worth asking around if real critique is what you want. Put “concrit welcome and even begged for” in the author’s notes and hope someone takes you up on it.
Some fanfiction writers with original fiction aspirations still don’t want criticism about their fic. Fic may be their fun-writing outlet. It may be about instant gratification (and there’s nothing wrong with that; we’re not in the business of denying ourselves pleasure out of some moral superiority here. It’s fandom). It may be the place where they post to get around their fears of showing things to others. It may be the place they take risks they wouldn’t in their original work because the stakes are lower. When you work on your original writing all day, every day—often putting that work through far more vigorous and exhausting paces than fanfic sees—the last thing you want is someone showing up during your time off to point out a frigging comma splice or shift in POV.
The point is unless someone asks for critique, you don’t know what’s going on with them. Maybe fic is the only fun thing they have in their lives. Maybe they’re writing in a different language. Maybe they are 14. Or 82. Maybe they’ve never written fiction of any kind before and this is their baby step forward. Maybe fic is just escapism. Maybe they are depressed or anxious as hell and criticism is going to push them over an edge. Fandom belongs to everyone. Not just people deemed “good” or “perfect” or “permitted” or “thick-skinned.” People don’t need to be saved from grammar mistakes or poor turns of phrase or even plotholes so wide a semi could drive through them. Authors sure as hell don’t need to be told when a reader just doesn’t like something. There is no fandom police force in charge of perfection. If critique is so important to you, advertise your willingness to beta. If you do not like a story or think it’s “bad” hit the freaking back button.
Unsolicited criticism is not helpful. Maybe you just catch someone off-guard and startle them. At worst, you may totally shatter someone’s self-esteem while they are partaking in a hobby they 100% do for fun—and not in pursuit of some unattainable perfection.
Don’t ruin a stranger’s day or week or hobby because you “know better” and somehow think you need to prove it. You don’t.
Honestly, you don’t corner people coming off the stage at karaoke night to shout your criticisms of their performance for the whole bar to hear. You don’t run up to people playing a pick-up game of basketball in the park to yell your opinions on what’s wrong with their performance. You don’t go up to the stitch ‘n bitch circle at the coffee shop to tell someone that everything they’re doing is wrong. There is no reason to do that to fic writers, either.
I used to belong to the other camp but these days find myself firmly in this one. In a writing class I took, a workshop leader once told us about the golden rule of critiquing, and contrary to what the golden rule usually is, for critiquing it basically boils down to “do NOT do unto others as you want them to do unto you.” Or, alternatively, “just because you have a tolerance for super heavy critique and want that from others doesn’t mean everyone else does too.” It was eye-opening for me–especially as I was probably more used to heavy critique than the rest of my class at that point–and has always stuck with me.
I also think there’s something to be said for giving feedback specifically about what worked for you in a story.
I once took a different writing class where we only gave a full “critique” in the sense of what worked and what didn’t for the very last submission–for the first few months we gave what the class referred to as “feedback” instead, which was basically talking only about what WORKED for you, to encourage the author and also to help them find the energy of the piece. It sounded strange to me at first, but definitely improved my writing–and also felt great–and I would 100% recommend!
(Also, if anyone is looking for a middle ground to help authors improve without risking making people feel bad–try this! Giving specific positive feedback about people’s work has helped me find friends and betas, and has led to me betaing for people too!)
I grew up surrounded by words in quite very
literal sense. By the time I was six months old my parents had taped words
to every surface in the house. So the walls said “wall” the window said
“window” and so on so forth. I still don’t know how they managed to get
the cat involved (she had a sign that said Cat) but some things in life are meant to be wondered at.
But for the next six years the world was covered in words, as first I learned to read, and then my brother. I dare say if you move some furniture in my parents house to this day you will find a faded piece of paper that says “shelf” or “bookcase” on it. It was a sad day when they were taken down, they were like old friends. But by then the magic had already worked. I was able to look at the world and see words, whether they were printed there or not.
I
was four when I sat down to consciously write my first story. I remember
it vividly because I had my bright yellow Cadburys Caramel mug, that
had the purple flowing font on the side with the bunny rabbit lady
on it. It was filled with “baby tea”— which is mostly hot milk with a splash
of tea from the pot to give it color— and I was holding it in both hands, sitting at the
little “art” table dad had built for me in the corner so I had a place
to sit and scribble that wasn’t the walls. Contemplating my next masterpiece I looked around the room for inspiration. Would it be an exploration of color through pinky finger painting only? Or would it be the greatest macaroni interpretation of a dog we’d ever seen? Sadly we’ll never know how this might have worked out, as at that very moment, mum came in holding a crystal mobile and hung it up on the window sill. This in turn had the effect of creating a living, dancing rainbow in the living room, and something in my brain short fused.
That was the day I learned the word “iridescent”. It was like learning the language of angels.
After that I was always scribbling something. My school books were a mess of words, crammed into margins and on back pages. I was always in trouble for letting my mind “wander into whimsy.” Once I got a report card that said “fantastical leanings towards flights of fancy.” It was meant as criticism, but dad still has it framed in the office.
Then there came the time a few years later when I was reading the Hobbit with dad, and I turned to him quite seriously and asked “where are all the girl hobbits?” and dad hemmed and hawed before eventually telling me “they’re in another book, darling…having their own adventure…” and I accepted this and settled back down to let him finish the chapter. He probably thought I forgot about it until that weekend I marched up to the Librarian and asked for “the girl hobbit book please”, which was met with much confusion and my dad rushing over to tell me they probably wouldn’t have it yet because it was very rare. A few weeks later, dad handed me something. It was sheaves of paper bound together by string. It was, he told me, a very exclusive copy of the girl hobbit book.
I still have it somewhere, back home. Probably on a shelf somewhere that still says “shelf”.
And sweet, naive thing that I was, I believed him. It wasn’t until later on and someone else popped my bubble, that I realized dad, not Tolkien, had written it. And oh I was furious, furious because the story had been so good and because dad had lied about not writing it himself. But that small bubbling anger was nothing compared to the heat inside my brain when my dad confessed he’d tried without much success to find books I might like with girls in them. All the heroes were boys, you see. It made me quite tearful actually, that no one had ever thought that someone like me could go off on an adventure and save the world, when I knew it to be a blatant lie. Old Mrs McDougall across the street had been a land girl and saved a man shot down from his spitfire. Mrs Mitchell had been the emergency coordinator and saved people from burning buildings when the Nazis bombed the shipyards, and her skin was all bubbled and tightly pulled across the left side of her face because of it and her hands didn’t quite work because she’d gripped burning metal to try and free the men inside. Those, were heroes. But we never learned about them at school. We only learned about kings and tyrants and the kind of heavily filtered history that lead you to believe that women were in there somewhere, but only in the same sense that a wall has paint on it.
And now my books, my lovely wonderful books, where you could travel through space and time or climb up volcanoes to throw rings inside and save the world…those wonderful colorful worlds that spoke the language of angels, were just the same.
I was ready to cry and be defeated about it until dad, raising his eyebrows at me and offering me a notebook, said, “well, maybe someone ought to write one.”
And you likely know the rest by now. But in short I write because there are stories to be told. I write because it’s the closest I’ll ever be to how the word iridescent feels. I look at the world and I see words, dancing like rainbows, singing like angels.
There’s words everywhere. I’m just scribbling them down as fast as I can.
For the person who saw this on Pinterest and wanted to reblog from the source, here you go ❤
You have been visited by the Thor of Positivity™! Take pride in your work and be confident in it! It may not be perfect but he knows you are working very hard and pouring your passion into it and therefore it is a Good Thing.
You ever write something and you think, “I’ve used this exact sentence structure/phrasing/convention approximately eight million times before but goddammit I’m going to do it again?”
That’s about where I’m at right now.
If artists are allowed to have a signature style, then so am I, motherfucker.
“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.” –Neil Gaiman
Sometimes I feel like a selfish, useless bitch for using my life to tell stories instead of majoring in mechanical engineering or challenging sexism and brutality in the police force. Then something like this comes along and remember that while I may just be telling stories, I’m also creating comfort for people who need it, and a war cry to rally around in times of need.
Stories are really important, but the people who make them sometimes forget that. So keep telling them how much their stories have meant to you. It will give them the strength to keep telling them.
Question of Smoke 