Thoughts on Fic and Mockery

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So, several days ago, another round of discussion began, this time in LOTR (mostly) RPS fandom, on the question of mocking fanfic. I'm moderately against. I mean, we've all seen utterly hilariously bad things, and laughed, and so on. But.... as I said elsewhere, the fanfic_hate thread about me bothered me so much I still sometimes have nightmares about it, and I would be pretty horrified if I found one of my stories MST'd somewhere, certainly to the point of tears and possibly to the point of ceasing to write at all. So that's where I'm coming from on this subject.

There's a lot I could write about this, but I'll try to be brief. Globally, I think I see this in terms of what one has the right to do vs what one is in the right to do, and in terms of the conflict over where we all end and begin as people, and what our responsibilities are as writers and readers. .When one puts something up to be read by others, one must know that one can get any and all responses. For example, I know that by putting my stories up I risk finding one of them MSTd, or having a series of savage reviews that disagree with every interpretation, or being told I waste bandwidth and should delete my LJ. If someone says such a thing it's up to me as to how I deal with it; I know I'm tender-hearted, and when I first became a fanfic writer I had to consider that when deciding whether or not to publically post. However, just because all responses are *possible* doesn't make all of them *right*. I would not think I was being a good person to leave such responses for people, and I don't think it improves the world of fanfic for people to leave them. Would I stop them if I could? No, I wouldn't. But I think it's a valid statement to ask people not to do so, to say that being nicer is possible and might be a better course.

There is, of course, always more than one side. To address just one of several other sides to this, writers have, I believe, a responsibility to not respond to well-meant comments as flames. (It's one of those differences that could have, and has had, much writing devoted to it. Often though, it's pretty clear. "If you can't read the source text properly you should not write fanfic and waste everyone's time" is a different sort of statement than "Character X actually has hazel eyes," even if sparked by the same feature of a story, let alone the difference between "if you can't read the source text properly..." and "I usually read Character A and Character B together, not A and C" as two responses to the same feature of a story.) It's better for everyone involved, not least in helping readers feel that trying to be helpful is worthwhile. That said....

...personally, this controversy has made me think about why it is we *do* write, about people's varying reasons. Many people have defended mocking by saying that they post stories in order to improve as authors, so they want criticism and want to be free to make any comment they choose to others. While improving my writing is one of my goals, it isn't my only one. I am not so self-sufficient that I find positive reinforcement superfluous. After a fair bit of criticism that boiled down to "you aren't writing what I want to read," I decided that I wanted to write for an audience who will share certain basic assumptions with me and be interested in some of the same things I am, for whom I could write enough of what they wanted to read that we could usefully communicate about the rest. I also find that constructive criticism mentions what worked in a piece of fiction as well as what didn't, which is pretty much antithetical to mocking.

Also, well, from my perspective what insisting on mockery boils down to is reserving the right to sit in judgement on people, about which my feelings are mixed. We do, and have to, make judgements every day about all sorts of things. And yet....I've read comments that clearly carried the subtext of "I know this better than you do" and or "There is no validity to your efforts." People have said in this discussion that if someone can discourage you from writing by mocking you then you didn't want to write badly enough, that flames ought to make you want to do better and show the flamers they are wrong, but I'm not certain I agree with that, because I think it's possible to convince someone that it's *impossible* for them to do better and that they should give up. And it feels weird, if not worse, to think of people sitting in judgement on my worth; I wouldn't want to contribute to giving others that feeling.

I haven't really gone into badfic communities and the like, aside of my own experience with the community mentioned above, mostly because my reaction to a story I find actually lacking in quality (not always the same thing as a story I just don't like, though my reaction is the same) is to go on to the next one. So I don't really *get* them, except as that people are interested in a great many things. I think my reaction to all this boils down to that as a reader I would rather see the goal of having more good stories to read met by having more authors feel free to write than by having authors punished for writing badly, and that as a writer I find it more *useful* to be told about what I accomplished as well as what I didn't, and that as a person if I want to be told I'm worthless I have plenty of places to go, I don't need to hear it it from online avocational communities, and I don't think others do either.

And of course there's so much else to be said, about how we define writing well vs writing badly, about personal responsibility in communication, about who we are behind our computers, about ....whew. OK, now that I've said all this, hopefully the topic can cease bugging me sufficiently that I can get back to writing.

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That, or they're masochistic.