Word count: too embarrassingly low to mention
Seema, monitor of blogs far and wide, pointed me to this tussle in ville. My favorite part of the whole BNF Oppression debate was part of a comment by ethrosdemon:
I really believe the vileness of the SV fandom springs from the fact it was born after the advent of LJ and people can spout off and get immediate, and voluminous, response to everything they say.
The het/slash thing is just a red herring.
Here are some questions that have been circulating around the C/7 list. I thought they’d make a good blog meme.
Firstly, how do you feel about feedback? Do you live for it, ignore
it, think it’s nice but not essential?
I like feedback, but I have to conclude it’s not essential. I keep
website stats, and I’ve found that feedback comes from only a tiny
percentage of readers. So it’s my hits that make me happiest - they’re
the real feedback, IMHO.
If 27 people tell me my story is great, but then it’s
beaten in a contest by a story I consider to be a total piece of
crap, does that mean the feedback has been meaningless?
You have to judge the feedback on its own terms. Is it just a note to
tell you “I read this”? There’s nothing wrong with that - it’s like a
personalized hit tracker - but it’s not very meaningful beyond that. On
the other hand, if the feedback is constructive and helps you out in
your writing, or is exceptional (”this is the best story I ever read!”)
or comes from someone whose opinion you trust, then it can’t be
meaningless.
Contests are the bane of the fan world. They frustrate good writers
when they see certain bad writers win, and they also frustrate those bad
writers who don’t win. I’ve seen a lot of contests where the best story
didn’t win, and that’s especially common in the contests run exclusively
for shipper communities. I don’t mean just J/C ones, either. You
should never let a contest result get you down. Fanfic isn’t any fairer
than real life.
The best contests are those that are run blind (where the voters don’t
know who the authors are until the contest is over) and the ASC awards
(in which all fic posted to the Star Trek newsgroup over the course of
the year is eligible and votes are tallied by lines of feedback). Also,
recommendations pages like The Best of Trek tend to give more reliable
results than the average contest.
How many of you writers *know* when you’ve written something good,
regardless of whether you get feedback on it?
I know, at least, I know if it’s good by my personal standards of good.
I don’t think I have a different standard for my own fic as opposed to
other people’s, or for fanfic vs. professional fiction.
How many of you try to do something different with each story you
write?
I don’t try, per se. I’m not interested in writing different genres,
for example - only PG sci-fi interests me. However, part of what
interests me in a particular plot is finding a new way to, say, get the
entire crew pregnant or to get a certain pairing together.
How many of you have a billion ideas and use only a fraction of them
in your stories?
No, I don’t have many ideas for fanfic. I think I triage them - if they
really interest me, I can’t help but write them. Otherwise, I forget
about them pretty quickly. I do have more ideas than I can ever use for
original fiction.
And how many of you sometimes think readers are a bunch of morons who
wouldn’t know a good story if they fell over it?
I’ve probably written about this somewhere before. I don’t think any
readers are morons, or that their preferences are entirely attributable
to bad taste. Here’s my favorite quote on the matter:
I agree with Mia that certain shippers are looking for Jane Austen in
Space. I can’t say I object to Jane Austen anywhere, at any time, but
I have a beta monkey in the back of my brain that keeps me from enjoying
the worst of the lot. Some people are missing the monkey, but that just
makes them less critical readers, not morons. Really.
Things are gearing up for Beta Reader Appreciation Day on October 13th. Have you hugged your beta lately?
How did it get this late at night? It must have been the bad Pierce Brosnan
volcano movie…
So people are going on about fanfiction.net. Thanks to Seema for this
link
to a classic LiveJournal comment-in on the issue.
I have only a couple of stories up at ffn, as an experiment. I had an
especially bad experience with the first one, in which ffn went down for a month
about an hour after I posted it. Fanfiction.net has always seemed like the AOL
of the fandom world - so easy to use that it channels a newbies into situations
they’re not ready
for. AOL users are famous for breaches of netiquette; ffn users for literary and
grammatical offenses. Yes, I know competent, professional people who use
AOL. I know good writers who use ffn. That doesn’t alter the fact that ffn lowers
the bar in a realm in which the bars are already too low. As we say in
mathematics, it fills a much needed gap in the literature.
It’s too late at night to explain how flooding the market with bad fanfic
drives out the good, and even the notion of good. Go reread the section of the
Hitchhiker’s Trilogy about bad shoes destroying the economy of an entire planet.
No, the point that interests me in the recent ffn debacle is the idea some people
have gotten into their heads that giving someone money makes the recipient a
business.
Far from it. Consider another link from Seema:
Save Karyn. Is Karyn a business?
Does everyone recall the classic rec.humor.funny joke about
amazon.org?
There are certain requirements to being a business. It isn’t
enough to go around destroying the book distribution infrastructure by selling
books at a loss in hopes that
someday, when there are no independent booksellers left standing, your
monopoly will finally
net you a profit. At least, that shouldn’t be enough to make you a
business. (Refer back to the Hitchhiker’s section on bad shoes.)
Likewise, giving away web services, and upgrading them for people who
make monetary contributions, is not a business. I’m well acquainted with this
popular non-business through my web host,
freeshell, a.k.a. SDF. Freeshell
is run by a guy named Stephen Jones, out of his own pocket, with some help
from contributions from members like me. It’s free to all, but you get perks
in exchange for donations. After a year of the free membership, I gave $36
as a one-time contribution and got ftp and a few hundred megabytes extra
space. In return, I have nothing but Stephen’s word for it that he’ll go on
hosting the service and and letting me
eat
bandwidth. I average 11MB a day, and the limit for my level of
membership is 50MB.
(I don’t know where it all goes - it’s not people reading my fic, that’s for sure.)
If SDF ran out of funds to pay for the uplink, I would have to move elsewhere.
If Stephen decided fanfiction was a legal liability, I’d have to move elsewhere.
That’s just the way of the free world.
SDF has been giving unix junkies like me a free shell to play in since 1987,
so I’m not worried about it going away. I think it’s a great service, and if I
weren’t so lazy I’d give Stephen even more money. But I’m sure there are
freeshell users who feel that SDF’s anti-hacking regulations violate the true
freedom of the shell. Don’t Windows machines deserve to be hacked? How can
any self-respecting unix user stand in the way of the Darwinian forces of
hacking? Wouldn’t that be communism or something?
When you’re running a community service, you have to bow to certain
community standards. It’s the people with the money who can afford to put up
porn or send out spam, and pay the legal consequences out of their ample
profits. I’ve checked out a lot of free web hosts, between my mirrors
and Trek sites I’ve set up, and it’s the rare TOS that allows adult content. Why
should they? Why should anyone go up against community or
legal standards, however benighted those standards might be, for
free, for a bunch of strangers? Strangers, by the way, who turn
on you and call you a communist when the chips are down?
I can’t think of a reason, myself.
Having been way too busy lately, between my current job and a sudden
reappearance of work from three years ago that’s been consuming my free time,
I have a big backlog of blog ideas, plus recent disturbing thoughts from Lori
and Seema. If you squint while you read this, you may even spot a
coherent theme.
From the November 2002 Analog, Niven’s First Law for Writers:
Writers who write for other writers should write letters.
The first thing I thought of when I saw that was, of course,
the fanfic potlatch, but maybe
LiveJournal is a better example. I’ve never cared for LiveJournal, not even
when I thought it was just another diaryland; I prefer blogs.
A blog is not a journal or a diary. It is not evidence of membership
in a particular clique. It is not a longwinded, scattered metafic forum. A blog is
just a weblog - links and thoughts of interest at least to the writer, possibly to
passing readers. A blog is asynchronous.
Blogging shouldn’t be work. Fandom is too much work already - why take
on yet another job? Blogging shouldn’t be a misplaced mailing list, forum, or
newsgroup, if only because clicking around the net after the next comment is
far more inconvenient than reading mail or news, and slightly more
inconvenient than a forum or bulletin board.
I’ve always been against work in fandom, all the little and big ways we
make this all so much harder than it should be. I’ve railed against
fic taxes from the
beginning, and I bring my tax evasion with me when I blog. I don’t do the
blog rounds. I read a few blogs that I find interesting (see right column
or the main page if you’re coming from the
archives), and if those known interesting people mention something intriguing,
I’ll follow the link. Otherwise, I just surf around when I have the time.
The latest addition to my blog list is Alara Rogers; I added her not because
I know her, or am fishing for a blog potlatch return link, but because on the
rare occasions I get sucked into reading a LiveJournal-based metafic thread,
I seem to end up on her site, like her points, and think, “oh, yeah, Alara
Rogers has a blog.” It’s not a social thing. If I want a social thing, I can open
my inbox, which my list full of chatty C/7 fans seems determined to keep
stuffed.
So it’s impossible for me to get tired of blogging. It’s just me thinking
aloud here, and how could I get tired of thinking? Blogging is asynchronous, so
I can blog as little or as much as I want. I do it nearly daily because I enjoy
certain kinds of writing. One kind is writing fic, but the other kind is writing
letters. Email isn’t really like pen-and-paper letter-writing - it’s not
asynchronous enough. Emails are too full of quoted material and background
context to stand on their
own. They’re too instantaneous to require the style of writing that re as it
goes, that makes its own freestanding argument. Emails have no ink.
Blogger was kind enough to give me back the pen-and-paper approach
to writing, but with a larger potential audience. So I blog like I used to write
letters in the days before most people had email - to amuse, at a distance,
in a coherent and freestanding way.
The more communal and comment-centric LiveJournal gets, the further it
drifts from asynchronous writing and into dialogue. Dialogue, in fandom, turns
to meta, or at least show-chat. Dialogue means if no one comments,
no one cares.
Letter-writing, on the other hand, is prone to long silences which do not
reflect badly on the writer. You post a blog entry, and you get a few
other people’s blog entries that day, asynchronously, on random topics they
thought might interest you. Comments are beside the point in letter-blogging.
It’s all a matter of perspective. Fandom can only chew you up and spit
you out if you let it. If you’re careful not to pay unnecessary, self-defeating,
time-stealing and fic-quenching taxes, you may survive to write again. If you
do, write me a letter and tell me about it.
Naomi Chana was blogging about multi-fandom writing not working. She sees similar failures in cross-overs, as well. One might take this, on one level, as the usual murmuring against multi, and, on one level, I did so when I commented that single-fandom authors failed as often (if not oftener) to live up to the spirit of the show as multi-types did.
There is something eternally suspicious about the multi-fandom writer - something that smacks of betrayal or at least jaded decadence. In larger fandoms, similar suspicions cling to those who leave one camp within the fandom for another, whether it be a change of pairing, the frequent switch to slash, or the infrequent switch to what Naomi Chana called compatibility. Or back again.
What she called good fanfic, fanfic with the referential dimension, compatible with the show, is what I call canon fic. To me, it’s just another fanfic genre. Don’t get me wrong - I certainly prefer it to all other fic as much as she does, but I don’t mistake it for the sine qua non of fanfic. I didn’t get into fanfic by reading canon. The first fanfic I ever read was Jane Austen fic, and of it all only one story sticks out in my mind as canon writing. Canon can be hard to find in Trek as well, perhaps because space opera isn’t all that easy to write. Romance is easier, or angst, or smut, depending on your leanings.
What got me into fanfic was reading fanon. The referent of canon writing is the show; fanon writing calls instead on the body of fanfic. In that way, fanon is more truly referential - it is a language that grows, even after the show is off the air. Take, for instance, the J/C fanon that has sprung up to bring an end to the C/7 broadcast relationship. J/C canon pales by comparison.
Those members of the C/7 list who were never in the J/C camp like to point out the baselessness of the whole J/C phenomenon. Those classic J/C episodes, they would say, were bad episodes and unconvincing. Those famous stray J/C moments - well, they never really happened. They were a mass-hallucination.
As a former J/C writer, my response is, why, yes they were, thank you very much. That is the nature of fanon. Seeing things that aren’t there is the greater part of fanfic. I started writing with a rather choppy background of watching the show, but a very strong grounding in fanon. My stories were a dialogue, not with Voyager, but with the J/C Story Index. Maybe they failed as good writing, maybe they failed to capture the spirit of Trek, but they had the referential dimension all right. They referred to fanfic. They were good fanon.
Naomi Chana remarked that multi-fandom writers, while writing good stories, usually failed to write good fanfic (of my canon variety). The other side of the coin is that single-fandom writers, while writing good fanfic (of my fanon variety), frequently fail to write good stories. I think most of us recall a time when a good fanfic excused a poor story; many fans never stop preferring good fanfic to good stories. Those of us with the bad luck to grow old in fandom lose patience with poor stories.
Maybe it’s true that multi-fandom writers prefer, subconsciously, a good story to a good fanfic. After all, how can they tell, hopping from one fandom to another, what a good fanfic is for any particular show? How can they establish the reference, without extensive reading in the fanon, or obsessive watching of the show? Yet if they carry their own universe with them and speak some language of angst only they can understand, that is also a fanfic genre.
Just not my genre. I prefer canon, though I haven’t forgotten fanon.
The examples of non-feedback motives in my last post were not meant to
be exhaustive. Lori and Mike gave some better examples of motives, to wit,
some people post just to be read and some people post for emotional sharing.
Mike’s essay led me to wonder whether emotional feedback counts as feedback proper. I was surprised to find that I’ve been in
fandom so long I’d forgotten that our usage of the term feedback is rather
unusual. It can be found in business English (which might be better called
corporate slang), but not in Webster’s:
feedback n. (1920)
1 : the return to the input of a part of the output of a machine, system,
or process (as for producing changes in an electronic circuit that improve
performance or in an automatic control device that provide self-corrective
action)
2 a : the partial reversion of the effects of a process to its source or to a
preceding stage
b : the transmission of evaluative or corrective information
to the original or controlling source about an action, event, or process;
also: the information so transmitted
- Merriam-Webster OnLine
I’m not looking for correction. Although I wouldn’t mind improvement and
I never object to constructive criticism, becoming a better writer
has not been my goal in writing fanfic. So on a deeper level than just rah-rah
email, I’m not in it for the feedback. Or rather, I provide all the
feedback I need - I fix what I want fixed, and I leave broken what I like broken.
(Said-bookisms, anyone?)
I get the most feedback, in the 1920 sense of the word, from my hit
tracker. I would have no idea how many
people were reading my fic on the web without the sneaky little perl script that
logs visitors, and I’ll never know what my readership on ASC is, between the
newsgroup proper, the mirror mailing list, the Trekiverse archive and Google
Groups. Hits are just a “partial reversion”, they’re nothing like a corrective
process. I put my stories on line before I started tracking, so I’m not
in it for the hits.
Then again, rah-rah email is just positive feedback, too. I’ve said in the
past that you can tell a lot from positive feedback - from what people say they
liked, even if they’re too nice or controversy-aversive to say what they didn’t
like.
I think I’ve finally wrestled the yellow into the format I want. When I reactivated comments, I took the opportunity to tweak the stylesheets one last time. The font sizes got out of whack back when I tweaked it to work better with Jurassic Netscape. There’s a massive WinIE5 bug for font sizes that I haven’t fixed, because the work-around is the ugliest hack I’ve ever seen. It’s an insult to CSS to hack them that way; I refuse. If you insist on using IE you deserve whatever you get (in this case, fonts that are one size too ).
Pardon the geekiness. On to the peeve of the day: a while back the partial logic test spread here from Lori’s blog (If P then Q). Today, I realized that one of my biggest fandom peeves is an example of the very same bad conditional reasoning.
Everybody has words or catch-phrases or old saws they can’t bear hearing trotted out time and again - the fingernails down the blackboard of the English language. I cringe whenever Catherine Asaro uses “gentle” as an intransitive verb, and I want to strangle someone whenever I hear, “If you weren’t in it for the feedback, you’d lock your fic in a dark closet somewhere instead of posting it on the Internet.” This classic of bad conditional reasoning starts with a good (which is to say, true) conditional:
(1) If you particularly want to get feedback, then you post your fic somewhere public.
For any conditional statement if P then Q, there is another conditional that follows from it: if not Q then not P. It’s called the contrapositive. The contrapositive of statement (1) is:
(2) If you don’t post your fic somewhere public, then you don’t particularly want to get feedback.
Statements (1) and (2) are equivalent, although one of them may seem more obvious or intuitive than the other. They are a single, simple fact of publicity.
No other statements can be derived from (1) or (2). Most notably, if P then Q does not, in any way, imply if Q then P. So we come to the old saw,
(3*) If you post your fic somewhere public, then you particularly want to get feedback.
Statement (3*) is not true. (That’s what the star is there for.) It’s the conditional fallacy discussed at length in the results of the partial logic test. Statement (3*) has its own logically equivalent (and therefore equally false) contrapositive:
(4*) If you don’t particularly want to get feedback, then you don’t post your fic somewhere public.
Statement (4*) is the more common form of the fallacy - slightly restated, we get the original peeve: “If you weren’t in it for the feedback, you’d lock your fic in a dark closet somewhere instead of posting it on the Internet.” Starting with the true statements (1) or (2), fans apply faulty conditional reasoning to get statement (3*) or (4*). Sometimes they take the form of an innocent statement about fandom, and sometimes they serve as a vicious accusation of status-seeking, but whatever the point to be made, it cannot be made with (3*) or (4*) because they are fallacies. (Specifically, the fallacy is the converse error or the inverse error, depending on which true statement you start with and which false one you end up with.)
That’s the end of the logical argument, but the notes on the Wason test mentioned that people still believe conditional fallacies even after they’ve been pointed out. So it’s helpful to give some counterexamples for (3*), keeping in mind that anything which disproves (3*) also disproves (4*).
The Newbie Example: Say you’re a rank newbie. You read fanfiction on the J/C Index, but it never occurs to you to send feedback. Sure, you see the email addresses at the bottom of the stories you read, but you’re still in a pay-per-fic mindset where reading requires no interaction with the author. Say, in addition, that you get inspired to write your own fanfiction. You’re a geek, you know html, so you make a website and put up your new stories. You may even add your email address, because that seems to be what’s done. If you’re the sort of person who skips past authors notes and steers clear of mailing lists, you could, conceivably, write and post several stories without expecting or wanting to get feedback for it. You post, but you do not particularly want feedback, contradicting statement (3*).
The BOFQ Example: Say you’re a bitter old fic queen. You got feedback in your heyday, back when the show was young and the fans had taste. You played the mailing list circuit and won awards - been there, done that, got the graphic. One day, when you’re slightly inebriated, you write a vignette for old times’ sake. You post it, just in case anyone’s interested, but you have no newbie delusions anymore. You know exactly how little feedback gets sent in your fandom; you’ve posted short pieces before and gotten not a single email for it. Nor do you consider the vignette significant enough in comparison to your famous 800k novels to deserve a line of feedback - you’re just tossing it out there to prove you’re still in the game. You post, but you do not particularly want feedback, contradicting (3*).
I’m probably the only person who has ever been accused of not liking feedback (and it wasn’t true). No one objects to getting feedback, but that doesn’t make feedback everyone’s overriding motive for writing and/or posting fanfiction. There are plenty of other motives out there: the muse, politics, practice, spite, building up a Big Name, trading in the fanfic potlatch, individual fic gift giving, honor, glory, and so on. Feedback isn’t everything.
This concludes today’s free logic lesson.
Late at night when I ought to be sleeping I end up surfing. Tonight the great http wave took me farther than I usually go and washed me up in an old entry of naomichana’s. She and Thamiris are people whose blogs I ought to track more. It’s a long entry, so here’s a representative sample:
I don’t think I can say it better, but I can say it shorter: why do people get annoyed by discussions that don’t interest them? Is there a law about being all things to all men? Fanfiction is supposed to be about Taking Things Too Seriously, after all. The pot is calling the kettle black, and the kettle just doesn’t get it.
Pardon me while I go link this woman right now. Here’s the line that pushed me over the edge:
In response to Lori’s blog on BNF’s
Trekdom is the oldest show fandom, dating back to the successful drive to keep the show on the air for a third season, and the unsuccessful one for a fourth. I don’t know that it’s IDIC that keeps Trek fans more polite than the newer, more rabid fandoms. I’d guess it was science fiction itself. In my experience, S’s have little patience for sci-fi of any sort, not even with Seven of Nine parading around in a catsuit, so the Trek population is heavily slanted towards the N’s, which cuts down on personality conflicts. Sometimes BNF is a matter of personality, too.
It’s dangerous, with non-Trekkers lurking nearby, to talk of BNF’s-by-merit. Let us say that all BNF’s deserve their big names, but that it is not always for fic that they’ve gotten them. Consider the idea that Big Fame can result merely from participation in fandom as a social activity, rather than from the stories themselves. It is, for people like myself, a very strange concept, but one which I’ve heard more than once and must take into account. I think Lori touches on this phenomenon when she talks of BNF’s by PR, of the effect of Big Names in author’s notes, and of Big Fans acting important and authorative, but she seems to believe it still has something to do with advertising your fic. I disagree - it’s not the fic that spreads by these means, but the Big Name itself.
Of course, all BNF’s write, or have at some point written, fanfic. It’s a rite of passage, but it’s not necessarily the source of their fame. Like a presidential candidate who was, technically, in the armed forces for the last relevant war but spent his tour of duty behind a desk somewhere or reporting for a military newspaper, the BNF’s actual fic may be merely nominal. Or she may still be cranking out the fic, but in a forum which will never be critical thereof. (One cannot overestimate the importance of quantity in fandom.) Thus, someone who has produced quality stories at a steady rate for years can be thrown over by voracious fans for a newbie with the energy to flood the market with average fic. To see a BNF-by-fic lose, say, a fanfic contest to a BNF-by-potlatch can be a disheartening thing to those who still think fandom ought to be all about the fic.
Archivists, blogs and rec sites aren’t common in Trekdom, so the idea that fame can derive from something that isn’t even there comes hard to geeky old-school fans who grew up on TOS, such as yours truly. One sees more of fame by social factors in the pairing lists, but I think that in order to find persona trumping oeuvre on a large scale, you’d have to look to other fandoms. If you’d rather not see that sort of thing, it’s best to stick to Trek. There are far stranger things in out there in fandom than our little sock puppets.