[Rant] In Defense of Bad Writing

[thefourthvine]

A long time ago, I had a lot to say in rants about how people were DOING IT WRONG and should NOT WRITE THIS WAY but rather THIS OTHER WAY. (And, if I'm gonna be honest, those rants are all still there, just waiting for me to type them. Let me tell you about the Should You Use the Pluperfect? flowchart I made the other day. Or not, because honestly, TFV, nobody wants to hear that.) I was all, "People! Write better!"

Sorry, past me -- you were wrong. What I should have been saying was, "People! Write more! (Even if it's really bad!)"

Because, yes, I still think the word sensitized needs to be left to lie fallow for a decade. Where it can maybe cavort with its friend, lave. I still sometimes want to ban thesauruses. I still feel like maybe those weeping cocks should see a doctor, or perhaps a therapist.

But these days, I also think we're lucky to have those stories. I probably won't be reading them, but I'm happy they exist, for three reasons.

Writing is good. People are writing! For fun! Good news! Seriously, if I had spent more time writing down the hideously painful Mary Sue fan fiction I dreamed up when I was a wee teen, I might have spent less time on, you know, drugs and sucking the cocks of random strangers without protection. I'm always happy to see someone making better choices than I made.

Maybe you're now saying, "Okay, fine, but do they have to post those Mary Sue stories where I can see them?" If so, you're being a dick. Cut it out. The Archive of Our Own is not the Archive of Just What You Want to Read. It's the Archive of Fanworks. Is it a fanwork? Then it belongs there! And if you're incapable of scrolling past something, it's not that the Mary Sue writers are in the wrong place, it's that you are. (Also, I'm sorry, but I don't know where would be the right place for you. Everywhere is going to have stuff you don't like, because tastes are individual and all that. Maybe the internet just isn't for you.)

Crap is important. Sturgeon's law is right, but it misses the point. Ninety percent of everything has to be shit. That's how you get the 10% that's good.

Your favorite writers, fan fiction, published fiction, published fan fiction, whatever -- they didn't start out writing that way. There was a time when they wrote unspeakably awful crap. Writing unspeakably awful crap is how you learn to write only moderately awful crap, and then eventually maybe decent stuff, and then, if you're lucky, actually good things. There are not two classes of people, those who are good writers and those who are bad writers, so that all you have to do to have only great stuff is scare away all the bad writers. There are people who used to write bad stuff, and there are people who are currently writing bad stuff, and there's a lot of crossover between the two. Some of the second category will one day be the first category. (Also, tomorrow some of the first category will move back to the second. No one hits it out of ballpark every time.) If you want to read new good stuff tomorrow, encourage the people writing bad stuff today. (And also maybe help them get betas. Betas are great.)

And, no, those people don't have to hide their work away until it gets better. They can share it with anyone who wants to read it. If they want to post it, they should. Wanting to is reason enough. (Although if you want another reason -- posting is how community happens. Which is how things like betas happen. People who share their work get better faster.)

Crap is a sign of life. New bad stories are a sign that this genre -- fan fiction, the genre I adore the most - is alive and well. Bad stories mean new people are trying to write in it, and people are trying to do new things with it, and maybe new people are joining the audience, too. When only the best and most popular are writing in a genre, it's on its deathbed. (See: Westerns and Louis L'Amour.) I want this genre to be here forever, because I want to read it forever. So I'm happy that teenagers are posting Mary Sue stories to the Archive of Our Own.

Does that mean you have to be happy? Nope. I can't make you do anything. (I can think you're wrong, but hey, being wrong on the internet is a time-honored tradition among our people.) But when you start making fun of a writer and bullying her in the comments of her story, simply because she's writing something you think is bad and embarrassing, well, that's when I say: shut the fuck up or get the fuck out. Because she's not a problem. She's just doing what we're all doing -- having fun, playing with words, throwing something out there on the internet to see if other people like it.

But you. You're trying to stop someone from having fun. You're trying to shame people into not writing anymore. And that, folks -- that is the definition of shitty behavior. (Mary Sue fantasies, on the other hand, are just the definition of human behavior.) It's bad for people, it's bad for the future, and it's bad for the genre. So you're a problem.

Please go away, problems, and let all of us write out our ids out in peace.

(And, yes, this was triggered by one specific story and some of the responses it's getting on the AO3. But it applies to all of them, all the fan fiction we don't like out there. Okay, I'm done.)

Comments

[cathexys]

Wonderful rant!!! I wholly agree with you. Plus, your kink is not my kink, and that goes for writing too!

However, the one thing that does annoy me and frankly could disappear is tiny regular updates. Please finish a chapter and have it be a chapter (or, even better a story!) Same goes for podfic. Every day there's a new update on this one story, and every day I'm excited and then realize it's that story again... Or maybe that's YMMV too?

[cathexys]

So, now that I looked at the comments. Really nasty and just not OK. Otoh, the one thing that did kinda annoy me was what I just said in my previous comment. This story seems to be farther written on Wattpad (yes I looked there a couple days ago to see if it was finished there :), and at that point the daily chapter updates are annoying. No justification for bullying (because that's frankly BS--there's shitloads of stuff I'll never read on AO3 and I'm happy for all of it!), but there's the thing of creating fic and then there's the thing of how you share it.

(Sorry to bring my pet peeve into this discussion...of course I am a firm defender of any and all fic. All the power to self inserts, ffnet epics, and Wattpad first writing attempts!!! And I read more of them than I should just so I have a sense of what all gets written...)

It may be ymmv, but we're at the same gasoline station...

[jenna_thorn]

As much as I love the idea of feeds from AO3 (pairing specific, because I am that sort of reader, yes), this is why I can't use it. Because there are a very few writers who update often with one to two hundred word chapters of an endless wip with my preferred pairing in the background and a summary that makes me flinch.

I respect her right to post her epic, one droplet at a time, and I certainly wouldn't go into comments and say anything (I'm preeeeetty sure from the summary I'm not her preferred audience) but man, it's frustrating from a reader pov.

Re: It may be ymmv, but we're at the same gasoline station...

[samjohnsson]

::nosy support camel sticks his nose in the tent::

The RSS feeds shouldn't be updating for just a new chapter, or even if they edit an existing chapter/work. If they post a new work in the series, it'll ping the feed, but just chapter updates shouldn't. If you've got one that is, let me know?

AO3 feeds

[jenna_thorn]

I don't want to out the dribble-epic publicly. Look for a private message, okay?

Re: AO3 feeds

[samjohnsson]

or send it to http://ao3.org/support - if a feed is updating on chapters, there's something odd going on.

Re: It may be ymmv, but we're at the same gasoline station...

[cathexys]

I think part of my issue is that I still think of an ARCHIVE as something that I look to retain a lasting inventory of fandom whereas for me LJ/DW is more for the spur of the moment things. As a result, I prefer my stories to be finished or, at least, in copyedited form and with some actual content already there...I'd be embarrassed to post anything public that was just spilling out of my mind. And yes, I'm not the world, but the first thing I always do on looking at recent fic is clicking the finished only (best button EVAH!!!)

Re: It may be ymmv, but we're at the same gasoline station...

[out_there]

Huh. I have that attitude too -- maybe it is something that comes from being in fandom when LJ/DW was the more dynamic/spur of the moment type of fannish communication and an archive was static and much more trouble to upload to. I mean, I still write like that -- bits of wips posted to my jnl, but once it goes up on AO3 it's ready for the world to see and therefore needs to be finished (at least, to my point of view).

Re: It may be ymmv, but we're at the same gasoline station...

[monanotlisa]

Same here; not all of my fic is up on the AO3 -- I've exempted not just older full stories but also more recent, more...experimental bits of writing. And I wouldn't ever post a WIP (but then, I've been burned in the past; clearly there are writers and readers who have no such negative experiences).

Re: It may be ymmv, but we're at the same gasoline station...

[havocthecat]

I've been considering posting my old, unfinished WIPs as abandoned works and marking that clearly in the summaries. Which is not what I normally do, but when I haven't updated a story in ten years, I almost feel wasteful letting it sit on my hard drive.

archive v journal

[jenna_thorn]

That makes sense, well to me, at least. 8-) I "archive", that is put up on AO3, some comment fic, but stuff like the 15 character crossover meme (which I love and have written words that I'm really really proud of!) tends to stay on DW, because it's scenes, not stories.

[thefourthvine]

To be honest, constant tiny updates don't bug me anymore. I use a script that greys out works in progress, so I don't even notice how frequently things update. (That's not the reason I got the script -- it's because I am not good at reading works in progress, and I kept accidentally clicking on them -- but it's a nice side benefit.) I only really see the finished works. (I wouldn't even have registered the presence of the story in question if people hadn't been assholes about it.)

And yes: there are many stories that don't work for me that will work for others, and stories I love that other people don't. There's no one single metric for separating good from bad. AGREED.

[jenna_thorn]

I love the little "complete only" clickybox with all the strength in my arms.

there are many stories that don't work for me that will work for others, and stories I love that other people don't.

and I love that fandom (as an amorphous whole - I have no idea who started it) embraced the concept of your kink is not my kink and that's okay. (Though I suppose it says something about me that I have an icon with it as a keyword.) Mostly because I do so love the Mary Sues.

The Archive of Our Own is not the Archive of Just What You Want to Read. Plus, really how could it be? How many among us are now in the only fandom that we've ever been in? That we started in? I've written in what? a dozen fandoms? and read in... I have no way of guessing how many. And while yes, I have iron clad kinks (pun not intended, but I'm leaving it, because it's funny), over the last (counts on fingers, let's go with several, shall we? several years in fandom, I've encountered new fandoms, new source material, new ideas of what can be sensual (or not) and golly, wouldn't it suck for fandom (not just the AO3, but ff.net and Tumbler and I'd never heard of Wattpad until C mentioned it, above) to stagnate like that, to be held to a juried peer review that stifles the damn fine armpit licking (I know, right? And yet, smoking in context!) in order to squelch the ... whatever. My example of the epic being posted in dribbles is really rather off topic. Actually, my entire contribution to this thread has been off topic. Sorry.

[samjohnsson]

The Archive of Our Own is not the Archive of Just What You Want to Read.

♥

[adina]

I love the "complete only" check box too, but I wish I could tweak it a little bit to give me "complete or parts 2-10", eliminating "chapter 1/?" and "chapter >10/?". Because I actually like some WIPs, but I don't want to get invested in one before the writer commits to at least a second chapter, and I know that if the first ten chapters didn't grab me the next 90 aren't going to. But I suppose that would be a feature in Archive of Just What I Want. *grin*

[taliahale]

Ooh, the "complete or parts 2-10" would be brill. But yeah, pretty in love with the complete only button. There are a handful of authors I'll read in progress, but it's really limited.

[mermaid]

Hey, just jumping in here to ask: what's the script that greys out WIPs at AO3, please? That sounds like something I'd love to have, if it works in Chrome.

More generally, I'm glad you made this post. That Seguin/OFC story isn't something I'd ever want to read, personally, but the author has every right to post it and I was appalled by the hateful comments left on it.

Also, I'd really like to see the pluperfect flowchart! As I said on Twitter, only persistent, dedicated work by my beta has trained me out of its misuse.

[thefourthvine]

I *think* this is the URL that will get you the script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/164866.user.js. (It's a Chrome script, written for me by the lovely and amazing Flamebyrd.) If that doesn't work, let me know; there's another URL it might be.

[mermaid]

Yup, that's the one - brilliant, thank you :)

[recessional]

It's a YMMV too; I don't read a lot of fanfic, but I read a lot of friends' origfic in progress, and small chunks every day can be better than big chunks once in a while, in terms of whether or not I will have time/energy to read it.

[kephiso]

Sorry to just like butt into this here, but could you maybe spare a second to tell me what YMMV means in this context? I just can't figure it out on my own google wasn't a huge help here ("Your milage may vary"? I think I just don't get it *embarrassed*)
Sorry! :(

[recessional]

Yes, "your mileage may vary"; it means "everyone's experience is different", based on how car commercials will claim that their cars go X distance on Y amount of gas and then small-print write "your mileage may vary".

[kephiso]

Aw, cool, thanks! (English isn't my native language, so I'm sorry I had to ask *blush*)

[cathexys]

Yes, when I was in HP there were so many people just loving epic stories with constant updates. I, otoh, avoid WIPs like the plague. Now betaing a story is very differently, and there are a handful of writers whose WIPs I'll read but they (a) always post substantial updates (like 5-10K instead of 200-500 words) and (b) they have a track record of finishing.

It's less that I don't get that people like WIPs as much as I'm not sure anyone needs to share every daily update... (I read a story yesterday where someone actually wrote at the end, and I paraphrase: This chapter will be longer, but i'm tired now and just wanted to post it. Like, I'd find that annoying on LJ, bc, i think author and readers could wait for 24 hours for the author to, like, proofread and maybe finish, but on an ARCHIVE it's really annoying!

[recessional]

*shrugs* Depends on how people relate to the archive, I guess. Some people relate to it more formally than others; for some people it rather more IS the equivalent of LJ. It depends on what you're posting for and what you're getting out of it.

Some people (and I've been one of them, for particular stories) would rather a bare-bones update NOW (when we have time to read, when we need some distraction).

Thus, the MMV issue. My point is not that you're wrong; my point is that what you are interacting with as a bug, others are interacting with as a feature.