![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenkushner"Who reads this shit?"
OK, in the actual joke it's "Who wrote it?" - but that's not my punchline for this post. See, it's like this:
On Saturday we went to a new play at Vital about the loving relationship of two adult sisters, one of whom gets cancer, and the other has to decide whether or not to pursue her mid-life dream of being a Writer, which involves taking a grueling grad school degree from a Bigshot Writer. She works hard, even beating out the hipster guy who wins prizes for stories that essentially come down to "Will my protagonist get laid?" (which, having now read a ton of submissions to various places, I am here to tell you is what a shocking percentage are about. Yawn. But that's another post....) . . . and her reward, her big marker of success, is that her mentor recommends her stuff to a prestigious literary Little Magazine. Which, after many edits & revisions, publishes her story. I suspect only the dying sister reads it. Though possibly she dies first.
The next day, Guy Kay (an old pal from our mutual Struggling Writer days) sends me this from Harper's (read it and laugh so hard you'll snork. I particularly like "This sentence is short, not because it is brief—which it is—but because it has few words.") Very cheering. But.
So here's the thing: What made me - and most people I know - want to be writers is that we loved to read. We read a lot. We wanted to write the kinds of books we loved to read.
Schools are full of grad students whose highest goal seems to be getting published in small literary magazines with minute circulations. But have they actually read those magazines themselves first? Did they love reading them?
I'm probably being an idiot here, but I've already written the post, and it seems a waste of time to delete it now. Also, it gives me a chance to offer you the link to the Colson Whitehead piece.
OK, in the actual joke it's "Who wrote it?" - but that's not my punchline for this post. See, it's like this:
On Saturday we went to a new play at Vital about the loving relationship of two adult sisters, one of whom gets cancer, and the other has to decide whether or not to pursue her mid-life dream of being a Writer, which involves taking a grueling grad school degree from a Bigshot Writer. She works hard, even beating out the hipster guy who wins prizes for stories that essentially come down to "Will my protagonist get laid?" (which, having now read a ton of submissions to various places, I am here to tell you is what a shocking percentage are about. Yawn. But that's another post....) . . . and her reward, her big marker of success, is that her mentor recommends her stuff to a prestigious literary Little Magazine. Which, after many edits & revisions, publishes her story. I suspect only the dying sister reads it. Though possibly she dies first.
The next day, Guy Kay (an old pal from our mutual Struggling Writer days) sends me this from Harper's (read it and laugh so hard you'll snork. I particularly like "This sentence is short, not because it is brief—which it is—but because it has few words.") Very cheering. But.
So here's the thing: What made me - and most people I know - want to be writers is that we loved to read. We read a lot. We wanted to write the kinds of books we loved to read.
Schools are full of grad students whose highest goal seems to be getting published in small literary magazines with minute circulations. But have they actually read those magazines themselves first? Did they love reading them?
I'm probably being an idiot here, but I've already written the post, and it seems a waste of time to delete it now. Also, it gives me a chance to offer you the link to the Colson Whitehead piece.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 08:56 am (UTC)That is depressing. And certainly it's a great aspect of fanwriting that there's this warmth, this immediate response to what you've written and a willingness on the part of both readers and writers to discuss the work, their interpretations of it; fanfic writers and readers can have this complex and friendly discourse, because the internet allows instant communication like that. I mean, I could be wrong here, but I think there was a time when people felt that people who wrote the popular short stories they read in magazines - and read in great volume, from the end of the Victorian era to about the Second World War - were in some sense more approachable because they did read those stories, they knew the stories were there to entertain them, not to be Good For Them, so they had correspondence with authors and went to see them lecture and listened to their radio programs and so on. But there was still the dividing factor of time between one letter and another, and - now, to some extent I'm just going on those authors I'm particularly fond of, so I could be totally off the mark here - also a sort of inequality between reader and writer. Because one had come to the other to praise (or maybe condemn, but at least interact with) that person's text.
Where in fandom, aside from the communication being instantaneous and both sides tending to speak off the cuff, there really isn't as much distance because it's already an us vs. them situation. As fans, you're on one side of a divide and the creators are on another, and there's this faint sense of participating in some kind of outlawry, also a binding force. And when as a reader you approach a fanwork, you have that in common with the fan who made it, and you also have - obviously - a common interest in the original work. So immediately you have things you can talk about with regard to characterization and setting and the choices they made in their writing.
Fandom interaction is just infinitely less intimidating than talking about someone's original work, where theirs is the Word of God. Even if the writer is friendly and totally willing to engage with readers it's awkward, because what can you say or not say? It might be easier to talk to the same person about another person's writing: everyone's a fan of something. But if conversation goes to the author's own works, does there need to be a line there, to ensure that people still get credit for and have a certain degree of ownership of their own original ideas and work?
The first "fanfic" story I posted on the web 8 years
ago I got over 200 hundred comments and e-mails in
the first three days
Hey, that's great! Do you mind me asking what fandom it was in?
See, I can't help thinking there has to be a way to bridge this gap. Because the answer can't be that aspiring writers should just throw up their hands and go, "Hell with this, I'm just writing fanfic," and leave the making of original source to big corporations and people who're willing to play the distorting games that come with being handed huge sums of money. Even if that model of things weren't having trouble, too.
And though there are several authors emerging now out of fandom who I love and respect a lot, I don't particularly like the idea that the new system is "you get a fanfic audience, you get them willing to buy your original fic, then you leave fandom behind," either; I mean, that's great if that's what you want to do, but it's not what everyone wants to do; some people would like to have both, and plenty of fanwriters out there who aren't interested in having their own original stuff published. That doesn't mean they're not doing brilliant work and contributing to this tremendous and often innovative force of creativity.
It does seem like fan culture becomes more and more a part of popular culture on a daily basis. So how do you connect between pop culture and fan culture and Culture-with-a-capital-C? I guess you just have to get people involved in all of these spheres who are able to respect all of them as valuable, and I think maybe that's happening too. At least, I hope so.
And wow, this is long, so, um, [/soapbox].
no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:38 am (UTC)thread at Television Without Pity (this was in early 2002,
before LiveJournal). The community there was very vocal and
supportive -- the feedback I received was tremendous.