Well, it *wasn't* really a group for people to improve their writing -- it was originally a procrastination group for authors who weren't writing, with appropriate memes and so on. Which led to people 'humble-bragging' in a tongue in cheek way about how they had broken the rules and actually written something, and being told to 'go and stand in the naughty corner' as a recognised form of admiration :-p
But of course when you had a lot of writers all clubbing together there was a big temptation for people to start posting excerpts in search of acknowledgement, and at one point when the group was expanding rapidly this got so out of hand that the group owner decreed that there would be official "Work in Progress Wednesdays" where you were allowed to post 500 words or so of whatever you had been writing, and that posting your own work at any other time was prohibited. In the last year or so there has been very little posted on a Wednesday as activity dwindles, but I did use it as motivation to type up and post the first chapter of "Ashes" over several months in a series of 500-word chunks while working on the other chapters -- I still haven't got round to typing any of the rest of it, although I had a nightmare this week that included, among other things, the realization that I had irretrievably lost the notebook holding the remaining text. Which is probably a warning from my subconscious!
It was quite an unusual group in being very positive towards people writing fan-fiction (probably due to the founder writing it), although most of what actually got posted and/or advertised didn't seem to be fanfic. You got people bewailing the fact that they had just tossed off five thousand words of fanfic when they should have been concentrating on their 'real' work, while I was struggling with equally grim determination to find a few sentences for my fan-fiction... amazing how much easier it is to write something you are not supposed to be doing! But it definitely wasn't set up with an eye to providing critique.
I did do so for a few pieces that were posted early on, and didn't get actively attacked for it (and discovered, some months afterwards, that I'd had private messages from a few other people asking me to do likewise with their text). But I lost enthusiasm as my own writing became more and more of a struggle, and the general air of the material being presented became more and more self-congratulatory -- or maybe that was just my own ever-increasing sense of inadequacy. But when somebody posts a long excerpt about Big Issues they have been going through, narrowly fictionalised, what they are looking for, or at least what they were getting, is to be told how brave and powerful their text is at tackling the taboo... and not how overwrought and tedious it seemed to this particular reader who is not part of that social grouping.
And we've seen yet again in the comments to AO3's proposed Terms of Service rewording the claim that "there has been an influx of new fanfiction readers" who don't "understand the don't like don't read rule" -- whereas in fact the people trying to enforce this 'rule' are themselves a 'new' generation of fanfiction readers, as becomes obvious if you look at the fanfiction.net Rules & Guidelines, which reflect the accepted community norms circa 2000 and explicitly tell writers that they may get critical comments on their work and that they ought to be grateful for this :-p
I must say that I've seen you work your magic with some texts which I thought could never be saved
I suspect, thinking about it, that that is my equivalent of writing fanfic in order to procrastinate ;-)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2024-11-08 01:32 am (UTC)But of course when you had a lot of writers all clubbing together there was a big temptation for people to start posting excerpts in search of acknowledgement, and at one point when the group was expanding rapidly this got so out of hand that the group owner decreed that there would be official "Work in Progress Wednesdays" where you were allowed to post 500 words or so of whatever you had been writing, and that posting your own work at any other time was
prohibited. In the last year or so there has been very little posted on a Wednesday as activity dwindles, but I did use it as motivation to type up and post the first chapter of "Ashes" over several months in a series of 500-word chunks while working on the other chapters -- I still haven't got round to typing any of the rest of it, although I had a nightmare this week that included, among other things, the realization that I had irretrievably lost the notebook holding the remaining text. Which is probably a warning from my subconscious!
It was quite an unusual group in being very positive towards people writing fan-fiction (probably due to the founder writing it), although most of what actually got posted and/or advertised didn't seem to be fanfic. You got people bewailing the fact that they had just tossed off five thousand words of fanfic when they should have been concentrating on their 'real' work, while I was struggling with equally grim determination to find a few sentences for my fan-fiction... amazing how much easier it is to write something you are not supposed to be doing! But it definitely wasn't set up with an eye to providing critique.
I did do so for a few pieces that were posted early on, and didn't get actively attacked for it (and discovered, some months afterwards, that I'd had private messages from a few other people asking me to do likewise with their text). But I lost enthusiasm as my own writing became more and more of a struggle, and the general air of the material being presented became more and more self-congratulatory -- or maybe that was just my own ever-increasing sense of inadequacy. But when somebody posts a long excerpt about Big Issues they have been going through, narrowly fictionalised, what they are looking for, or at least what they were getting, is to be told how brave and powerful their text is at tackling the taboo... and not how overwrought and tedious it seemed to this particular reader who is not part of that social grouping.
And we've seen yet again in the comments to AO3's proposed Terms of Service rewording the claim that "there has been an influx of new fanfiction readers" who don't "understand the don't like don't read rule" -- whereas in fact the people trying to enforce this 'rule' are themselves a 'new' generation of fanfiction readers, as becomes obvious if you look at the fanfiction.net Rules & Guidelines, which reflect the accepted community norms circa 2000 and explicitly tell writers that they may get critical comments on their work and that they ought to be grateful for this :-p
I suspect, thinking about it, that that is my equivalent of writing fanfic in order to procrastinate ;-)