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anoceaninthesun · 5 years

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What do you think of reviewers who post at the last chapter and say, "I usually review only on the last chapter. I like your story blah blah blah" Doesn't this common habit among the fandom readers take away any motivation for writers to update frequently? I feel there are more reviews for people who update once a month, than people who update once in three days.

This is interesting because despite the main way I interact with fandom spaces being from writing fanfics, I generally don’t get asked much about my opinions on reviews, despite having loads of them. Caveat to my response is I speak mainly from my own experience with maybe brief generalizations I feel fanfic writers would more or less agree on.

To the first part of the question, um, well honestly even if infrequent I guess I’d prefer to see people review throughout. This is because my fics tend to be longer. I do often get reviews from people along the lines of “I would’ve stopped to review sooner but I just got so caught up in binging I waited until there was nothing left to read, whoops” I get that sometimes that’s true. If it’s a really thoughtfully constructed longer review than I guess I’m good with that. If it’s 36 chapters published in the span of two years with over 200,000+ words (which is where ASiT currently sits) and you give me maybe two lines....yeah, I can say you likely aren’t exactly my favorite person when I open your review. 🤣

But this is because I spent two years cranking this out piece by piece and the returned investment is already so little I feel two sentences to sum up all that’s been read and processed and hopefully enjoyed, is less than the bare minimum. So in summary on that less is never more for longer works in my opinion. If you’d like to leave shorter comments here and there that are chapter specific as you read it makes a lot more sense for me.

Yes, lazy reviews in short absolutely do drain away motivation. I’ll just bluntly come out and say that. By lazy I mean the specific kind of reviewer often admits they thought it was okay to keep reading and not review, not even at the end, and they tend to pop up only when there hasn’t been an update in a while. That’s....yeah.

Personally I hardly ever do every three day updates. When a story is in its infancy and I’m trying to get a feel for how it’ll take off so I’m cranking out these short chapters consecutively you may see me do that with little regard to how many reviews the chapters are getting as long as it ups the word count, which in turn often makes the story easier to find and generates attention....but on longer works I strongly advise against trying to do updates weekly. Why? Well on systems like FFN (Fanfiction dot net), this will actually not move your work to the top of the system when the page refreshes.

Due to an outdated algorithm they have, one of many, it has to be like 8+ days between chapters before updating will cause your story to float to the top of the fandom’s page of recently updated fics. So for example if you update every three days, people already following and favoriting may be alerted but new readers just scrolling through not using tags won’t see it because it’ll have been buried. So yes people who update monthly absolutely do usually (notice italics) get more traffic than people updating much, much more frequently. Updating that frequently can also give readers a sense of entitlement in my experience and the experiences of other writers I’ve heard from.

Chapters get cranked out soooo steadily and quickly that many people won’t feel it necessary to post feedback. They’re not being made to wait and for some (for sure not all but many!!) readers the wait is all they care about. If they’re not waiting/ “being inconvenienced” then they’re not going to comment. That is their sole reason to want to reach out to you to remind you in some way, sometimes politely and sometimes rudely, that they’re still waiting.

That being said, we are most definitely not machines. I know when I discovered fanfic I was barely in double digits and when I clumsily posted my now long-ago-deleted first work, I could hardly be considered a teenager. Now I am an adult, albeit not a very old one, and my priorities have for sure shifted and the free time I found in abundance even in high school, is a lot more limited. I’ve got a lot going on at any given time. A lot of things require me to devote myself to them pretty thoroughly.

Social lives don’t make themselves; you have to work to keep cultivating those no matter if the relationship is platonic, familial, romantic or otherwise. Animals tend to be less likely to bite the hand that feeds them (not that they have in my case) when you spend time raising and training them and then keeping up that bond—not that anyone asked but right now my whole thing is experimenting with fruit salad combos I made myself to see what my new baby bird likes, and renovating his cage so he’s constantly stimulated enough not to try to figure out the locks😂😂.

I’m gearing up to try to kill myself with school again by going for a D.PH next fall (which means I need to apply now and that in itself is a long and expensive process) because living even remotely close to three decades (which is what I would be when I finally finished it) is overrated anyway. If that doesn’t work I can always shave about the same amount of time off my life with emergency disaster management work. So what I’m saying is, all the stuff that young adult me has been juggling for the last three years or so, ten or fifteen year old me would have no clue about in terms of priorities. She could read fics and write fics, read fics and write fics in a cycle.

People want me and writers who are just as busy as me to update frequently, so make it worth our while. Show us why you, the readers, are worth devoting a probably limited chunk of our free time to keep happy with a craft we’ve honed (in my case professionally with the help of degrees), when we could be doing literally anything else. I don’t advise people slaving away at a keyboard to put free fics out there every three days and then getting discouraged when it’s not received as well as they’d like, when nothing is wrong with updating monthly, or hell, even every six months if that’s all your personal schedule allows for.

Sometimes I do surprise updates sooner than expected when a reader has really made my day with a solid review that encouraged me to jump start my writing process or when something has gone well in life and I turn to my writing or when I myself am sick of not finding what I wanna read and want to see more of what I’ve written admittedly partially from wish fulfillment put down to page. But never count on that a writer will feel generous for nothing, is my advise to readers. And if you, anon, are a writer, or some of my aspiring fellow fanfic writers see this, again, go at your own pace to avoid burnout. It’s a really fun hobby that has undoubtedly brought me endless joy but existential rewards aside it can be thankless. You will feel unmotivated and unappreciated at times.

Especially when reviewers roll in after long absences on their parts to feed you a line about why they hadn’t reviewed for a while until you chased them out of your inbox with a broom for badgering you between updates. Hopefully this wasn’t too rambling to get something from. Thank you for the ask.

#long post #writing #fanfic writing #woes of a fic writer #anon ask

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raging-violets · 6 years

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For the Meme for Fic Writers Asks ^_^ ##2, 7, 21, 24, 36 and 38

Riley:

2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

I’ve done a LOT of tropes over the years, including past published and now deleted stories. At this point I’ve probably done all of the ones I could think of. However, what I want to do is a love triangle story to the best of my abilities. I’ve done them before but they fall flat, bash a character, and make it incredibly obvious who’s the ‘bad guy’ and the ‘good guy’ of the entire thing. (Spoiler alert, my OC was usually the ‘good guy’). But I want to try to make it a bit more realistic in showing how messy and hard it can be.

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Too many to choose from, honestly. I have a LOT that are my favorite. So, to cheat a little, I’ll say it’s everything I write that’s to be super emotional/hit you in the gut. Confession scenes, verbal fights between friends/lovers, action sequences, and highly emotional scenes of angst and tragedy. If it can get me to the point that I’m feeling what the character is feeling, I love it.

Though for my most recent one, you can check out my version of Henry’s death in chapter 49 of Fuel to the Fire.

21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

Twice. I edit as I go (not all the time, but usually if I’m struggling having something go write) and then directly once I’ve finished the chapter. I don’t ever write an entire story out before I post (unless it’s a one-shot of course) so I post the chapter as soon as I’m done with my second revision. I never want to agonize over things not being perfect.

24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?

*laughs*. Try nearly every story between 2005 and 2008. Sometimes I wish I kept them, but that’s what the wayback machine is for.

36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?

FFN. I’ve written on it for 13 years this July. (Not including an account I had before the one I use now). I’ve made so many great friends on it since I was a very young teen, who I still talk to, and still make friends. I do slowly crosspost my stuff on AO3 but I’ve used FFN so much that I’ll never leave it. (Honestly, I don’t really understand the complaints against it either, but to each their own).

38. Talk about a review that made your day.

Too many reviews to list, but I’ll talk about a PM I received recently, which, I guess, is a review. For my BTR (Big Time Rush) stories, I primarily wrote a Kendall/OC pairing as I didn’t like any of his canon ones or thought any canon girl made sense with him. Now, I haven’t actually written a multi-chapter story in that fandom in a long time as it’s a dead fandom so I didn’t know if anyone still read. Out of the blue, I got a PM/review saying they LOVE my Kendall/OC pairing and that it converted them from being the canon ship lover to my oc-pairing lover. And that it made more sense than what the show had him as. The PMer also mentioned they’re very strict with their ships so to be able to convert them was a real complement. I have it saved and look at it from time to time as I miss the fandom every now and then and it gives me motivation to potentially go back. Plus, I miss writing that pairing every now and then.

Rhuben:

2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

From the reader’s point of view, I may have done it already, but I personally feel like I haven’t. Of course, this could very well just be because I’m the reader and I know it was planned all along. That would be the Wham Shot!

I’ve always wanted to be able to come up with a twist or a sudden event in a story that would have a strong reaction from readers, much like how tv shows or movies (for example: the first time I watched Saw and saw the ending) can do it for me.

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

From my BTR fic, “Never Again”:

Kendall blinked open his eyes,finding himself staring up at the ceiling. His eyes burned and his body achedas everything suddenly came slamming back into his head; the dance, the PalmWoods ghost, his mom acting weird, Sydney’s nightmare. Gustavo was finally outof the Palm Woods, which he was happy about, but he had an odd feelingof…dread? Worry? Doubt? Guilt? He couldn’t pin point it, he just felt weird andexhausted. Enough so that when the apartment was finally empty and quiet hetook the time to take a nap instead of joining in whatever insanity Carlos wasbound to cook up in his boredom.

This one I always come back to because it was a re-write of my very first Big Time Rush fic, and I was toying with the idea of how Kendall would piece together that not only had his friends been abused as a kid, but he had too. This chapter had him really listening to song lyrics, which brought forth his own repressed memories that he knew he had to confront. It was the first time I tackled a reveal in this way, and I really liked how it turned out.

21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

A lot. I can’t give an exact number. Of course, there are things i miss, but after I leave the chapter overnight, when I open it, I’ll go back and re-read what I have to see what makes sense, what didn’t, what can be cut out all together, what will be moved to another time, etc.

24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?

I’ve deleted a lot of my published fics over the years.

36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?

FFN; because it was one of the very first fanfiction sites I published too. Although, (if anyone remembers this site), I do miss fanfics.org a lot.

38. Talk about a review that made your day.

I recently had someone on FFN read my Flash fanfic “Out of Focus”, and how they were skeptical of my OC, Averey, and her metahuman abilities focusing on her eyes, but ended up loving the series, her, and how she ended up fitting in with the canon characters. It kept me smiling for a while and eased any fears/worrying thoughts I had about how people were perceiving her.

[ Meme Writer’s Ask ]

#answered ask #darknightfrombeyond #fic writer's ask #The Flash #Big Time Rush #BTR #fic: out of focus #fic: fuel to the fire #Kiley #Kendall Knight #Riley Jackson #oc: averey moore

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