I think I agree with what you're saying. The kind of writing you're talking about, which is more of a conversation between fans or a game, is just as valid as writing for any other reason. The trouble seems to come, imo, when the two get mixed up.
For instance, I feel like if you wrote something for social reasons and somebody critiqued it as if you were writing it to be criticized on a professional level, there would be a miscommunication there, but the critic wouldn't necessarily have intentionally insulted you. This just may have been what they thought they were supposed to do because that's the side of the writing part of fandom they're in. If the person was ridiculing you it would be possibly mean and also pointless, like holding up an ad in a magazine and complaining that there was no plot or characterization. If we're going to have lots of different people in a fandom we all have to make room for each other.
But then, if I were to submit a story I wrote as a game between friends to an archive and it was rejected and criticized, it would be silly of me to get angry and shoot back that they were wrong for criticizing me since I was just writing a joke for friends, since the archive describes itself as a place for writing-for-net-publication. Similarly on some of the other threads, sometimes people seemed to want the kind of feedback intended for published work--but only the good kind. They were hurt not because their non-serious work was critiqued seriously, but because their serious work received serious criticism that wasn't glowingly positive.
Of course in fandom it's always going to be confusing because it's all "published" the same way--on the net. You and somebody else might both "publish" something in your lj, only you're not wanting it to be considered as a piece of professional writing and somebody else does. You're saying hey, I'm an amateur, I'm doing this for such and such a reason. Somebody else might be an amateur literally but approaching things more as a professional.
The people I described in my post, for instance, are professional amateurs because they *are* trying to work as professional writers with actual publishers...they just have this bizarre idea of how that's supposed to work!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-19 11:13 am (UTC)For instance, I feel like if you wrote something for social reasons and somebody critiqued it as if you were writing it to be criticized on a professional level, there would be a miscommunication there, but the critic wouldn't necessarily have intentionally insulted you. This just may have been what they thought they were supposed to do because that's the side of the writing part of fandom they're in. If the person was ridiculing you it would be possibly mean and also pointless, like holding up an ad in a magazine and complaining that there was no plot or characterization. If we're going to have lots of different people in a fandom we all have to make room for each other.
But then, if I were to submit a story I wrote as a game between friends to an archive and it was rejected and criticized, it would be silly of me to get angry and shoot back that they were wrong for criticizing me since I was just writing a joke for friends, since the archive describes itself as a place for writing-for-net-publication. Similarly on some of the other threads, sometimes people seemed to want the kind of feedback intended for published work--but only the good kind. They were hurt not because their non-serious work was critiqued seriously, but because their serious work received serious criticism that wasn't glowingly positive.
Of course in fandom it's always going to be confusing because it's all "published" the same way--on the net. You and somebody else might both "publish" something in your lj, only you're not wanting it to be considered as a piece of professional writing and somebody else does. You're saying hey, I'm an amateur, I'm doing this for such and such a reason. Somebody else might be an amateur literally but approaching things more as a professional.
The people I described in my post, for instance, are professional amateurs because they *are* trying to work as professional writers with actual publishers...they just have this bizarre idea of how that's supposed to work!