Professional Amateurs and Amateur Professionals

[sistermagpie]

Since my alter ego has so far not been represented on my flist:

You scored as Remus Lupin. Your alter ego is Remus Lupin. You are a wise and caring wizard and a good, loyal friend to boot. However sometimes in an effort to be liked by others you can let things slide by which ordinairly you would protest about. </td> Remus Lupin 75% Severus Snape 70% Hermione Granger 65% Harry Potter 60% Ron Weasley 50% Draco Malfoy 40% Sirius Black 30% Peter Pettigrew 20% Albus Dumbledore 15% Lord Voldemort 10% Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...? created with QuizFarm.com

you can let things slide by which ordinairly you would protest about Like the fact that it's o-r-d-i-n-a-r-i-l-y? ;-)

You know, it's almost more interesting seeing the rankings of different people's characters. A Snape with a #1 backup of Harry must be very different than my Remus with #1 backup of Snape. It's all the way you blend then, man.

Also I forget to mention the world-changing news (and by "world" I mean about six inches all around me) that I got a new chair. See, you all had no idea that for the past few months I've been sitting at a chair at home which had lost all of its caning little by little. I wrote that Petunia thing sitting on what was essentially an oversized square toilet where you could never put the seat down. I just didn't think about it until the roommate had to borrow my computer and tried it herself and failed. I went to Staples and got one on-sale. There's no telling how much I'll be writing now I'm not balancing by butt on an empty wooden frame. Mwahahaha!

By the way, I'm really enjoying all the

Harriet the Spy was never a very important book for me. I liked it, but it wouldn't ever be a book I said would shape my life or anything. Except for one line in it that I always remember and often find reason to remind myself of. There's some moment when Harriet asks Sport a very basic question and the narrator says something like, "Harriet never had a problem asking about something she didn't know. She just thought, 'Well, I'll ask about it and he'll tell me. Then I won't not know anymore."

Which is not to say there aren't times when I don't pretend I know about stuff when I'm completely lost if I think it will make me look stupid. But for me this comment refers to things that I just really have no way of knowing yet because it's new to me, or I'm a beginner, or for whatever reason I'm just not up to speed yet. If I was 16 years old and putting my first story up on an lj, sure I'd probably be hurt if people called me an idiot over it. If I felt like I was entering a place where being new and learning meant I was fresh meat to be torn apart I wouldn't be part of that either. And certainly nobody should be part of an artistic community that's trying to tear each other down rather than genuinely make each other better--though apparently some people thrive in that environment.

But the thing is too, that in my experience people who genuinely want to improve and have a realistic idea of their own work find others like that, and I don't think the big generalizations about who's behaving badly work. If you've got a critic and an author they're both people; both can affect the other; both are responsible for their own behavior--just like any interaction, neither one of them gets a free pass. I've read a lot interesting stuff lately that I agree with on, for instance, the danger of mediocrity, and that's very different from taking one side or the other and saying nobody should ever post this or that. For instance, in one of several threads on the subject of badfic one poster championing the writer completely lost me by sharing a personal story that was supposed to convince me--the story of how she quit writing forever because somebody gave her what to me sounded like an important bit of criticism. I mean, I'm reading the comment about how she used to write all the time and then somebody said THIS and I literally expected the next sentence to be, "I didn't like it at first but then I went back and looked at my writing and to this day I've always appreciated that criticism. That was the day I really started becoming a writer," or whatever. Imagine my surprise that the moral of the story was that the critic was a monster. It wasn't that I decided, "Hmmph. This person must suck!" It was just that it showed just how impossible it was to say there was just a right way to give feedback, because here was something probably more young girls should hear and understand (I thought) being put on the same level as an anonymous personal flame on a hate thread. That made think whoa-this isn't a thread about vicious behavior at all, it's about no criticism ever unless it's exactly what the author wants to hear and who's got time for that?

Some people would say that a reaction like that simply means the person shouldn't be writing. I don't know if that's true. Everybody writes for different reasons. Saying you can't write unless you're trying to get to the point where you write at a publishable level is a bit like saying fanfic should never be an end in itself because people should ONLY write fanfic to move on to profic--which is silly. A person can write for her own personal enjoyment rather than the enjoyment of others. If she wants to share that stuff with an audience that's okay too--with the understanding that somebody might say, "Hey, if you're going to share this with an audience you really need to think of the audience, and that probably means improving your style." I'm sure most people who would critique run-on sentences in fanfic, for instance, would never think of saying the same thing about somebody's private diary entry. But I think people are making things unnecessarily hard on themselves by being angry at someone for *thinking* they're writing for a different reason than they are, or for criticizing something in a way they don't like. It's just like...how is that person supposed to know what feedback is correct? How could they know how sensitive you were? Maybe this person thinks they're doing you a favor. The way we take a comment isn't always proof of the way it was intended and the way we react to comment really isn’t necessarily the way anyone would have reacted so clearly the person should have known better. As teasel said very well on this thread, the best way to avoid vicious fanfic is to have a community in which constructive concrit is encouraged and writers are expected to take some responsibility for their reactions.

I mean, when it comes down to it nobody can make you stop writing. Only you do that. That doesn't mean you can't ever be hurt by criticism or whatever--of course you can. Maybe some criticism makes you feel in a way that makes writing not fun anymore and you decide to quit because of that. But particularly if you supposedly have a love of a particular art form, it's up to you what you're going to do with it. I just don't really get how you can quit because of *other* people. For instance, Bob Fosse went into choreography because he knew he would never be as good a dancer as Fred Astaire and if he couldn't stand not being up to the level he wanted. That's a good example of somebody making a reasonable decision to do something else. Or somebody who just doesn't like the life of a professional actor or writer with all the rejection and no money so channels their energies into something else. That's another example of someone making a good decision to quit, but it's not the fault of the cruel world just because hey, the world is what it is. Of course it'd be easier to be an actor if there was no risk of ridicule or politics or rejection or anonymity, but that's the reality of it.

Any vaguely artistic business is hard to succeed in, which is why to be honest, people who work in one are all too happy to see anybody else give up. Yes, we want to inspire talented people to produce good work so that we can enjoy it, but it would actually make things a lot easier on me as an editor, for instance, if somebody who doesn't write very well DOESN'T send something to me. In my personal experience, the worst type of author to work with is the "professional" writer. "Professional" writers differ from professional writers in that they are actually professional amateurs. Often they're women, in my experience, and they all have very strong ideas about how they're supposed to be treated and nurtured as a professional, which translates into truly unreasonable demands, accusations that they're being oppressed and, ultimately, no work for them in the future. So I'm actually not really upset when that kind of attitude is encouraged in fanfic, since at least it's in the amateur realm where it belongs.

So I don't know. I think the main problem with fanfic is you probably do have two very different types of people writing it: those who want to be professionals and those who want to be amateurs--and I'm not using the word amateur as an insult. I just mean amateur in the sense that the writing is about personal expression--it's about the author herself rather than the work. Like I said, sometimes the amateur attitude shows up in the professional world, just as the professional attitude is very often present in fanfic. If somebody really wants to be professional, then developing a thick skin probably is a good idea. Or really not so much a thick skin, but a reason to keep writing for its own sake that doesn't depend on any reaction you may or may not get from the public. If the real goal is to actually produce better fic than of course it makes sense to present criticism in a way it’s going to be heard. Sometimes, as strange as it sounds, even snarky threads contribute to that. It’s like any other culture—if something is looked down upon by the culture it’s probably more likely to be rare. Fear of posting anything because people attack anything personally even it’s good would be a bad thing. The desire to avoid posting something badly-written because the culture values good writing is a good thing. As harsh as it is, I suspect that while the fandom culture perceived as nurturing of self-esteem and valuing personal expression will produce more writers, it’s the fandom culture perceived as having intimidating standards that’s going to writers of better quality. Ideally, of course, we should have both, but if I was going to lean one way or the other, I’d lean towards the latter culture

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I really don't understand the fanfic as practice for profic argument either. I mean, I can see the connection--plenty of people, especially kids, might start out writing stories about their favorite characters and later on write original work. Other people enjoy writing original work and fanfic as two different things. Some people just like writing fanfic. But it seems incredibly silly to me to describe fanfic as some sort of stepping-stone to original work because-hello? You can write original work right from the start. If you want practice for original work you should write original work.

Similarly, I don't think fanfic's necessarily such a great practice even for the kind of profic that's book based on the series of which you are a fan because that does a totally different thing. It's true some fanfic writers have crossed over into that--I think Star Trek writers did, definitely. But a lot of fanfic is by definition the kind of thing that can never be part of even the supplementary canon of tie-in books.

In writing my comment I was actually thinking of someone who was seeking an agent and asked my advice on cover letters etc. She mentioned in her cover letter than she wrote fanfic just as part of her explanation of what writing she did, since she was just starting to try to write professionally, and I told her that my instinct was to leave that off because it probably wouldn't impress the agent and might count against her in ways that saying she wrote original, unpublished short stories woudln't.

[fernwithy.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think of it as practice, but as legitimate writing that I've done. I've done fan work and I've done pro work (I actually did pro before I did fan), and I don't see why I should need to treat them differently--they both had the same amount of devotion spent on them, and if I'm writing a query letter about something, I don't know why I should be able to cite my creds as my one pro novel and several book reviews, but can't point out that I'm also the author of several well-reviewed stories that appear on _____ (wherever). I don't like treating some of my work like I'm ashamed of it, while I treat other work like it's legitimate just because I was paid for it.

Now, I have become a better writer through my fanfic. That's a given. Not because it's practice for pro, but because it's writing, and the more you do of it, the better you'll get. But I can't cite anything I've done in the last five years or so, because it's all fan work, and I think that's silly and insulting to fanfic, since it doesn't treat it as legitimate writing experience.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Now, I have become a better writer through my fanfic. That's a given. Not because it's practice for pro, but because it's writing, and the more you do of it, the better you'll get. But I can't cite anything I've done in the last five years or so, because it's all fan work, and I think that's silly and insulting to fanfic, since it doesn't treat it as legitimate writing experience.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought was ridiculous even as I was telling the person that putting fanfic in her cover letter might make a bad impression on a potential agent, because it was exactly that--as if it was something she should be ashamed of, when there's no reason to be.

I feel the same way about tie-in novels that I've done--though quite arbitrarily those can help me because they are published, even though they are so close to fanfic in terms of what they are. And like fanfic, they are writing and so are good practice as writing. But there's not this logical progression from fanfic to profic--I don't like it when people act as if once you get to a certain level of skill in fanfic you're supposed to "graduate" to original work, when a good author might prefer to simply write better fanfic.

Unfortunately, people are always going to try to rank these things. Recently somebody referred to tie-ins I've done as "formatted" novels in order to basically make it clear they were like paint-by-numbers and not original like her picture books (which all had the same formula, interesting or not). She also described them as "writing" with the quotes to again make it clear that I was as an amoeba to her great skill. There's that same kind of attempt at snobbiness about fanfic--and it's just as ridiculous there. That's another reason why it's probably imoprtant that fanfic writers learn to have a healthy pride in their own work, so they know this kind of stuff is untrue.

[fernwithy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my pro novel is a tie-in as well, and isn't any different from fanfic. And my writing has gotten better since I wrote it--I'd much rather someone who wanted a notion of how I write read either the sample I'd send or, say, "The Doll Army" or Lines of Descent than Quantum Leap: Odyssey or the fifteen odd book reviews I did when I was still bothering. Heck, even as a reviewer, I'd use some of my LJ reviews as better writing samples than my published reviews.

Of course, if I'd gone through with my plan to try my hand at a Harlequin, I might have cause to be ashamed of myself, because that would just be done to net some cash...