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 thought the training wheels comment was bound to get him in trouble, but the thing is, in the context of what he was saying it was exactly right. If somebody asked me how I thought fanfic could prepare you for being an original writer I think I'd have to say much the same thing based on my experience: it's great because it's writing, but doesn't include everything you need in OF. So if somebody says they are using fanfic as a way of learning to write Original Stuff, then they are the ones who came up with the training wheels idea--he just put it more bluntly. Just as training wheels remove the scariest part of bike-riding (balancing yourself), so does fanfic remove the scariest part of original writing--being completely original.

Now, I think most people who write fanfic *aren't* using it that way, so the metaphor doesn't work. But if someone claims they are using fanfic that way, then they themselves have already ranked fanfic as lower than their future goal, so it makes sense to say, "Well, what are you waiting for? Go off on your own now, if that's what you want to do." There can be plenty of skill-honing involved in fanfic--you can work on your structure without having to first come up with characters and a world, for instance. But again, that's training wheels--have somebody else hold up that end of the bike so I can work on the peddling/structure.

but there are things you never learn in OF that are central to FF such as staying in character.

Well, you have to stay in character in OF too. I think in fanfic what you have to do is stay in someone else's character, which is more a challenge of understanding another author's work and working with realistic possibilities--at least that's what I feel when I write series tie-in books. It is a challenge getting the characters to sound right and behave in character, and I do feel like I get stuff out of finding those voices within myself. In fact, when it comes to staying strictly in character tie-in work is probably much better than fanfic because the original author is supervising it--fanfic has a much bigger margin for error. There are no Draco Trilogies in tie-ins! Fanfic, however, can be better in teaching people possibilities in character types and things like that. There's often a lot more character development in fanfic than tie-ins.

But...that kind of thing isn't exclusive to fanfic; you can learn that last part with original fic too. Despite what some people may claim, an original writer can't just have the character do any old thing and have him be in character because she's the god of him. If Harry came to school in HPB and murdered Ron JKR would have to make it work with his previous character or she'd lose her audience just as surely as a fanfic author would. Or actually, she'd lose her audience faster than a fanfic author would. A fanfic author could probably get away with it because it was just a plot device to get Harry and Snape together or whatever.:-)

it's a different type of writing, which is why i don't think one can or ought to be the measuring stick of the other. it's like apples and oranges...yes, they are both fruits, they both need good grammar, style, a certain sense of originality to be good...but they are also a different genus at heart!

Absolutely--which is why I don't like it when people claim they're writing fanfic only in order to practice for OF, as if one is training wheels to the other. That, to me, is just as wrong as saying that children's book writers should develop into adult writers, or genre writers should grow into literary ones. Different genus, like you said.

But the angry replies to Neil Gaiman that I remember did not use this line of argument at all, and I thought that proved his metaphor was right. They didn't argue that fanfic was not training wheels because they were simply doing something different, they argued fanfic was not training wheels because it was actually original writing.