About Crappy Writers & Commenting

[emmuzka]

What is the sentence that I hate the most in fan fiction?

A/N – First chapter’s done. Let me know if you think I should continue or not. (From this exemplary piece of crap fic.), a.k.a. "Do praise me because without your continuous ego stroking, I might drop the fic, and as I haven't actually wrote it to the end yet, I can always blame my readers when I drop it due it's going nowhere."

Grr, in the old times is was common to beg for feedback and I did't like it then. Now it's demanding and blackmailing. I would like to believe that a good story will spontaneously generate feedback. Admittedly high profile writers will receive more feedback and some times it's not even connected to the relative goodness of the fics, but generally speaking, if you aren't getting as much feedback as you would like? Maybe that could be because some of the readers werent satisfied with your story. And no amount of pleading and blackmailing for feedback will change their attitudes.

Speaking of witch, what do you think of negative feedback? In a case where you suspect that the writer wouldn't actually gain anything about your feedback (constructive or otherwise) and would only feel hurt by your comment, would you comment still if the fic would be so drastically bad that it would put you in a bad mood? Like this not-very-helpful comment I gave tonight:

The characters are ooc. Grissom would yell and call his workers lazy and think that it would be the only way to learn? Have we been even watching the same series? Usually I have a policy of dropping the fic if anyone cried in the first two paragraphs, but I gave this a chance. But sorry, didn't like it.(Given to this piece of fic)

One can't know if the writer in the other end is a twelve year old girlie writing her first fic. On the other hand, there could be an adult, self-important shitty writer who just doesn't care. In this case, it's probably the former reason, because the author responded like this to a real constructive criticism: I'm not very good at writing. This is all new to me.

Which, of course leads to the question: Then why are you bothering us?

Comments

[cimness.livejournal.com]

"I'm not very good at writing" does not excuse a complete lack of sense-making. Part of the process is thinking about whether the story you want to write even makes any sense or not before you write it. If it's pointed out that it doesn't make any sense, the correct response would be for her to think about it and hopefully realise that it's good if the characters act like themselves, not to try to excuse herself.

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

hear hear. "I'm new to this" could stand as a partial excuse for writing crap, but still: a writer should see that something is wrong if her characters behave totally out of character. There is no excuse. On the other hand, I have a feeling that with some of the younger and newer writers, fan fiction *truly is seen* as only a device for getting your original story some readers, that requires no faithfulnes to the characters. I have seen a few "It's AU, so the characters are bout the be ooc!"-defences and boy, they make me scared.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Hahhahahaha. I'm pretty sure plenty of people who aren't even teenies use that logic, alas...