On Fan Fiction and Comments
So, I have recently posted a chapter 2 of a fic. Which has me a nervous wreck for reasons. While I watched the hits to double with not a single comment that would be any sort of asurrance of all the anxieties I had about it doubled as well. Like nothing. Just the hits and a couple of kudos (new readers?). So of course, my mind goes to "everyone hates it, I should delete it all, I should delete the whole account and disappear from the internet." Yes, I know, I have issues. But that is not the point.
At the same time, I am writing my thesis and read all these books written by academics, which talk about how fan fiction is a community experience, about works in progress and negotiation between the author and the audience. Those books are mostly from 1990s and 2000s.
The community-centered creation of artistic fannish expressions
such as fan fiction, fan art, and fan vids is mirrored in the creation of this book, with constant manipulation, renegotiation, commenting, and revising, all done electronically among a group of people, mostly women, intimately involved in the creation and consumption of fannish goods. As the examples above indicate, the creator of meaning, the person we like to call the author, is not a single person but rather is a collective entity.
(...)
Work in progress is a term used in the fan fiction world to describe a piece of fiction still in the process of being written but not yet complete. This notion intersects with the intertextuality of fannish discourse, with the ultimate erasure of a single author as it combines to create a shared space, fandom, that we might also refer to as a community. The appeal of works in progress lies in part in the way fans can engage with an open text: it invites responses, permits shared authorship, and enjoins a sense of community.
—Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (2006), p.14
It makes me sad. Because for many years, we didn't have a nice, big archive for all the fan fiction that would be easy to use. Where any reader could leave a comment and their thoughts on the story without even needing to have an account (if the author enables guest comments). Yet, people choose to consume the story as a fast food meal, moving on to the next one, not realizing that someone wrote that in their free time and wanted to share it and talk about it . I know I am hardly the first one pointing that out. Hits are not engagement. when I see like 300+ hits and then 40 kudos and 8 comments (that overlap with the kudos), as a writer I think "oh, so the remaining 260 people who clicked the story hated it". I realize that not every story is for everyone. I realize writers are not entitled to feedback. But consider this:
Readers and writers engage in power negotiations in a variety of ways, not only in terms of competing interpretations but also in the actual pro-cess of presenting, reading, and providing feedback to stories. Feedback, the reader’s comment to the author describing the positive and negative as pects of the story as well as its affective qualities, is often the only currency writers have in fandom. Writers can control feedback to some degree, be it through begging or blackmail as they hold parts of their stories hostage to a certain number of comments. Posting in parts not only may force the readers to enter a dialogue with the writer but also allows the writer to control reading practices.
—Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (2017), p.37.
Yes, feedback is the only thing the author gets for their effort. If there is none, then it is understandable why a fan fiction author could get to the mindset of begging for it in the notes, or blackmailing that the next part is not coming unless there is at least 10 new comments from 10 different people. To make the decision where to post and why, is the only power they have.
Fan authors also control readers by controlling access by locking journals so only selected people can read them, password protecting websites, or posting to private mailing lists.
—Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (2017), p.37.
Consider the quote above. Recently, I learned from a friend in a different fandom, that a fairly new author felt there was no interest in her story. So she decided to stop posting it to AO3 and announced on Twitter that she would only send the next parts to people privately upon requests, basically, going back to all good private mailing lists. She got a lot of requests from people who didn't leave any kind of feedback on a single published chapter. They didn't know it was important.
What I am trying to say is...
the writer is part of an interactive community, and in this way, the production of fan fiction is closer to the collaborative making of a theatre piece then to the fabled solitary act of writing.
—Francesca Coppa, ‘Writing Bodies in Space’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, p. 242
...and when people don't interact, it becomes a desperately lonely place to be. When you are a regular writer, you see reviews of your books, the sale numbers and all that. Fan fiction writers don't have that. All they have is the community they hope to discuss their stories and ideas with.
Maybe, as a reader, you want to say "but I am intimidated to interact with the author, you wouldn't interact with a writer of your favourite book."
...fandom does not preserve a radical separation between readers and writers. Fans do not simply consume preproduced stories...
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), p.46.
Do not separate yourself from the writers. Do not simply consume. Please. I beg of you.
