fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2937 ]

[ SECRET POST #2937 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2937 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 056 secrets from Secret Submission Post #420.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I run a fic exchange and I sometimes offer to beta for participants. Most submissions require very little comment, because the writer's using a beta as a final sanity check, but some stories are no more than a first draft, and I find myself spending hours thinking about the characterisation and explaining why it's OOC, thinking about the plot and pointing out the holes, the leaps, and the missing scenes, correcting the spelling and the punctuation, raising matters of canon...

And I have to say that it baffles me.

I mean, how can a writer bear to put her name to a story when she's relied on a beta to sort out the plot and the characterisation for her? (Why would a writer want someone else do all the best bits of writing for her?) And why does a writer need a beta to format paragraphs and punctuate dialogue correctly, when she can just open up the nearest Penguin paperback, check how a respected publisher does it, and do the same?

I can well believe that your friend's writing has deteriorated because you no longer beta for her, OP, but I find it really, really sad that she needed you so badly.

I've done betas for these kinds of bafflingly incoherent fics.

To be fair, the writers were young and didn't have a clue that there was so much work still to do. They'd been over-ambitious. I admire them for having a go in the first place and wish them all the best.

When I started doing betas, about 12 years ago, most writers needed a medium amount of work on their fics. Nothing major, unless English was their second language, but a whole load of easily missed mistakes/typos and a few plot tweaks, plus a few canon mistakes and suggestions about pacing.

Now I'm finding there are two types of fic. The first, with barely five silly little errors per ten thousands words or so. Almost immaculate. Excellent writing, staggeringly good grasp of character and plot.

The second type has about five mistakes per sentence. Confusing to read, or to know who's doing what and when. Missing scenes. Inconsistent characterization. Just a huge mess.

My theory is that some writers who joined the early stages of internet fanfic by now have got frighteningly good at it. Other, more recent entrants see all these fics out there and think it's easy. Fanfic is a fun hobby, but some people don't realize the sheer amount of work it takes for the good writers to have gotten to that point.

Not that I want to discourage new writers. But they're not going to be at that level immediately, even if they're prodigies.

One thing I've found is that there's not much point going overboard in beta suggestions for the really messy fics. They're invariably abandoned anyway, although I hope these writers come back later and try again.

Now I'm finding there are two types of fic.

Yes, those two types are exactly what I'm getting.

And, yes, as I was writing my comment, I was thinking that the sensible thing would have been to send the messy fics back to the writer with a note saying: "You need to work on this before I can beta it." The problem is that I only beta when I'm modding, and usually only when the stories are already overdue, so I need to get the writers to bash their fics into shape quickly so that I can post them! But I do worry that by doing such a bossy job, I may put them off writing in the future.

I guessed that you were constrained by needing the fics to be edited as soon as possible, but still hopefully to a certain standard for your own fest.

I think I put a few people off myself with my betas. There wasn't a big time pressure in these cases, but I asked the writers "what do you want from my beta?" and they said "everything", so I gave them everything. What I think they really wanted was no beta at all, although they were polite about it, which was good.

If they've learned the lesson to ask more clearly what they really want in future, whether for fanfic or not, I hope I've helped them.

I did feel bad at the time. It was like I'd driven them away. But I can't control other people's reactions. As long as I know I was encouraging as well as critical, that's about all I can do.

I don't know what else you could have done either in your own situation.

That's an interesting theory. I have one of my own: that the coherent well written fics are likely written by older writers who have a lot of non-fandom experience in both reading and writing. We didn't grow up with this huge fanfiction culture or its tropes... which is not to say that we didn't have fandom, just that it wasn't the easily accessible behemoth it is today.

One of the major handicaps I see in younger fanfic authors is how little they read outside fandom. Yes, yes, everyone knows there's amazing fanfic and crappy published fiction, and one isn't automatically better than the other. But... reading a lot of published fiction means you're more likely to learn the "rules" of how a story is constructed, how a world is built, etc. etc. You're far more likely to absorb how dialogue sounds, how a scene works, how a plot is developed, things like that. If you don't know how to do those things, there's no built-in audience to love your work in spite of its flaws, and fandom does that a lot.

But that's been my experience. All of the really good fanfic writers I'm acquainted with are big readers and write original fiction in addition to fanfic.

NAYRT

I'd have to agree with this.

I started reading fanfic about fifteen years ago, and I saw these two types of fic the AYRT talks about showing up then, too. Some people were amazing, some people were all kinds of terrible. Some people had professional aspirations, some people were just doing it for the fun and love of the canon.

You're always going to have that two-tiered structure, because chances are the older fans writing now were some of the terrible writers ten, fifteen years ago.

What I do see different these days is, as you say, a lack of wider reading. It's as though some odd elitism over fanwork has cropped up in more recent years whereby it's something of a betrayal of the very concept to read (much less praise) published fiction. I don't know if it corresponds to the boom of self-publishing and this "I don't need no damn editor!" attitude a lot of people seem to have, but these days there's a sense of pride in only reading fanfic to the exclusion of everything else.

I was an original fic writer long before I even knew fanfic existed. While I'm not claiming that's inherently any better than anyone else, it's certainly different to the (usually newer, usually younger) writers who see producing fanfic as shorthand for internet popularity without having any actual interest in the craft itself.

I do see a prejudice of a sort re: published fiction, mostly along the lines of fanfiction being free, plentiful and quite specific in supplying what readers want in terms of pairings, and tastes for fluff and porn. While I understand that, I think that reading fiction that's been properly edited for grammar/punctuation that involves a structured plot is more helpful than most people realize when it comes to writing, and you're more likely to find that in published fiction. When writers consume mostly fanfic, I think it's likely they're going to be consuming a lot of works written for audiences who aren't as picky about grammar/punctuation, world building, plot, etc. and I think the lack of exposure to well written stories shows in their writing.

But that's an unpopular opinion in itself and usually begets wank on FS. :)

DA

Unpopular it may be, but it's pretty easily proven when you look at the prevalence of certain myths within any given fandom. Certain characters always get mischaracterized in the same way, the same quirks become exaggerated, the same smut-by-numbers routine shows up in the sex scenes. Actually, the sex scenes are a minefield of weird myths that propogate between writers who, sometimes, have very little actual experience and no real means of researching it.

That sort of thing only happens because people are getting their (mis)information from other, inaccurate, fanfic rather than the source itself. It stands to reason that grammar/punctuation errors will spread the same way. A popular writer in one of my fandoms has lots of issues with apostrophes and tenses, for example, and I've noticed that a lot of her most avid readers are making the exact same mistakes in their own work. Whether they pick it up unconsciously, or they think that hey, Popular Writer gets away with it so it must be okay, I couldn't tell you.

Another DA

This theory makes a lot of sense. I spent the last 10 years or so mostly reading fanfic. If I'd been younger and those were my formative years, I probably wouldn't be able to spell now, and I'm still not the best in the world. I read a lot of terrible books as a kid, but at least they were professionally edited and mostly free of typos. I didn't grow up reading twitter.

As a side note, I've noticed that even news websites like the BBC have started to have a shocking amount of typos in their news articles. There's a generation that grew up reading the internet and those people are now holding down professional jobs.

I was shopping on the Next website and they even spelled scarves as scarf's on their front page categories. This was supposed to be a professional business retail website. That's far from the only example. So this spread of errors is not a problem that's confined to fanfic.

I feel like an old fuddyduddy now, but honestly, 10-15 years ago professional websites weren't filled with so many basic spelling errors. Teenagers who grew up with the internet are now showing it as young adults, which surprises me. I thought other sources would cancel these kinds of errors out.

I don't think it's just the Internet fault.

It's part of it, sure, but both the rush created by the Internet (no time to edit anything, things have to be published NOW) and many companies wanting to decrease costs (why pay for editors?) are also at fault for the many typos on professional websites.

NAYRT

The idea that editors can be dispensed with at all, though, is an issue created by the internet, where any and all content can be published without one. However you feel about them, when it came to print publications, editors were a 'gatekeeper' of sorts that ensured the vast majority of the things a reader saw were correct.

The internet made that role unnecessary. A whole generation has grown up without the concept of editing at all, let alone any realization of how important it is.

That's a disheartening theory, but you may be on to something. I've been on the internet since it's early days, and I can tell you that standards for expressing yourself in this medium have gone waaaaay down. (And it's not like they were super high in the first place.) It really is disturbing to me how many people reach adulthood and still don't know how to spell or write in complete sentences. They don't do it in informal settings, but they don't necessarily do it for formal settings, either. It's sad.

I saw the "loose/lose" mistake on one broadsheet newspaper's website the other day.

The article had been up for a couple of days, and no one had caught it or corrected it.

That's a really common internet error, and one I'd never seen in print before the age of the internet. It's spread.

Some papers are famed for their typos, but there's particular errors that seem like an internet meme in how they've crept everywhere. Lose/loose is a good example.

Nowadays, if I see the word "lose" spelled correctly, I do a double take. It's genuinely got that bad.

Do you think in 50 years that "loose" will be the generally accepted spelling? It's already happened with "strait-laced". Now "straight-laced" is more commonly used instead in my country, even in respected print publications, and that used to be classified as an error.

AYRT

The first time I remember noticing the lose/loose error gaining traction was back when I still read Laurell K. Hamilton. Which just goes to show that reading print books isn't a guarantee of mistake-free.

Hers were the only ones I ever remember with that many mistakes though, and I devoured books at the time. And I could see it for a mistake, which is the important part I think. I didn't just think that because this one author used it incorrectly then it was perfectly acceptable for me to do it too. Because I read a wide variety of stuff, I could still tell that her usage was the aberrance.

I was wondering about that when I was typing the comment, honestly. That one day it's going to be so ubiquitous that no one will even think it's a mistake. But it's not as though you're replacing "lose" with a brand new word, so if you start accepting it as okay then "loose" loses (hah!) its meaning too somewhat. Or it becomes a homonym, which only adds another level of complexity onto something a lot of people clearly find too complex as it is.

My favourite ever internet typo was a Facebook status update which then made the rounds as a screen cap.

Picture the scene: Christmas Eve in a normal suburban home. A young girl can barely contain her joy.

"Grandma is raping the gifts next door! I'm so excited!"

Every year at my house, we still get excited when it's time to start raping the presents.

I couldn't find the exact link, but have a compilation instead: http://postgradproblems.com/yes-people-are-still-raping-presents-on-twitter/

I get your point about the typos in your dearly beloved Laurell K. Hamilton books being balanced out by the correct usage you saw elsewhere. That's what I thought would happen again now. However, it seems like the current generation overwhelmingly reads material on the internet in places with bad spelling (badfic, twitter etc) as opposed to properly edited writing elsewhere. There was a tipping point somewhere that was crossed.

I'm not saying that pre-internet, everyone could spell well. If anything, I have the feeling that literacy has gone up slightly overall, purely because more people write facebook statuses now than ever used to write letters on a regular basis. It's the professional-level writing occupations (journalists, reviewers, technical writers such as for catalogues and manuals) that have suffered a drop in basic spelling ability because they're interacting daily with those who spell wrongly, whereas they didn't before. Democratisation of the internet is a powerful tool in both directions.

Oh, and I bought a video game on ebay last year that came "complete with manuel".

My second favourite ever internet typo. I hope it replaces the real thing.

Cologne/colon doesn't come close, although it's also fun.
http://gawker.com/5903384/why-knowing-the-difference-between-colon-and-cologne-is-kind-of-important

I think of it as "garbage in, garbage out". Don't get me wrong, I've read some incredible fanfics that were at least close to professional-level editing, but those fanfics are rare, and they're never ever going to make up the majority of all the fanfic that people are consuming. Way too many younger writers are growing up with lowered standards when it comes to basic grammar, but also characterisation, plot, pacing and just writing a coherent sentence. All of those things are more lax in fanfiction than it is in published fiction, because people will forgive a lot if it's about their favorite pairing or trope. People like what they like, but I've yet to see a writer who's been raised almost exclusively on a diet of fanfiction and fandom turning out a decent fic.

Basically.

Or at least everyone's wallowing around in the same garbage all the time, and rarely get any exposure to anything better.

I don't think it's even that they have lowered standards, it's that they don't even have any exposure to what those standards are in the first place. I don't think people who praise badly-written fanfic are necessarily being lax or forgiving; I genuinely think that most of the time they really don't see how bad it is, because they have no way of recognizing the mistakes they see as mistakes.

On the other hand, a lot of fanfic writers from the old days grew up on a diet of Harlequin novels. Myself, I've never read a whole one in my life, I preferred the classics (and schlocky science fiction novels). Yet these writers were usually streets ahead of me in terms of plotting and pacing. I was kind of envious, actually, that they knew all these fun romance tropes, although not envious enough to actually put myself through reading unappealing romance novels. Though at least these books had correct spelling and grammar.

A lot of the fanfics these days that appeal to young readers are precisely the worst ones in terms of plot, spelling, grammar and so on, perhaps because they mirror these readers' own undeveloped use of language. But reading these fics is not going to help these people improve. In the past, these kinds of fics with shaky language skills in them just weren't available in such huge quantities. They might make low levels of literacy seem almost desirable through a kind of peer pressure.

I've seen this a few times, actually. Teens on the internet after being told by someone outside their usual circle that it's unclear what they mean because it's so badly spelled raging that everyone on the internet spells however they want!!!!!! Stop picking on me!!!!

I've also seen a lot of articles recently about helicopter parents, and a growing culture in schools where children are told they can achieve anything, regardless of their actual levels of talent. I've not experienced this first hand. Education is still pretty harsh in my personal experience (professional exams in the UK). But perhaps this also has a part to play?

I actually kind of admire that sort of naive ambition, even if it often crumbles at the first hurdle. I was the same when I was young. It takes a few years to develop emotional stamina.

I read a book recently called "Generation Me" that goes into depth with studies and stats and such on the 'you can do anything, you're perfect just the way you are' phenomenon. It's really interesting and made me re-think a lot of ideas and cliches I took for granted ("just be yourself").

Long story shot, yes, Millennials cannot take criticism and that's a scientific fact.

(Not the OP) Some writers need more direction than others, I find. Usually it's younger writers with natural talent, but not a lot of experience. Writing a good story and being able to assess your own writing objectively are two very different skillsets.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2937 ]

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