i don’t think people really get how little feedback fanfic authors actually get? like the effort to reaction ratio is so abysmally skewed here that a fic nearly 50,000 words long takes an entire year to amass like. 16 comments. someone reblogged a fic i wrote at 4 am and tagged it with a 5-word compliment and i can’t stop thinking about it, not because it was so nice but because half the time you post a fic you’re going to hear nothing and anything feels like so much
fandom culture is so, so good about giving artists the credit they’re due, but we gotta start doing that for writers too. you’ve got no idea how much people put into their stories and get maybe a handful of reblogs and a dozen-odd kudos. that’s not enough. writing is an endurance sport and y’all need to start giving fic writers a reason to endure it and improve their craft. encourage writers like you encourage artists. reblog fics, leave tags, leave comments, acknowledge that these stories do not just spring into being for your entertainment.
every single damn writer i know feels like at least their readers see them as a machine. that’s gotta change.
Okay. This topic is not gonna go unnoticed or un-blogged by me.
I’ve been writing for, let’s see… seventeen years now. I’ve been to all kinds of fandoms, from TV series to cartoons to animes, and I’m also working on my own projects in the time being. I think I’ve written over 100 fictions, stories, scripts, etc. I just wanna talk about a recent piece, however, that makes me question whether or not it’s worth continuing with fanfictions nowadays.
Recently, I’m working on a fanfiction for the Naruto series next gen. Let me explain to you a bit more what I mean by work;
- I keep a track book for the fiction (literally, not on computer), on which I note down summaries by chapters, possible dialogues between characters, outlines of important events, detailed explanations so that my readers won’t be confused… anything you can think about that makes a story, a story.
- I write the whole story on a notebook first before typing it on computer, so I can check whether or not I’m doing some stupid mistake. It has been two notebooks already.
- Oh and before that, I usually write on a big writing board, those that are used in the classrooms. Inspiration stuff.
- I don’t just write randomly. I make my research thoroughly, especially because I am a recent returneé to the Naruto fandom, so I don’t want people to come out and say what I’m writing doesn’t make sense.
- Last but not least, I work with one of the most amazing artists on the internet, who, asides from making the fanart of the story, is also my co-author.
THIS is all the effort I put in my stories. This is how and why it takes up to one-two months to upload a new chapter, while readers probably read it in, what… fifteen-twenty minutes at max?
Now truthfully, I have a few loyal fans who follow the story on fanfiction net and deviantart, but especially on ao3, whenever I compare the number of hits to the reviews and kudos… Well, let’s say there had been numerous times where I said; goodness, I’m just gonna quit it. (I’m saying this on 18 chapters and 1440 hits on AO3 and over 20,000 views and 76 reviews on ff btw). And the latest coment on ff.net was on a frigging fighting chapter, for which I did a massive research on Narutopedia on about 2.000 techniques and sorted them carefully for about 8 characters, and what did the person say?
That I had to use “brunette” for females and “brunet” for males. Literally nothing else. Not one word on the chapter or the ones following or preceeding it. (and duh, excuse me for not being a native English speaker).
Comments and feedback are important, people. They encourage us, give us a reason to deal with what we have to go through everyday and still present you another chapter. Believe me, it’s as hard as how an artist is making his/her art. And maybe, just maybe it wouldn’t hurt anyone to show that you actually care.
