My fandom is tiny. I love it that way - but I noticed something strange about our fanfic.
We have been great at encouraging more people to write but the overall level of kudos and comments is very similar - sort of like more writers sharing the same interaction.
I can see from hits that lots of people are reading work but not interacting. Apparently this is ‘a thing’ - also most, but not all, people who reblog fanfic are other creators in some way.
So I know it is unlikely this post will change behaviour but - if you want content you have to interact with it. Not because we are egotistical but because we get sad and downhearted without it.
Fanfiction is communal. ‘♥️’ on tumblr is like picking up the beautiful hand knitted repro Zoso jumper on my stall and putting it back down, crumpled.
Send comments on tumblr or better still AO3 if a writer has an account; Kudos on AO3 sends us a nice ‘well done’ email but a comment, even just emoji is so much more lovely.
Send Asks if we accept them. You can be anon if you are shy. Tell us what our work made you feel.
But reblog - we need other people. Can you imagine going to a Zeppelin gig and there was only three people there and nobody applauded. Zep needed the Ocean (the fans, the interaction, the buzz off an audience) Writers are not Zeppelin but we are the nearest you have to a time machine. Maybe that jumper on my stall is the one from 1973?
All My Love - Led By Threads
I’m a reader (sometimes a doodler ) but not a writer - and I don’t leave these amazing people mentioned above a fraction of the comments they deserve for all the hard work and emotion that they put into their art … if you like it, tell them. If you love it, tell them. And if you have constructive criticism, you can probably tell them too (in the nicest possible way!).
Also adding @callmethehunter to the list above cos Hunter writes amazing fanfic now too!
And this comes from me having fallen into the “hits are people running away” spiral less than a year ago. I’m here because I was there, recently.
Kudos specifically gets me, though.
There’s this push for people to kudos every fic they finish reading because “It’s the least you can do” or “you owe the author if you read all the way through”, along with some “kudos aren’t good enough, you have to leave a comment”
and I think as @ao3commentoftheday said in the linked post, this is people devaluing kudos. A kudos is literally identical to a comment that reads “Kudos! ❤”
It’s supposed to be a signifier that someone liked your work. It kinda waters down the meaning to consider it an obligation, and the overwhelming majority of people do not use kudos as a way to mark that they finished a work.
But if you’re inundated with people making the argument that kudos should be used as a “made it through the fic” marker rather than a comment reading “kudos! ❤”, kudoses lose their impact. If you imagine them as an obligation, they cease to be a compliment.
And if that’s the slurry you’re in, of course you feel unappreciated and invisible. That’s a totally reasonable conclusion to come to, if you don’t know that very few people devalue kudos that way. Of course it hurts if you think a kudos simply means “I read this”!
And I get why people want readers to understand how authors feel. I really, really do. There’s always a nonzero number of people in fandom who simply haven’t thought about how much it would mean to the author to get a comment, and hearing “authors love comments!!” can be really helpful!
But I do wish that we as authors would put a little more effort into reciprocating that understanding.
my nephew, who is like 11 or 12, is playing “5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel”, which is exactly what it says on the tin, and I have never been more terrified of the youth of today
so,Metacognitionis the practice of thinking about thinking or identifying one’s cognitive process . in essence, metacognition is understanding how you prepare for academic challenges, exams, or tasks, and then being able to reflect on whether you did well, you prepared adequately, and what was most effective. in a writing setting, this type of self-awareness helps you transfer skills in writing, say, fanfiction into writing academically, competitively and professionally.
here’s an articlefrom brown university on the subject i’ll discuss further. there are 3 parts of practicing metacognition identified in this article: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. how might this look like for a fanfic writer?
planning:asking oneself ‘what is my goal?’ ‘what strategies should i use to meet that goal?’ ‘how much time/length do i need to meet my goal?’. so maybe my goal is to write a meet cute where two characters kiss. i’ll need to use a perspective, an upbeat tone, and forward characterization to do this. it’ll probably take 5000 words and two days to write.
monitoring:asking oneself: is my story making sense? am i reaching my goal, or do i need to summarize more succinctly to keep it to 5k? maybe you started with a lot of exposition and now you’re 6k in and the characters haven’t met yet. what went wrong/changed? is it ok that it changed or did you not realize it got away from you? what now?
evaluation: asking oneself: did i reach my goal? was it effective? what would i change next time?
this is where comments come in
it is incredibly difficult to evaluate yourself. comments like “i love this!” actually do begin to touch on the evaluation step of metacognition. it means, in general, the writer is on the right track. comments like “i loved the dialogue between x and y” or “the emotions of this section really hit me” begin to answer the questions of was it effective, did i reach my goal and conversely answer what would i change next time (by adding more of whatever was specified as working well). HYPER SPECIFIC comments, like analyzing the story between the lines or pasting in a line that you really liked and explaining why, is like jet fuel for the metacognition process and i’m not exaggerating. specifically pointing out what was effective and why is incredibly useful
i might elaborate later but fanfic replies literally develop writer’s metacognition and make them better writers
i can straight up credit my writing style to all of my friends and readers who have given incredibly detailed comments. when i found a community who gave feedback like that, my writing improved a thousand times faster than before. so! i guess what i’m saying is give feedback! it goes so much further than you realize!
Inspired: Leave comments because it will make them write better
Eureka-d: leave comments because it will make YOU write better too. It develops your meta cognition as well
I been screaming about this for like 4 years now! Want more and better fic? Tell your fic writers what you liked and why!!
As a fic writer, i need every reader to know that:
I don’t care if your comment is coherent. I know what you mean and i love you
I don’t care if you ramble. I read every word and i love you
I don’t care if you leave a comment on a fic from four years ago or leave comments/kudos on like ten of my fics in one go. This isn’t IG, pls stalk my AO3. I love you
I don’t care if you mention the same thing in your comment that four other people have already mentioned. It’s actually really useful to know what resonated with people and I love everyone who takes the time to tell me they liked a particular turn of phrase
I don’t mind if your comment is super long or just a couple of sentences, i love them all
