(no subject)

[bubosquared]

This was going to go into an email, but I figured this would be better suited here.

I guess that's one of my main gripes with fandom: the way everything gets assimilated to the same level of feh. The reason I improved more in my three-four years of being actually active in the slash world than in the seven or so years of writing before that is that I finally had a chance to listen to people talk about writing, to read their gripes about writing. I don't take them all to heart, but reading about what people find irritating about stories always makes me thing if a) I do these things and b) their complaint is legit. (The whole "one finger, two fingers, three fingers, cock" thing, for example. I didn't even realise I was doing that until I saw it pointed out.)

But so many lists have carefully cultivated the idea that any criticism, however correct, of a story is tantamount to flaming the author and, basically, being mean. I seriously cannot stand this bullshit. Look, I know that my "entry level", so to speak, was higher than most non-native English speakers. Fuck, I'm gonna be immodest and say it was probably higher than a lot of native English speakers I see churning out stories everywhere. I knew the proper construction of a sentence, as well as the difference between their and they're and its and it's, and I knew how to locate the spell check in Word. Apparently, these skills are obsolete in the slash world these days.

The two most useful (personal, as in not counting general rants and raves) comments on my writing I've ever had were critiques. the first was from DT in BMfM fandom, who finally made me stop forgetting that the comparative (bigger/colder) goes with "than", not "then". (I'd always had problems with this, and the fact that both words translate to "dan" didn't really help.) The second was from someone on ff.net who pointed out that I'd allowed myself to get stuck in this rut of shmoopy, sappy, fluffy funny stories. Was I hurt? Yes. Was he/she right? Absolutely, and so, upon deciding that this was, in fact, something I wanted to correct, I mentally slapped myself and finally started writing one of my angst bunnies.

Fandom would be a much better place if more people would, mentally or otherwise, slap themselves. I'm tired of all the egos getting in the way of the stories Get the fuck over yourselves.

Comments

[nyn.livejournal.com]

Sing it, sister!

I totally agree with you. A lot of those stories make me fear for the future of my country. I really don't think grammar and basic punctuation are that. hard. Come on, people. Dialogue goes inside the quotes. Geez.

Thanks for speaking what a lot us are thinking :)

Re:

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

It's not even the ineptness that's bothering me, it's the fact that so damn many of them seem to think spelling and grammar just plain don't matter, because it's all about the content and not about the format, and anyone who complains about spelling and/or grammar errors, no matter if they're so numerous that the story becomes just pain unreadable, is anal and nitpicky.

(That's almost verbatim from a discussion I was pointed to the other day, btw. I'm not exaggerating.)