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beccaelizabethBeen thinking about fanfic posting best practice and how it changes in relation to the tech tools available.
Posting in parts:
(wherein I discover how it is like both television and sonnets, and how those things are like each other)
Started on mailing lists back when 25K was in fact rather large.
Continues on LJ that has a word limit.
Both nice solid tech reasons, right?
But then it interacts with human propensity to send feedback at the end of a day's reading, or the end of a part, rather than just as you think of it. And people go "ooh, more parts, more feedback! yaays!". And slowly yet surely you end up with people posting two paragraphs and saying they'll post more if there's feedback.
That might not be as new as it feels. There's very few stories in chunks that short that are anything like memorable, so if they've always been around they'd have faded out my long term memory where novel length fic series haven't. However the mounting irritation where my fic starved brain goes looking for story and finds something that with a bit more thought could have become a drabble tends to linger.
So... is that the only reason to post in parts? Hell no.
Some stories are WIP, and posting a bit every day is a useful way to keep writing. Despite the fact I keep trying not to read WIP and the way my writing tends to head up blind alleys and have to back out again I've been thinking that might be useful discipline for me. I mean I haven't written any fic since the summer holiday, and that's really too long. Writing stuff for class doesn't feed the fic writer side.
Some stories are complete, yet still posted in parts with gaps between. I've seen people complain about that - they want the whole fic right now, and consider it an unreasonable tease to dole it out in sections. Which... strikes me as odd. If it's a multi part fic posted at intervals with adequate labels and links then you just wait until something comes in saying 7/7 (or 10/10 or whatever) and then go back and read the whole thing. Like the way I hardly ever keep up with TV when it's actually on TV and am a fan mostly via DVDs. Gives me a different viewing experience than the one they designed, but still works for me.
But the experience intended actually makes the delays between eps part of the art, the way there's commas and full stops in poetry. The pauses are where you stop to think. The delays build suspense. And in a well designed story each part ends on a climax, with each successively higher, leading to the big payoff at the end. Like the mini cliffhangers before commercial breaks on TV - when I started writing fic that tried to emulate episode structure I found it *incredibly* useful for structuring a longer story to have these relatively fixed points to aim at, like a fixed poetry form.
... and I pause to realise I'm actually getting something out of this semester after all. Woah. Because the fixed forms of poetry and the external constraints of television have enough in common that a lot of the same debates would apply. Even the way the sonnet is short in itself but typically written in a sequence. Huh.
... I sit here having firework brain and suddenly finding a reason to study. Cool.
ANYways, the point is, posting in parts is in itself a *form*, a particular *structure* for fic, one which can and hopefully does use the constraints for particular aesthetic effect. Posting in parts hopefully gets a particular response from the reader... and as long as that response isn't frustration and quitting reading it's all good. One more tool for writers to use.
The reader, if they wish to avoid the suspense waits, has the option of skipping the commercials or buying it on DVD, so to speak. But if the writer posts all in one go they lose their option of ever getting that effect. Limits the possibilities, reduces diversity, both things I'm usually opposed to.
Which is not to say there's not still uses of the form that will irritate the hell out of me. Just that there's uses of *any* form that irritate the hell out of me.
... also, this wasn't quite what I set out to write.
I was going to be dry and technical about labelling.
The header on fic is something between those FBI warnings at the front of movies and the blurb on the back of books. And I guess it's another fixed form: you get a set number of lines, dealing with particular concerns in set order. Usually not so very poetic in effect though.
On mailing lists the header went in the part 0. Which avoided the arguments where some people wanted it and some people didn't - don't want to read it, just don't read 0/10.
... I'm getting a sudden urge to write a disclaimer/warnings/rating sonnet. Oh *dear*.
... maybe just a haiku?
... teach was write, poetry makes you mad...
LJ has a handy dandy tool called lj-cut that lets you stick stuff not everyone will want to read behind a link. But writers have to put enough outside the cut to get people to click on it. And here I think the... hmmm, blended? Polyphonous? There's a word I'm not thinking of, but possibly 'multi cultural shopping mall' will do... The very varied nature of LJ postings and the LJ f-list makes the header issue a bit more complicated. On a mailing list, everyone has joined on purpose. They've picked a topic. Sometimes it's a very skinny definition of topic. Say all the adult fic for a particular pairing. So, when you post a story with
TITLE: Title goes here 1/10
then people know what they're getting well enough to look inside.
If it's a multi pairing list the stuff outside the cut, or in the immediately visible line, has to go up, so people who are offended at the very thought of interpecies sex can keep away from the hot Trill/Klingon action, just for instance.
So the line becomes
TITLE: Title goes here 1/10 A/B
Unless the fandom has more than one A and/or more than one B, where they have to start making up more labels or - in radical straits - using full names.
If the list is for mixed ratings then maybe it has ADULT on the end of some posts, or GEN.
And so on.
On LJ? People don't put that in the title lines. People often don't put *anything* in the subject lines. And that particular habit, while I'm very much aware I have it, do tend to drive me nuts in fic posts, because it means once you click the link to memory the place you have to either type or cut'n'paste the title in yourself, which seems like, you know, work.
If the Subject line on LJ were used like the Title on mailing lists, more stuff could go under the cut. Maybe.
As it is the header goes outside the cut pretty much everywhere, giving us all the data we need to choose to read or not read. Which is cool, in it's way, but when people are xposting to half a dozen communities at once then it do get a tad bit repetitive. Also if they're not putting it in big letters in the title line it takes actually reading the body of the post to find out if it's 1/10 posted ten times or 1/10 thru 10/10 completely posted.
Not cool, dude! I might not have my glasses on!
... aaaaand we're back to how much work is reasonable to ask the writer to do to save me time.
The way I figure it with the memory-title issue is if one cut-n-paste by the author can save potentially a thousand cut-n-pastes (if it's memoried by everyone on a large community), then that small courtesy would be quite a nice gesture.
The don't-make-me-read issues are more personal. Though the accessibility issues involved in that make it a disability Thing too. Bit sideways of what I set out to write though.
What else... oh yeah, the 1/10
This apparently takes a bit of explaining to look logical.
If you post one part of a story labelled 1/10 then the readers know that when they are looking for the other parts they are looking for parts 2/10 through 10/10, in whole numbers, numbered sequentially, to be read in that order. When they have all those parts, they can start reading in the confident knowledge that they have a whole story.
If you start using 1c/10 the system is suddenly frelled. Because while 1c may imply the existence of 1a and 1b, it says nothing about the existence of 1q or 1z. You therefore don't know how many parts you are looking for. Similarly with 1.5/10, though I haven't actually seen that done. I see 1c and it's friends quite often though, and it makes me make a face like :-[ because now I have to do big thinking and a bit of logic to hunt all the other parts. Which fairly often I won't get around to doing. Just FYI.
Also the system goes
Hopefully Unique Title 1/10
followed by
Hopefully Unique Title 2/10
If what you write is
Hopefully Unique Title 1/10
followed by
Different Unique Title 2/10
what you have in fact implied is that you are writing two quite seperate ten part stories. The reader would then set out to find Hopefully Unique Title 2/10 through 10/10, and possibly Different Unique Title 3/10 through 10/10, plus going back through mailing list or LJ looking for 1/10 wondering how they missed it.
It's all very well to say that (author you expect everyone to remember the name of) is only writing the one series and everyone knows it, but remember some people don't like to read multi part stories until they are finished. They will therefore be waiting until you post something labelled 10/10, and then looking back for parts 1/10 through 9/10 quite oblivious to all the things you've written in the story notes of earlier parts or expect all your readers to know by now. 10/10 will get you *new* readers.
And new readers join a fandom, mailing list, community or friends-friends all the time, so they might join you for part 6/10 and feel like catching up. Confusion can therefore happen at any point.
I kind of thought all that was, you know, logic and obvious, but I've seen someone argue about it and decide to do it their way instead. I always hate rules I don't know the reasons for, so I thought I'd explain this isn't a Rule, it's a Logic.
The thing with LJ is, we're all writing our own thing here. When we post to communities it's like old style mailing lists in that there's a lot of people that we're joining and they probably have some rules they'd like us to fit in with. But when we post on our own journals there's no particular requirements whatsoever. We're absolutely free to speak here, and nobody can kick us off LJ for doing it (unless we violate the terms of service, of course). But that means people who don't like the way other people are doing things can do their own thing and then say, being perfectly reasonable, that nobody else can tell them what to do. Which, true.
But the conventions have evolved as a way of conveying the information most likely to match story with reader in the least possible space, and they've been knocked about by quite a few years of use now, and do in fact seem pretty logical when you poke them. So I like them.
... what else... ah, last thing: tags
LJ and teh internets have these new handy little features called tags.
They're nifty. I like them.
I'd like them more if the things I care about enough to write about most didn't get lost when they went over some dumb limit (and without a word to me), but in general, tags are made of win.
But there's a big difference between LJ, where writers tag their own posts, and del.icio.us or however you spell it, where people collecting pages make the tags. LJ encourages people to make rules about tags that they want to impose on others. Which... can come out a bit obnoxious. Once again, more helpful to explain the Logic than to make it look like a Rule.
Tags plus notifications give some real added usefulness. People who you don't want to friend, for instance me with my messy signal to noise ratio, you can instead stalk through tracking their tags. If you want to know only things I say about Torchwood you can now set LJ to notify you whenever I post something tagged Torchwood. It is nifty cool and made of win, to my mind. And it has real helpful applications in posting fic. For a start, if you want to only read my fic, you can be notified to every use of the tag fic. But if you're only following one series, say if you want my RFJ fic, you can follow only that... if and only if I tag every part with a series specific tag. Which, I do. And since I only post them about once a year and rather lose at the telling communities about it part I can totally see how useful it is for readers to stalk that tag.
But if a writer doesn't want to tag? It's up to them. Readers will have to stalk them one of the half dozen other ways available, wait for their fic to post to comms, friend them, all like that. Pretty straightforward. Yet apparently some people are feeling pressured or even told off because of their tagging habits. Which is a reader problem - don't scare off the writers! Never enough fic to go around!
Though, natch, trolls are always with us, loud people in crowds also, and the old misreading problem is unlikely to go away any time soon. The usual social balance - trying not to be offended and not to offend.
... I do my best, but some days? Not so very much with the balance.
All that? Up there?
Not exactly original to me.
It's talking about conventions, so if it *were* original to me, bit of a problem.
But I thought putting it all in one place might be useful.
Putting it all in *this* place might be *less* useful, since my friends list pretty much do things the way I like already, but I thought I'd run it past y'all before I had a think about where else it might be useful to put it.
If there's other places I should link to like for references, like classic how-tos on the web that could have saved me half an hour, or other LJ posts or a community that makes it especially clear in the userinfo, that would be useful stuff to go in comments too.
Posting in parts:
(wherein I discover how it is like both television and sonnets, and how those things are like each other)
Started on mailing lists back when 25K was in fact rather large.
Continues on LJ that has a word limit.
Both nice solid tech reasons, right?
But then it interacts with human propensity to send feedback at the end of a day's reading, or the end of a part, rather than just as you think of it. And people go "ooh, more parts, more feedback! yaays!". And slowly yet surely you end up with people posting two paragraphs and saying they'll post more if there's feedback.
That might not be as new as it feels. There's very few stories in chunks that short that are anything like memorable, so if they've always been around they'd have faded out my long term memory where novel length fic series haven't. However the mounting irritation where my fic starved brain goes looking for story and finds something that with a bit more thought could have become a drabble tends to linger.
So... is that the only reason to post in parts? Hell no.
Some stories are WIP, and posting a bit every day is a useful way to keep writing. Despite the fact I keep trying not to read WIP and the way my writing tends to head up blind alleys and have to back out again I've been thinking that might be useful discipline for me. I mean I haven't written any fic since the summer holiday, and that's really too long. Writing stuff for class doesn't feed the fic writer side.
Some stories are complete, yet still posted in parts with gaps between. I've seen people complain about that - they want the whole fic right now, and consider it an unreasonable tease to dole it out in sections. Which... strikes me as odd. If it's a multi part fic posted at intervals with adequate labels and links then you just wait until something comes in saying 7/7 (or 10/10 or whatever) and then go back and read the whole thing. Like the way I hardly ever keep up with TV when it's actually on TV and am a fan mostly via DVDs. Gives me a different viewing experience than the one they designed, but still works for me.
But the experience intended actually makes the delays between eps part of the art, the way there's commas and full stops in poetry. The pauses are where you stop to think. The delays build suspense. And in a well designed story each part ends on a climax, with each successively higher, leading to the big payoff at the end. Like the mini cliffhangers before commercial breaks on TV - when I started writing fic that tried to emulate episode structure I found it *incredibly* useful for structuring a longer story to have these relatively fixed points to aim at, like a fixed poetry form.
... and I pause to realise I'm actually getting something out of this semester after all. Woah. Because the fixed forms of poetry and the external constraints of television have enough in common that a lot of the same debates would apply. Even the way the sonnet is short in itself but typically written in a sequence. Huh.
... I sit here having firework brain and suddenly finding a reason to study. Cool.
ANYways, the point is, posting in parts is in itself a *form*, a particular *structure* for fic, one which can and hopefully does use the constraints for particular aesthetic effect. Posting in parts hopefully gets a particular response from the reader... and as long as that response isn't frustration and quitting reading it's all good. One more tool for writers to use.
The reader, if they wish to avoid the suspense waits, has the option of skipping the commercials or buying it on DVD, so to speak. But if the writer posts all in one go they lose their option of ever getting that effect. Limits the possibilities, reduces diversity, both things I'm usually opposed to.
Which is not to say there's not still uses of the form that will irritate the hell out of me. Just that there's uses of *any* form that irritate the hell out of me.
... also, this wasn't quite what I set out to write.
I was going to be dry and technical about labelling.
The header on fic is something between those FBI warnings at the front of movies and the blurb on the back of books. And I guess it's another fixed form: you get a set number of lines, dealing with particular concerns in set order. Usually not so very poetic in effect though.
On mailing lists the header went in the part 0. Which avoided the arguments where some people wanted it and some people didn't - don't want to read it, just don't read 0/10.
... I'm getting a sudden urge to write a disclaimer/warnings/rating sonnet. Oh *dear*.
... maybe just a haiku?
... teach was write, poetry makes you mad...
LJ has a handy dandy tool called lj-cut that lets you stick stuff not everyone will want to read behind a link. But writers have to put enough outside the cut to get people to click on it. And here I think the... hmmm, blended? Polyphonous? There's a word I'm not thinking of, but possibly 'multi cultural shopping mall' will do... The very varied nature of LJ postings and the LJ f-list makes the header issue a bit more complicated. On a mailing list, everyone has joined on purpose. They've picked a topic. Sometimes it's a very skinny definition of topic. Say all the adult fic for a particular pairing. So, when you post a story with
TITLE: Title goes here 1/10
then people know what they're getting well enough to look inside.
If it's a multi pairing list the stuff outside the cut, or in the immediately visible line, has to go up, so people who are offended at the very thought of interpecies sex can keep away from the hot Trill/Klingon action, just for instance.
So the line becomes
TITLE: Title goes here 1/10 A/B
Unless the fandom has more than one A and/or more than one B, where they have to start making up more labels or - in radical straits - using full names.
If the list is for mixed ratings then maybe it has ADULT on the end of some posts, or GEN.
And so on.
On LJ? People don't put that in the title lines. People often don't put *anything* in the subject lines. And that particular habit, while I'm very much aware I have it, do tend to drive me nuts in fic posts, because it means once you click the link to memory the place you have to either type or cut'n'paste the title in yourself, which seems like, you know, work.
If the Subject line on LJ were used like the Title on mailing lists, more stuff could go under the cut. Maybe.
As it is the header goes outside the cut pretty much everywhere, giving us all the data we need to choose to read or not read. Which is cool, in it's way, but when people are xposting to half a dozen communities at once then it do get a tad bit repetitive. Also if they're not putting it in big letters in the title line it takes actually reading the body of the post to find out if it's 1/10 posted ten times or 1/10 thru 10/10 completely posted.
Not cool, dude! I might not have my glasses on!
... aaaaand we're back to how much work is reasonable to ask the writer to do to save me time.
The way I figure it with the memory-title issue is if one cut-n-paste by the author can save potentially a thousand cut-n-pastes (if it's memoried by everyone on a large community), then that small courtesy would be quite a nice gesture.
The don't-make-me-read issues are more personal. Though the accessibility issues involved in that make it a disability Thing too. Bit sideways of what I set out to write though.
What else... oh yeah, the 1/10
This apparently takes a bit of explaining to look logical.
If you post one part of a story labelled 1/10 then the readers know that when they are looking for the other parts they are looking for parts 2/10 through 10/10, in whole numbers, numbered sequentially, to be read in that order. When they have all those parts, they can start reading in the confident knowledge that they have a whole story.
If you start using 1c/10 the system is suddenly frelled. Because while 1c may imply the existence of 1a and 1b, it says nothing about the existence of 1q or 1z. You therefore don't know how many parts you are looking for. Similarly with 1.5/10, though I haven't actually seen that done. I see 1c and it's friends quite often though, and it makes me make a face like :-[ because now I have to do big thinking and a bit of logic to hunt all the other parts. Which fairly often I won't get around to doing. Just FYI.
Also the system goes
Hopefully Unique Title 1/10
followed by
Hopefully Unique Title 2/10
If what you write is
Hopefully Unique Title 1/10
followed by
Different Unique Title 2/10
what you have in fact implied is that you are writing two quite seperate ten part stories. The reader would then set out to find Hopefully Unique Title 2/10 through 10/10, and possibly Different Unique Title 3/10 through 10/10, plus going back through mailing list or LJ looking for 1/10 wondering how they missed it.
It's all very well to say that (author you expect everyone to remember the name of) is only writing the one series and everyone knows it, but remember some people don't like to read multi part stories until they are finished. They will therefore be waiting until you post something labelled 10/10, and then looking back for parts 1/10 through 9/10 quite oblivious to all the things you've written in the story notes of earlier parts or expect all your readers to know by now. 10/10 will get you *new* readers.
And new readers join a fandom, mailing list, community or friends-friends all the time, so they might join you for part 6/10 and feel like catching up. Confusion can therefore happen at any point.
I kind of thought all that was, you know, logic and obvious, but I've seen someone argue about it and decide to do it their way instead. I always hate rules I don't know the reasons for, so I thought I'd explain this isn't a Rule, it's a Logic.
The thing with LJ is, we're all writing our own thing here. When we post to communities it's like old style mailing lists in that there's a lot of people that we're joining and they probably have some rules they'd like us to fit in with. But when we post on our own journals there's no particular requirements whatsoever. We're absolutely free to speak here, and nobody can kick us off LJ for doing it (unless we violate the terms of service, of course). But that means people who don't like the way other people are doing things can do their own thing and then say, being perfectly reasonable, that nobody else can tell them what to do. Which, true.
But the conventions have evolved as a way of conveying the information most likely to match story with reader in the least possible space, and they've been knocked about by quite a few years of use now, and do in fact seem pretty logical when you poke them. So I like them.
... what else... ah, last thing: tags
LJ and teh internets have these new handy little features called tags.
They're nifty. I like them.
I'd like them more if the things I care about enough to write about most didn't get lost when they went over some dumb limit (and without a word to me), but in general, tags are made of win.
But there's a big difference between LJ, where writers tag their own posts, and del.icio.us or however you spell it, where people collecting pages make the tags. LJ encourages people to make rules about tags that they want to impose on others. Which... can come out a bit obnoxious. Once again, more helpful to explain the Logic than to make it look like a Rule.
Tags plus notifications give some real added usefulness. People who you don't want to friend, for instance me with my messy signal to noise ratio, you can instead stalk through tracking their tags. If you want to know only things I say about Torchwood you can now set LJ to notify you whenever I post something tagged Torchwood. It is nifty cool and made of win, to my mind. And it has real helpful applications in posting fic. For a start, if you want to only read my fic, you can be notified to every use of the tag fic. But if you're only following one series, say if you want my RFJ fic, you can follow only that... if and only if I tag every part with a series specific tag. Which, I do. And since I only post them about once a year and rather lose at the telling communities about it part I can totally see how useful it is for readers to stalk that tag.
But if a writer doesn't want to tag? It's up to them. Readers will have to stalk them one of the half dozen other ways available, wait for their fic to post to comms, friend them, all like that. Pretty straightforward. Yet apparently some people are feeling pressured or even told off because of their tagging habits. Which is a reader problem - don't scare off the writers! Never enough fic to go around!
Though, natch, trolls are always with us, loud people in crowds also, and the old misreading problem is unlikely to go away any time soon. The usual social balance - trying not to be offended and not to offend.
... I do my best, but some days? Not so very much with the balance.
All that? Up there?
Not exactly original to me.
It's talking about conventions, so if it *were* original to me, bit of a problem.
But I thought putting it all in one place might be useful.
Putting it all in *this* place might be *less* useful, since my friends list pretty much do things the way I like already, but I thought I'd run it past y'all before I had a think about where else it might be useful to put it.
If there's other places I should link to like for references, like classic how-tos on the web that could have saved me half an hour, or other LJ posts or a community that makes it especially clear in the userinfo, that would be useful stuff to go in comments too.