between a rock and a hard place

Today is a Ramen day. I hate to admit it, but I've been on this serious Ramen kick for like a month. Is it the delicious sodium, the rich powdered artificial flavor, the thin, sad noodles? I have no clue. But it is total, total crack. I feel like a junkie hovering over my little bowl-thing.

My day yesterday ended pretty well. Just so everyone knows.

Metaish Kinda

I'm really intrigued by the concept behind the SPN comm nostairway.

Quoted from the nostairway:

No Stairway - an introduction & overview
You know how it goes. You turn on a classic rock station, and they are guaranteed to play Stairway to Heaven at least 23 times a day. Everybody loves Stairway, but there are some amazing songs that you only hear once in a great while; songs that are buried on the b-side of out-of-print platters, songs that weren't deemed commercial or hits. Why hasn't anyone put together a radio station to play all those great songs, songs that you might love if only given the opportunity?

This project is to showcase stories that you might not otherwise see and to offer classic examples of literary fiction in the Supernatural fandom. No Stairway is not a greatest hits collection, but an anthology of work that values both style and substance, and a chance for readers to discover those unrenowned b-sides that might become dear favorites, or replay an old favorite that they lost four moves and five cars ago.

Please note that 'literary' in this instance refers to form and function and not to genre. Romances, science fiction, fantasy and all other so-called "genre" forms are welcome here. What, after all, is Supernatural if not a genre story? We are looking to share your best work with our readers. Be it prosaic or experimental, sexy or plain, featuring dragons, robots, or just two boys on the road, we want to give your songs a chance to be heard.

winterlive started the discussion here on the general concept of a comm based somewhat on objective quality standards. There are links going from there.

esorlehcar weighs in here on the subject.

I started having a moment of significant cognitive dissonance when I realized I kinda completely agree with them both. But it's complicated.



One of the things its very hard for most fangirls--not people, but fangirls--is to express these three true things*:
1.) Wanting to write popular fic.
2.) Wanting to be *acknowledged* as an awesome author.
3.) Wanting lots of feedback.

*to disclaim that. Yes, there are exceptions. Hence the use of 'most', not 'all'

I actually don't think it comes from a self-denigration place, but more from a wary place of generalized equality; there's also the blank terror of being called elitist, snobby, attention whore, bully, but you know, not so much. The big thing I think sometimes comes from inside; we can be hard on each other, but I don't think anyone, anywhere, is as hard on us as we are on ourselves. If we walk around with a little voice saying "your writing sucks", we also have an extra one muttering whatever specific social failure we worry about seeing in ourselves.

The concept of objective quality is one of the things everyone flinches on kneejerk. We are all married to the "I" statement in a very big way when discussing fic we liked. "I liked". "I think". "I enjoyed". "I consider this the best story ever in the history of the world". And seriously, you forget to make the "I" explicit--well, don't forget that. You will be taken as literally as a piece of paper. Actually, it's kind of weird like that; in the textual medium, the explicit is chosen over even the most overt implicit. I have no idea why. Probably because in the right mood, we can raise deliberate misunderstanding to an art form.

Most of us can say "I didn't care for that fic for xyz reason" but rarely do we say "Wow, that was incredibly bad; why did you do that? Please stop writing like that." anywhere we think it'll be seen by more than our flock as the gods of fanfic intended (and whoever gets emailed the entries; we are totally not above that sometimes when it's just too interesting to leave alone). It's kind of a good way to plausibly deny, to be honest; you really don't want that kind of crap to haunt you later if you change fandoms and become really close to someone who is Sucky Writer's BFF. Yes, I'm sure we are all honest. Except when we are totally not. And few of us really want to go to bed at night after having like, five people tell us we destroyed someone's soul with our critique. Seriously, we could have been writing porn with that time. A lot of it.

On one hand: quality control. Fic that is betaed, grammar checked, spell checked, might have known the basic rules of the English language; has a solid plot; is at least to those people canon-compliant (if they go that way) or pairing-etc, or yes. Various tests to see if a fic complies. Awesome. I love this.

And then I love esorlehcar's reasons why not. It could be discouraging. It could lead to a style stultification in writers trying to copy the styles in the community as the only ones acceptable. It can be intimidating to new writers.

It's this:

So here's the thing. I loathe quality fanfiction communities. I hate pretty much everything about them -- the attempts of a limited group of people to pretend their subjective taste is an objective barometer of "good" writing; the solidification of a fandom class system with "worthy" writers set apart from the rest of the riffraff; the cookie-cutter fiction they tend to inspire, once writers get a handle on how this particular comm is defining "good" and, if a comm succeeds the way it's intended to, the choking out of authors who are deemed unworthy or choose not to participate.

The comments on both sides are fascinating; compare and contrast a community to a rec list; compare and contrast the community to elitism; how will new writers feel; what will happen to diversity; what are the objective standards. It's kind of a lot, and seriously, read all comments, this is some very thoughtful stuff.

I don't know. Well, that's lie, I do know, but that's changed eighty time since I started writing this and it'll change eighty more while I read. It's interesting from both sides, though, in that way that makes me want to nail down what I believe philosophically compared to what I think practically and where the two mesh.

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I don't actually understand if there's any philosophical or actual diff between the proposed community and crack_impala.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I'm of half a mind to wonder if this comes down to semantics.

[thornsilver]

From what I've seen of this dabate, (and I freely confess to only going through little bits of it), the idea of the comminity is to only publish good thing, while the oppoinents think that it will damage crativity. I'd say that rec pages and communities provide the first function, while the second is pretty much impossible in any fandom. So it's a moot point either way.

Or, conversely, I just missed the point of this discussion entirely.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Nah, that pretty much sums it up. And in two sentences, even!

[amalthia]

I'm on the fence about this community. on one hand I love the idea of having a community that should have lots of good fics but on the other, I don't want people to stop writing whatever comes to mind and I feel that rec communities have done a very nice job so far of pointing out stories that are worth reading.

Basically, I think I'm a bit conflicted too.

p.s. I think a lot of the problem has more to do with sematics? I think if they had created an online zine with the same process people would feel different. Truly, every zine I've heard of has beta readers and editing and etc...the only difference is the stories get printed out. Not sure how the community would work long term.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Good point. I wonder if the problem is a zine is finite, while this would be more an ongoing process. *ponders* Hmm.

[eleveninches.livejournal.com]

I'm against quality control and whatnot, but I guess whether or not the comm stifles creativity depends on who the mods are. If there's enough people with a wide range of tastes, then it'll just be like another crack_van, right?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Not quite. This would have a sharp limit on number per issue, for one, but--hmm. I wonder if they're more alike than not.

[ladycat777.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing that's bothering me, and a whole lot of other people. Rec lists, or rec communities, those are awesome. Crack_van, crack_impala, the absolutely amazing All About Spike website -- those are all awesome and the idea of wanting a place to go where you know the fic isn't going to suck, even if it's not to your taste, is kind of like the holy grail of fanfiction. We all want it.

The problem I'm seeing is that they're going to require submission. It's like the issue with awards times a million, because writers who write to just write, the ones who are often considered to be 'good' writers, tend (so, so generalizing here, massively generalizing) are not going to put their names in for an award. There are tons of reasons, from the most selfish to the most selfless, but given the amount of writers in SPN who have already said 'yeah, maybe I won't submit' the idea holds pretty true.

Somewhere in esorlehcar's post someone says: they aren't going to get writers, they're going to get the writers who think they can write. And I absolutely believe that is what'll happen.

They can have all the double-blind anonymous whatevers they want, but so long as they have submissions, I honestly think this idea is not only destined for wank, but for complete failure.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's something that's come up in general on fannish behavior; we really dislike the idea of submitting our own work for anything. It does make an interesting point on that; the wank part, I'm on the fence about. That this has *potential* for it, yes, but not doing something solely on the potential-wank factor seems a bad reason not to do something.

[frog4.livejournal.com]

See, everyone else has had intelligent things to say about your meta- I'm just here to commiserate with you on the whole Ramen Addiction thing. I've ben an addict since I was... 7? I think? By high school, I was eating it every morning for breakfast, much to my mother's dismay. And I'll go through phases where I manage to kick the habit- I've been on the wagon for about two years now- but then just seeing you mention it is all it takes to get me jonesing for another fix. Maybe there's some sort of support group available for this?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

God yes. It's like the hugest--must have, and I am totally not resistant. It's so wrong and yet so delicious.

[moirarogers.livejournal.com]

I had an odd sense of Deja Vu.

Then I had an odd sense of, "Oh. Oh no."

Then I went into the corner and resolved not to come back out.

I can't help but hear the echoing cries of, "All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again."

-Bree (in a different journal. :D)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I had some--faint stirrings of deja vu too.

...then again, cotterize. Total justification. Though in the world of livejournal, I now really wonder how that would have been seen?

[callmeri]

I would love to *not* be skeptical about SGA's fandom's ability to pull this off, but... well, I admit it -- I'm skeptical.

Personally, I think the wank is a given, but even beyond that, I think such a thing has the potential to be incredibly divisive to the fandom. The thing is, there is already an established hierarchy of writers in SGA fandom, in practice if not in theory. I think *non*-established writers would be likely to feel skittish about putting their work forward for judgement as a result of that, and so we'd end up with a comm full of the fics we all already *know* are really good, those that are already well-known and popular and recced to high heaven -- a situation which could, potentially, make new or lesser-read wirters feel even *more* intimidated. I think it could be a vicious cycle that in the end accomplishes little.

Or, you know, I could be totally wrong. It sure wouldn't be the first time. *g*

[callmeri]

ETA: I should amend this to say that I'm skeptical about fandom in general being able to pull something like this off, not specifically SGA. I didn't mean to refer specifically or exclusively to SGA fandom.

Just felt compelled to clarify that!

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

I have a problem with, well, numerous aspects of this whole thing, even as it's changed somewhat from the original conception.

Yeah, sure, we all want to wallow in nothing but good fic, and we all want the truly bad fic to go away. But it's the condescending and irritating assumption of authority - "WE will TELL YOU what the good fic is" that chaps my ass.

Of course, I also hate fan awards, because after a certain level of technical proficiency is reached, it's all a matter of taste, and taste is personal and idiosyncratic. (And that's not even getting into the other branch of discussion, about stories that aren't as technically well-crafted but still manage to pack that emotional wallop.)

Recs lists tend to admit that openly - or, at least, recs lists I follow. "Here's what I like; if you like the same stuff, you might like it too." With the occasional, "Sometimes, this author forgets which POV she's in, but the story is worth it." Not, "If it ain't on this list, it ain't good." Which is very much how the original post came across, and all the reassurances have not washed the bad taste from my mouth.

If they just want to put out an ongoing e-zine of fic they think is really great, that's awesome. They should do that. But touting it as a one-stop shop for all the "good" fic in a fandom is just dumb.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I can see that, but I'm not sure that's precisely what they are trying to do, with the "Tell you" aspect. While reading the original threads and the current concept--and this is just me, so YMMV--the feeling I got wasn't it was going to be "The Only" concept but rather "Here Is Some Really Good Fic" and have that be the focus. Anything that advertises "Best Of" is by definition wrong, but--hmm.

I'm still undecided on that.

[miscellanny.livejournal.com]

*ponders*

I think what worries me about the set-up here is that - due to the submission format - it will attract the sort of people who want to be part of an elite clique. Those who don't require that sort of validation and/or don't feel the need to display their credentials in this sort of community would be less likely to bother to submit their fic, leaving people who want to - to some extent - prove their worth and show that to other people. Certainly not all, and quite possibly not most, but the potential for dramatic wankery does increase rather with each. And then there is automatic dismissal for people too shy/modest to submit their own work, which seems a little ridiculous since this is not a professional field and it shouldn't really have to be a fight to get noticed.

And I have no idea if I make any sense at all since I've just woken up from a nap and require tea before brain function initiates. Huzzah!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Good point. *thoughtful*

I'm still--see-sawing? I think the problem is my context; as a newbie, I was really terrified but also--hmm. IT's complicated in how I interact with the text and the people, it never would have occurred to me *not* to at least try to submit, so it's hard for me to find a common ground with that.

The bigger question si would I submit *now* and take the hit to my ego?

[morgandawn.livejournal.com]

Ha. nice to know I am not the only one running back and forth behind the fence.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Yes, I feel completely like a gullible voter on this going Yes! No! Yes! No!

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

The concept of objective quality is one of the things everyone flinches on kneejerk.

Well, not everyone. But then I had a longstanding argument with my one of my Lit professors because I was the only person in the class (and possibly in the department) who supported the idea of there being a canon.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Okay, now you have to elaborate that one. I'll wait. Right. Here.

*waits*

[ratcreature]

I don't think I have ever eaten Ramen...

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Food of the gods. Totally.

[nymphaea1.livejournal.com]

The concept of objective quality is one of the things everyone flinches on kneejerk.

From my POV, that's probably because objective quality just doesn't exist. I'm with musesfool here. Anything above bare bones spelling and grammar is going to be very hard to define. I don't think you could get fandom to agree on what constitutes objective quality even in terms of pure writing, let alone if individual stories match those qualifiers. Even with the highest recced stories out there, I don't think you would have to look too hard to find people who have serious issues with them even from a craft stand-point.

And I have to agree that I would think a comm like this would have a homogenizing effect on fic. I think popularity already has a homogenizing effect on fic. There are some pretty common characterization tropes will get you readers so long as your writing's not egregiously bad and which ones won't . Having these things imprinted with an official stamp of "objective quality" I think will only make that worse.

Now, I think the people behind the comm are very well meaning, and while I don't know them personally from all I hear of them they seem like the types who would strive to make it as wank-free as possible. But I'm still left wondering the point. Ultimately, it's still going to be a recs list and we already have those. If they want to cast a broader net so it's not always the same authors and stories being recced, I'm all for that, but that doesn't seem to be what they're trying to do.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Ideally--and this is just from my pov, so not canon--it looks like an effort to get as wide a range as possible, with the double blind submissions and no automatic entry by author.

I think it *could* get wanky, yes, but I'm kind of minded to see what happens first. The very worst that could possibly happen is it will fail, but--I don't know. I feel like sometimes, we're so worried about it that we wont' try anything new for fear of that, and that worries me more than wankiness.

[billythecad.livejournal.com]

I think I'm just a little confused. In the introduction and overview, it looks like the community is about showcasing really good fics that it seems like no one's really read, which is great, good, awesome, and all that. In fact, that's a pretty darn good idea! But then I'm reading all these posts where people are saying that's *not* what the community is about; the community is about just letting in the authors everyone knows and who write (more or less) objectively awesome fic.

Can someone clear this up for me?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'm going by what I read on winterlive's lj and teh community and what she said below; with this person says that says whatever, for me it's easier to ignore that and go straight to the source.

[tamalinn.livejournal.com]

Is it the delicious sodium, the rich powdered artificial flavor, the thin, sad noodles?
it's the crack.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes it is. It *is*.

[winterlive.livejournal.com]

Hi hi hi.

compare and contrast a community to a rec list
Recs lists are typically operated by one person. That person recs items based on their purely subjective taste, and they make no bones about that. If you find a reccer that you like, that's ace, but if you can't, you're hooped. Objectivity is always going to be in question for some people, but we think that a triple-blind review process and a panel of reviewers with diverse tastes is a step in the right direction. Recs lists and authors do not interact beyond reccers reading the author's stories - the Anthology offers the author constructive, objective feedback on her (or his) work. We don't aim to be better than recs lists - just different.

what will happen to diversity
The name of the anthology is No Stairway. While established authors are not forbidden to participate, the idea is to pick up stories by other, lesser-known authors. The idea is to create diversity, not stifle it. Maybe we succeed and maybe we don't, but i think the whole staff hopes we do.

compare and contrast the community to elitism
The idea we have is a kind of recs/zine/archive/beta monster hybrid thing. It's intended to be pieces of all those things, put together into something that hopefully will be good. Not the best, not the only place of value, not the definitive anything - just one good thing among many. As our stated mission is to find fiction that hasn't gotten a lot of attention as opposed to fic that's got five pages of comments already, I hope most of the things that could contribute to elitism have been washed out of it.

how will new writers feel
I don't know how they will feel, but I can tell you how I hope they feel. We're focused on unknown talent and we absolutely will read a story, no matter how unknown the author. We will give detailed feedback if you want it - areas to improve and areas a writer is already strong in - and we guarantee that we won't be mean or unhelpful. So I would hope they'd be as excited about it as we are.

what are the objective standards
Working on it. Now that we've got the staff aboard, we're all talking it over together and trying to solidify some basic concepts. When we've got it to the point that we like it, we'll make them public so everybody knows exactly what the process is. One of our guiding principles is transparency of process.

I realize that mine is only one viewpoint, but I'm really hearing a lot of viewpoints ascribed to me and the community that don't belong with us. In comments to this very post, I've found somebody that's evidently confused because the things other people are saying about what we want is significantly different than the things we're saying we want. Uh.

For the record, we printed the stuff we want. All due respect, but anybody saying differently is misinformed.

[winterlive.livejournal.com]

and also, ramen is god food.

[annaalamode.livejournal.com]

I am going to totally ignore all the thoughtful meta and talk to you about Ramen.

When I go on a Ramen kick, I throw away the flavoring packet and just flavor with soy sauce. I don't know why it tastes good but it does.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

mmm, that *does* sound good. *mulls*

[snarkyducky.livejournal.com]

i'm sure you already know this, but the "little bowl-thing".. please don't use those styrofoam ones that come with some of the ramen; they .. are bad.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Oh no--I have this little hot bowl thingie I use with regular packages of Ramen. Deliciousness. For some reason, the styrofoam bowl ones never tasted very good to me.

[esorlehcar.livejournal.com]

On one hand: quality control. Fic that is betaed, grammar checked, spell checked, might have known the basic rules of the English language; has a solid plot; is at least to those people canon-compliant (if they go that way) or pairing-etc, or yes. Various tests to see if a fic complies. Awesome. I love this.

See, I always have this moment, too, because I'm a horrible fic snob, and jesus, there's a lot of crap out there. And then I remember that there's no way anyone can objectively agree on very much beyond spelling and grammar, and that I really don't want anyone else making those decisions for me, much less for an entire fandom, under a false mantle of objectivity.

In the end, I think there are a whole lot of ways to limit your crap exposure without creating the class system inherent in quality comms or elevating the subjective taste of a few people to some kind of exalted status (and good intentions or no, that's where they always seem to end up), and I'm a lot more comfortable with the options that focus on celebrating stories that made people happy rather than excluding ones that are supposedly unworthy.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I loved your entry immensely, even if it screwed with my instinctive "WHEE WHEE" reaction, because it covered a lot of my general wary points whenever I run across anything like this and brought up several I hadn't thought of except in sideline.

In the end, I think there are a whole lot of ways to limit your crap exposure without creating the class system inherent in quality comms or elevating the subjective taste of a few people to some kind of exalted status (and good intentions or no, that's where they always seem to end up), and I'm a lot more comfortable with the options that focus on celebrating stories that made people happy rather than excluding ones that are supposedly unworthy.

Now that is an interesting distinction to make, and a lot less in semantic difference than practical difference; you're right. There is a very sharp difference between the two concepts when one is under the concept of 'including what I love' and the other is 'excluding what I do not'. The first--and this *is* basically semantic--seems a lot less painful than the second for a writer.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

Eh. It's a big fandom, and also one dominated by grown-ups (so you don't get the weird dynamics of an HP, for instance). If people don't flip out about it, it will be a resource for some and ignored by others.

* It's a big enough fandom that there are many many different ways to get feedback/feel validated. Maygra is a very long-time fan, but, you know, if I wrote an SPN story and never got any love from her, I doubt I would even notice. Whether she and some of her friends approve of a story isn't going to be a stranglehold on fandom.

* Because she is a long-time fan, I assume she is also sensible enough not to be explicitly nasty with her judgments and will generally conduct the comm politely. Some people will still feel oppressed by the "elite" there. Those people would find someone to feel oppressed by regardless, because they are still in the oh-so-common state of fannish social retardation that leaves one unable to distinguish between one's own social anxieties and people actually being mean to/unjustly excluding one.

* People who will mindlessly follow such a comm's house style would just find another source of inspiration to follow mindlessly if the comm didn't exist.

* People who disagree with her criteria for quality are still perfectly capable of articulating that--whether on an abstract level or through reccing specific stories passed over by the comm.

In short, assuming the comm organizers behave with reasonable civility, which I have no particular reason to think they won't, it's really No Big Deal. Not my personal cup of tea, but No Big Deal.

Raman

[jmchau.livejournal.com]

http://food.yahoo.com/blog/continentalchef/739/dress-up-ramen-for-dinner-in-minutes

[poisontaster]

I really feel sort of Darwinist about the whole thing. If you are going to spend your fandom life pandering your style to 'the cool kids', and writing what you think 'they' (insert your 'they' of choice) are espousing or find popular or acceptable...dude. Have at it. The presence or lack of this community is not going to stop you from that kind of behavior. If it is really that important to you to emulate others, then you're probably already doing it and then whether there's a community or not doesn't really matter, does it?

I mean, fandom behavior is fandom behavior is fandom behavior and no community or lack of community is going to change that. And no one community is going to so change the face of fandom that there's no room for anything else. People are going to do the same things they've always done.

fueled by ramen

[raveninthewind.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. I too periodically binge on ramen. I particularly like the Sapporo Ichiban miso and chicken flavors.

This was amusing:
http://www.ramenramenramen.net/

I have...some thoughts about this issue, but since I am only a reader, not a writer, I think my stake is different. I don't want wank proliferation, but finding new authors would be keen.

[eleventh-guard.livejournal.com]

I don't really like the idea. I've had some mildly bad experiences with a different only-the-best archive. None of my work was rejected - I didn't submit any, since I figured that the only "tests" I could guarantee passing were ones related to spelling. There was way too much subjectivity. I saw bland fics make the cut. Stories that were grammatically correct and had a solid plot, but were about as much fun as reading the dictionary (and sometimes less so, because at least my dictionary includes the etymology of naughty words, and has some Middle English roots listed here and there that are fun to try to pronounce.) And I saw two fics from an e-acquaintance rejected. I beta-read one of them myself, along with two other betas, and could hardly find anything to improve upon except for a couple of very minor things like "this paragraph could use a little more sentence structure variation."

In the end, it was quality control gone wrong. I'm all for comms and lists that weed out the truly, deeply bad. The lists that reject fics that look like they've been Babelfished out of English and back a few times, the ones in which the author can't even spell main canon characters' names correctly, and stories that have no coherent plot and nothing to make up for the lack. But restricting this further generally leads to, at best, mostly boring fic with good writing mechanics and the occasional gem. This is exactly like searching archives/lists/comms without that kind of control, except that there's more misspelled sugar-high junk in the mix.