"my god, they have guts and the guts are often splendid stuff"

[flemmings]

I will join the squee over this. And note that when I followed the link through metafandom I didn't look at who the writer was, but thought as I was reading My God *yes* thank God someone else thinks this. And then looked to see. It's always the same people in the end, isn't it? :-)

"This is, btw, one reason why, by policy, I don't spork badfic; some of it is by potentially glorious writers, with astonishingly fertile minds, who may direly need to learn control and style and restraint and research and all that stuff that you CAN, with a bit of application, learn, but my god, they have guts and the guts are often splendid stuff."

Flow being what it is today, no sooner do I answer someone's inquiry about yaoi and its realism (or lack of it) with a long screed about how it's individual fantasy that matters, whatever form that takes, than someone else emails me with piteous thanks for writing the defence of Mary Sues article at Aesthe. I still maintain that whatever you want to say about Mary Sue fics, they have a sincerity and energy that shines like a beacon or, more like, a huge blinking neon sign. Whatever, it's a quality I too often find lacking in carefully composed and utterly irreproachable fics by BNFWs. If you won't take risks and you won't be honest, your writing will show it sooner or later.

Of course, to judge by various rants, there seems to be a general liking for carefully composed and utterly irreproachable fics, and consequent dismissal and/or mocking of anything that's rough, personal and revelatory. But aren't the people who think like this, in the end, little different from young readers who only want perfect OCs they can identify with snogging the hot guy? I don't think 'I know what I like and you should provide it' is excused just because one of the things you like is proper spelling, formatting and grammar. Those are virtues, but they don't make a good fic by themselves. Energy, ladies, let us have energy. Spell-check will take care of the rest.

Comments

[incandescens]

Thank you for pointing me at that. Definitely worth the read and very good stuff.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Any time. ^_^

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

That is indeed very much worth reading.

I loved that Mary Sues article; and I think that perhaps all of my attempts to write have been trying to get there, lurching back and forth between wildly self-indulgent and polite and restrained...

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It's a fine balance, yes. The writer who does the Romantic thing and writes *only* what turns her on and *only* what she feels and *all* of it in great detail is doubtless sincere, but if it goes on too long and past a certain age she starts looking demented. 'Hellooo? There's people out here reading this, y'know. Hellooo!' OTOH the writer who's always peering nervously over her shoulder at her prospective audience's possible reactions is in a sad state.

But y'know, what gets forgotten here is that all writing is part of the process of becoming a writer. Of course one lurches drunkenly at times and falls down frequently. It's like babies learning to walk. You have to do it to do it, and you'll start by doing parts of it badly.

[stormcloude]

The whole mocking thing really bothers me. I had to track back some of what you referenced earlier in your post about Nice v. Mean fans (because I am that curious. >.<) but I couldn't get past the fact that they saw it so black and white. The world isn't just one or the other, it's shades of gray and colors and patterns and damn, if I want to live in a black and white world.

I may be a little more selective about the stories I recommend, but my reading is all over the map. And the stories I tell myself? 90% of them would be called Mary Sues.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

(because I am that curious. >.<)

It killed the cat, you know.

The black and white thing, yes. It seems to be a default attitude in online debate, at least, that one must insist on the extreme version of one's position in order to state a case at all. Possibly because reasoned debate and qualifying one's statements online lacks the same punch as the rant, long or short, full of in your face-ness and dirty words. Possibly because online allows for extreme statement in a way that face to face doesn't. And possibly because some people do think in black and white.

[joasakura.livejournal.com]

wow. that's really a fascinating piece. 0.0

extremely thoughtful. Thank you, ma'am for linking to it!!

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

My pleasure.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

Well, the various rants about the superiority of carefully composed and utterly irreproachable fics are generally written by writers of carefully composed and utterly irreproachable fics, so I wouldn't read too much into them. Though most of us do live in a plastic age in a plastic land populated with plastic people, and frankly, after a while it's easy to lose the ability to tell between a plastic monster and a real monster.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I want to say But but but to this, because surely everybody has monsters under the bed that they know are there, even if they don't look at them too closely, and surely that serves as a touchstone for the realness or otherwise of other people's monsters when you encounter them.

But then I remember various fen who hadn't a clue what I meant when I talked about the monsters of the Id, because it would seem that they didn't have Ids. (It certainly looked that way from their writing too, especially when they wrote slash.) It was sad in its way, like tone-deafness. One can live without music, but life is pleasanter with.

[marymason.livejournal.com]

The two stories that exemplify Controlled vs Id to me are Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Pride and Prejudice is wiped clean of any authorial fingerprints, and is as close to perfect in its construction and consistant tone as a novel can be. Jane Eyre is in every way a Mary Sue with "id monsters" all over the place, burning down the house, blinding Rochester and making piteous moans from deep inside the mansion. But both novels are brilliant in their own way, I think showing that exemplars of both types have value.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I'll agree, though to me P&P isn't quite as authorially distanced as other Austen works. That is, there still seems some sort of authorial wish fulfillment at work in P&P, or at least the reader can see it if she chooses. I think one reason why it's Austen's most popular work is that you can self-insert into it most happily. Who wouldn't want to be Elizabeth, and who /would/ want to be Emma or Fanny Price? (I actually like Emma, the book and the character, but the character at least is social menace.)

[shiny-monkey.livejournal.com]

Self-excision, I like that. I suppose that lately in my mellowing years I don't like to apply "good" and "bad" to fanfiction because fanfiction is for so many people just mental exercise (or mental exorcision, if need be). I prefer to sort them into "stories I like" and "stories I don't like", and I don't tell the people whose stories I don't like that I don't like them, because they haven't asked me in the first place, and if you can't say nothin' nice...

I have no illusions about my own writing; it's all self-insertion and quite silly, and I wouldn't call it "good" by any stretch of the imagination. But it keeps my brain from atrophying. I can only aspire to the level of the authors whose works I admire, like flemmings and incandescens. No, I'm not sucking up.

And who wants realism in their fantasy, I ask you? Not I, said this goose. (fingers in ears) La la la...