Meta on Writing
Oct. 21st, 2011 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76There's a meme going around my flist along the lines of "first ten people to give me a one-shot fic or a chapter of a multi-part fic I've written get a DVD-style or meta commentary from me on the fic." And I think it's a fun idea, but... I just can't participate. I would just end up staring at the screen and going "Um. This is what I wrote. It's all there in the file. I don't have anything to say." Because while I have an amorphous swirling cloud of ideas for what I write beforehand (I'm looking at you, Deus Ex Machine chapter 7...) or it sometimes all comes out fully-formed from the brow like Athena (see: Ghost Stories), I just don't have much to say afterward about what I've written. Aside from a few buried puns in my novel that I put there just to be a dork, the rest of what I write seems spelled out in capital letters to me, and unfortunately I can't get inside other people's heads to know if they missed things.
I suppose the Internet is truly novel in the regard that there is a lot of writer-reader interaction. Other than reading reviews, "published" authors traditionally don't get all that much feedback from their audience, do they?
("Published" being in quotes because, as my writing class keeps debating 'round in circles, the concept of the e-book and thus easy self-publishing is beginning to change a lot of things and erode the professional/amateur divide. Which I think is a good thing; there are a lot of 'Net writers who are far superior to many dead tree writers. And vice versa, of course. But I still think the tech requirements for e-books mean they will necessarily have a limited audience (only the top N% of the globe can afford them), and won't last forever. I own books that are over a century old and still in fine condition; I doubt a Kindle will have as long a life.)
I suppose the Internet is truly novel in the regard that there is a lot of writer-reader interaction. Other than reading reviews, "published" authors traditionally don't get all that much feedback from their audience, do they?
("Published" being in quotes because, as my writing class keeps debating 'round in circles, the concept of the e-book and thus easy self-publishing is beginning to change a lot of things and erode the professional/amateur divide. Which I think is a good thing; there are a lot of 'Net writers who are far superior to many dead tree writers. And vice versa, of course. But I still think the tech requirements for e-books mean they will necessarily have a limited audience (only the top N% of the globe can afford them), and won't last forever. I own books that are over a century old and still in fine condition; I doubt a Kindle will have as long a life.)
