And, yes, this is true. If you aim for one thousand comments on your novel, you’re probably not going to get them writing Silmarillion. (Another Man’s Cage currently has 185 comments on ff.net.) You’re much better off in Twilight or Harry Potter, even The Lord of the Rings. (My friend JunoMagic’s LotR-based novel Lothíriel has 995 reviews on the same site.)

My contention is not with whether or not this is reality. It’s pretty in-your-face obvious, if you ask me. My contention lies with the very notion of recognizing rewards for our writing in such terms.

Because the fact of the matter is that people who post their fiction publicly are looking for something for doing so. Oh, I’ve heard the wide-eyed assertions of people who claim, “I only post for myself!” I call bullshit. You may write for yourself–I hope that you do!–but if you’re taking the time to join groups/archives and format stories for uploading and to actually upload them and write summaries and debate the rating and so on, you’re doing so with hopes of getting something from someone else. That might be simply getting read; it might be in-depth concrit; it might be the adulation of masses claiming that Shakespeare is currently licking the taste of your road dust from his lips. So there is some hope for reward, maybe not even anything particularly tangible, but something. Write for myself, post for others: that is my motto, and I fail to see how there is any shame in standing on a stage and hoping for an audience.

And, of course–idealist though I may be–I can also see things in realistic terms, and I know that nothing I say will change the fact that there will be people for whom the sole measure of success is reaching a certain number of comments or page clicks. I count these people alongside those who take 80-hour-a-week jobs for the six-figure salaries and the ability to accrue shinies like a million-dollar home that might as well be a million-dollar motel room for all that they’re in it, complete with a professional-grade kitchen that never gets used because their dinners are slurped out of Chinese takeout boxes, and a vacation home in Bethany Beach that never gets used because they’re working eighty hours a week, every week. But the collection of such shinies is their mark of success; intangibles like contentment or personal enrichment are of little to no matter.

But, of course, there’s no meaning in such an existence, just as there is no meaning in fiction that is penned solely to entice the greatest number of eyeballs to look at it. Traffic accidents earn that much.

This concept is nothing new. In professional fiction, the term for it has been sanitized and euphemized as “writing for the market.” Those with blunter tongues call it “selling out.” Last year, horribly enough, I had to write an essay on Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara for a course called Modern Epic Fantasy, and while looking for information on the book, I found an interview with the author during which he was asked how he handles critical reactions to his work. “I write first for myself and for what I perceive to be the market” was part of his answer. Having read no further than Sword of Shannara (because, as I often admonish fandom trolls, if organisms lacking a central nervous system nonetheless possess the capability to learn a basic avoidance response, then what does it say of human beings who cannot do the same?), I can say that it is painfully obvious that Brooks writes foremost for a market. “Writing for the market” necessarily means that there must be a perceptible market in the first place, which means that there must be a body of books that is being overwhelmingly purchased (and, thus, published) over another body of books, which means walking in the ditches created by the passage of all those authors’ feet before yours, which means stale ideas and writing that lacks anything close to daring.

However, I am not so naïve not to understand that professional writers are just that: They are professionals, and so they need to make money on their work. So they must remain at least cognizant of the market for that work. I know firsthand the allure of that “market,” of leaving an idea about which I was passionate for another because I thought that the latter had a better chance of “selling.” It made me a miserable writer and drove me to give up writing for two years. I suppose it’s the same as the caveman’s urge to hoard more deer legs in one’s cave than one can possibly eat because that stack of rotting meat in the corner represents success and, ultimately, survival. Never mind that it reeks.

But this is professional writing. After my failed stint as a writer of literary fiction, it was “fan fiction” that brought me back to writing, and it brought me back in part because it was something that could not be sold. It kept me honest much in the way that a job at Denny’s and not Applebee’s keeps a recovering alcoholic honest by not even providing a whiff of temptation into the old habits. There was very little “market” for Silmfic beyond a slightly bigger audience for some characters and pairings over others; it was the closest I’d ever seen in a fiction-writing community to the ideal of 1) writing only what one’s heart and mind cries must be written and 2) having one’s work judged foremost in terms of how well it worked for its audience. This is not to say that the Silmarillion community was (and is) without any favoritism paid to some works, genres, and authors over others. But that an unknown author could march into the room with her big, hulking novel that never once touches on an event mentioned in the texts and still find readers and get comments on her work is, I think, a testament to the difference between fanfic and o-fic. Let me try the same thing with an original novel and see how far I get.

So I find this notion of recognizing and writing for a fanfic market to be dismaying. What the FanHistory posts encourage (especially the first) is abandoning one’s own passions as a writer in favor of writing to fit a perceived market. Fuck quality. My heart and mind pull me to contemplate the early lives of the Fëanorians, the quality of my writing (I hope) reflects my passion and interest in this topic, but as my “mere” 185 reviews on ff.net reveal, this isn’t enough. Never mind that I’ve never read Twilight and strongly suspect that I would object to some of the books’ basic premises, but this is where it’s at. I can surely scratch together a story about Bella and Edward (see, I know the main characters’ names at least!) that will probably get more comments in a week than AMC has gotten in three years.

I don’t object to the reality of this claim but whether this is a measure that we should be putting upon fanworks in the first place. It’s bad enough that, in order to make a living off of their art, writers must mash and corset their creative passions to suit the “market.” What is to be gained by placing the same impositions upon fan-writing? It takes fan-writing from something that is driven by creativity and the community that forms around sharing that creativity and turns it into a capitalist enterprise, only instead of success being measured in dollars or euros or pounds or kroner or pesos or yen, now we’re measuring in page clicks or comment counts and shifting our creativity and our communities to accrue those meaningless little tick marks. We can’t even feed our families off hits on ff.net. In such a system, tiny fandoms–like Silmarillion, where the stories being written are overwhelmingly of high quality and the communities are extremely dedicated, passionate, and close-knit–must necessarily lose out in favor of–what exactly? Stacking our archives with the same pulp that I saw when, two Christmases ago, I wanted to buy my husband a book by Ursula K. LeGuin (any book by Ursula K. LeGuin) and, in the local B&N fantasy/sci-fi section with its bright-colored covers featuring shovel-jawed, sword-wielding heroes and dew-eyed, diadem-wearing princesses, I found one copy of The Left Hand of Darkness? Terry Brooks, on the other hand, probably had a shelf unto himself.

The difference between piling rotting deer carcasses in the corner of your cave if you’re writing professional fiction versus fan fiction is that, in fanfic, those carcasses are never a matter of survival. They just stink.

I have heard the criticism made against fandom before that it is too easy on writers. Even the worst stories tend to find one or two people willing to say something nice about them. Comments on stories are almost all praise, even on sites–like the SWG–where concrit is not only allowed but encouraged. We are, by and large, a community that anguishes over how to write good feedback and the ethics of when, where, and whether constructive criticism is appropriate. A common defense by flamers is that they are toughening up fan writers and forcing an honest consideration of their writing because most of their peers will not. It is true that the process of sharing fannish writings is largely different from sharing original writings, at least in my experience, and, in my opinion, largely because of the pressure to publish that comes with original but not fan writing.

But in the midst of the debate about how we do and should treat authors, the experience of reading as a fan and in the so-called “real world” of writing is often overlooked. And I think that it deserves some consideration, at least equal to that which we give to authors and perhaps more, since there are far more readers than writers in fandom. Just as many fandom participants feel that authors are coddled by the culture that has developed around fan writing, I feel that readers are likewise coddled by a culture that is hypersensitive and caters to their “needs” in a way that the broader world of creative writing does not.

The complaint on the MEFA list reflects this. Fan readers are, at times, obsessed with the idea of “spoilers.” It is an unwritten rule that story reviews that contain significant revelations about the story’s plot should indicate this loud and center at the top of the review. Software like LiveJournal lets spoilers be hidden “behind the cut” and away from the eyes of readers who don’t want to see them, and it is understood that LJ users will make good use of this tool. The MEFA’s implementation this year of the spoiler flag writes as a rule this unspoken agreement between author, reviewer, and reader.

But the MEFAs are not alone in their official consideration of spoilers. As my comoderators and I developed the rating/warning system for the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild, finding a method that would not spoil a story was a frequent point of discussion and was treated as a priority. Even our ratings policy assures readers: “We are willing to work with authors when warnings may spoil the plots of their stories.”

This is unique to fandom. In the “real” world, if you choose to read a review, or if you insist on a rating system for an artistic medium, then you should expect some degree of spoilage.

Right alongside spoilers as a frequent point of discussion are ratings and warnings. I don’t think that the SWG entertains questions and dissatisfaction about any single point more than it does ratings and warnings. We have received emails in the past from authors asking for guidance on whether we think a story is best as Adults or Teens, as though the gradation is as clear as deciding between red, yellow, and blue. The graduated system of warning for sex and violence–mild, moderate, and graphic–earns its own handwringing as authors debate what degree of explicitness nudges a story from one to the other. Yet a discussion on our Yahoo! list showed me that readers are pretty clear on where they stand on ratings and warnings: They like them, they want them, and they won’t read on an archive that doesn’t make an attempt at providing them. I think it’s illustrative that the fiction archive software, eFiction–which is largely aimed toward creating fan fiction archives–makes nearly every detail optional through the control panel, but “[r]atings are a required element for story submission.” In other words, archive owners must have the PHP/MySQL knowledge to alter the software directly to get rid of ratings altogether or else find a creative way of recasting the required rating field as something else entirely. Or, when LiveJournal developed its own rating system for journal entries, the discussion of whether this was ethical to start was as loud as the discussion of another concern: that ratings in the story body would be hidden behind LJ cuts and readers actually had to click on the story to find them.

Literature outside of fandom is so far untouched by the ratings bug that has made a color-coded alphabet soup out of movies and television in many countries in the world. Perhaps it is assumed that if you are mature enough to pick up a novel for entertainment, then you are mature enough to handle the fact that it might represent real life in some degree of explicitness, including sex and violence. Or perhaps rating literature inches too close to censorship in a culture that still feels the heat of past book burnings (a phenomenon that we haven’t entirely thwarted in this century either). Or maybe it is assumed that you really can judge enough about a book by its cover (and the blurb on the back) to discover whether its content will be to your taste or not. Or maybe fan writings are really that much more explicit overall than original writings, making meticulous ratings and warnings a far greater imperative.

There is a movement among fan writers to shuck the system of ratings and warnings. I am among them: My homepage The Midhavens does not include a single story rating and uses warnings only when I think that a story contains something that might work as a “trigger” to victims, such as those affected by rape or suicide. But we are in the minority, and, even among us, it is understood that scrapping ratings on public archives is an impossible dream. In reconsidering the warning system used by the SWG, a member wrote to me to say she thought it’d be best to get rid of it altogether … but that she understood that readers would never go for it. Yet, briefly, we entertained the thought of an experience where the reader would judge a story on its merits and not which warnings it could be shelved under.

But what is the point of all of this? Surely, pleasing readers and site visitors is not a bad thing.

And I agree that it’s not, just as I agree that the more delicate and tolerant treatment of authors in fandom is not a bad thing either. But gripes about how things are handled in fandom compared to the “real writing world” tend to focus almost exclusively on the kid-glove treatment that the author receives. Very few fandom readers–when making a loud show about spoilers and ratings and the other luxuries they enjoy here but not elsewhere–seem cognizant of the differences between fannish and original literary communities and the burden that creating an absolutely flawless reading experience puts on archive owners and, more importantly, authors. I have heard complaints about the sorts of reviews attached to barely coherent stories that invoke such bland, vague praise as “great grammar!” or “you really use your canon!” just so the reviewer has something nice to say. Yet this requires no more verbal gymnastics than does the sort of warning I remember from my early days on fanfiction.net: “warning for slash (well, maybe, Maedhros and Fingon do hug each other in one scene, but they’re cousins, so you could see this as slash or not, depending on how you want to look at it, but I thought it safer to warn anyway).”

Or when a MEFA reviewer writes, “Aragorn and Arwen are my favorite canon couple!” without using the spoiler tag, and a reader huffs and puffs that now the story is ruined because the writer could not possibly carry the story on skill alone now that the story’s pairing is revealed!

Fandom is ridiculous at times. Anyone who has been around it for more than a week generally knows that. But, as an author and an archive owner, I find myself caught between wanting to please everyone who supports my writing and my site and tossing their more ridiculous requests in the bin where my own judgment says they belong and start treating my writing and that of my peers more like literature and less like that despised label evocative of squealing, irrational children: fan fiction.