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x_losI know better than to do this, but I'm gonna do it regardless. Ayyyy.
Cfandom, maybe because of the publication format of cnovels, is really big on posting a wild number of small chapters. The JJWXC standard is something like 3k, but fandom will cheerfully drop to 2k or even 1k. I'm not certain that people in these spaces right now know this practice isn't universal, and, while not unheard of, wasn't that common anywhere until fairly recently. Social mediatisation probably plays a role here.
These semi-regular bitty updates make following the Ao3 saveable tags difficult: which chapter of the 281/?? fic did you last see near the top? It's worse when half the page is comprised of such titles. The number of English language BingQiu fics drops from 2525 to 1794, when Incompletes are removed.
This composition model, in which chapters are released as they're written, lends itself to a partial and restricted beta (if any), incomplete and abandoned projects, and sloppy arc construction. Many a 70k fic I have read would have been actively better for having been composed and edited before its release--the very fact of which would have chopped it to 50k. Composing in this style locks the writer into decisions that are hard to retract (mostly, people don't substantially revise either a WIP or a finished work composed along these lines). You can point to famous Victorian serial novelists as sources of legitimisation for the practice, but they had hard outlines in many cases (we have all Dickens' working notes; he was a meticulous planner with the benefit of a ton of practice), significant experience of long-from writing, an understanding of the whole project upon commission and substantial, talented editorship (in a lot of cases, ie Gaskell and Collins: also Dickens). Also--we only remember the best of these. There were a lot of bad Victorian serial novels.
The current trend of bitty instalments does catch a bigger readership (they keep one at the top of the tag, if nothing else). They may also generate a phenomenological over-investment in a given text: the water-cooler effect of talking about each successive chapter, the sustained engagement. The model also makes it very hard for writers to consider shape, to give a project the absolute gift of proper editing (so often the making of a work), to clarify their points and to effectively change their mind. I believe that you often trade a work's best possible realisation and enduring reputation for its immediate hit count, and even as capital-saturated as fandom is becoming, I can't get behind this Branding approach: you're not getting paid, who do you need to sacrifice the quality of your own work for? Yeah there's dopamine to be had in tiny updates, but there's self-respect to be had in allowing yourself the time and space to git gud. You don't have to replicate the capitalist attention economy processes that hamstring working artists in the gift economy: ur free.
You could argue people only have time to write 3k on and off--all right, fine, then compose and publish a substantial 15k piece in about a month? Sometimes your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and it'd help to ask why this idea needs to be 40k and not 15k, and to conceptualise manageable projects. A lot of these bitty fics have ambitions they lack the technical infrastructure to realise well, and a habit of bitty composition can render you less able to execute substantial designs (people really seemed to struggle with the 2Ha Big Bang, and I think it was probably down to lack of experience with longform composition as such). There's also, 'oh but fandom might have moved on, by the time I'm done!!' I mean--in a month? In six? Maybe so, but a flurry of instantaneous bursts of some complex saga which takes even longer to write than a 50k one-off is subject to some of the same time pressures, and in fact might well exacerbate fandom-drift. If there's a lot of noise and not much signal to get purchase on, people will drift away faster. Really compelling work generates its own audience, and is its own reward. The deep esteem of ten readers means more than 1000 anonymous hits.
Cfandom, maybe because of the publication format of cnovels, is really big on posting a wild number of small chapters. The JJWXC standard is something like 3k, but fandom will cheerfully drop to 2k or even 1k. I'm not certain that people in these spaces right now know this practice isn't universal, and, while not unheard of, wasn't that common anywhere until fairly recently. Social mediatisation probably plays a role here.
These semi-regular bitty updates make following the Ao3 saveable tags difficult: which chapter of the 281/?? fic did you last see near the top? It's worse when half the page is comprised of such titles. The number of English language BingQiu fics drops from 2525 to 1794, when Incompletes are removed.
This composition model, in which chapters are released as they're written, lends itself to a partial and restricted beta (if any), incomplete and abandoned projects, and sloppy arc construction. Many a 70k fic I have read would have been actively better for having been composed and edited before its release--the very fact of which would have chopped it to 50k. Composing in this style locks the writer into decisions that are hard to retract (mostly, people don't substantially revise either a WIP or a finished work composed along these lines). You can point to famous Victorian serial novelists as sources of legitimisation for the practice, but they had hard outlines in many cases (we have all Dickens' working notes; he was a meticulous planner with the benefit of a ton of practice), significant experience of long-from writing, an understanding of the whole project upon commission and substantial, talented editorship (in a lot of cases, ie Gaskell and Collins: also Dickens). Also--we only remember the best of these. There were a lot of bad Victorian serial novels.
The current trend of bitty instalments does catch a bigger readership (they keep one at the top of the tag, if nothing else). They may also generate a phenomenological over-investment in a given text: the water-cooler effect of talking about each successive chapter, the sustained engagement. The model also makes it very hard for writers to consider shape, to give a project the absolute gift of proper editing (so often the making of a work), to clarify their points and to effectively change their mind. I believe that you often trade a work's best possible realisation and enduring reputation for its immediate hit count, and even as capital-saturated as fandom is becoming, I can't get behind this Branding approach: you're not getting paid, who do you need to sacrifice the quality of your own work for? Yeah there's dopamine to be had in tiny updates, but there's self-respect to be had in allowing yourself the time and space to git gud. You don't have to replicate the capitalist attention economy processes that hamstring working artists in the gift economy: ur free.
You could argue people only have time to write 3k on and off--all right, fine, then compose and publish a substantial 15k piece in about a month? Sometimes your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and it'd help to ask why this idea needs to be 40k and not 15k, and to conceptualise manageable projects. A lot of these bitty fics have ambitions they lack the technical infrastructure to realise well, and a habit of bitty composition can render you less able to execute substantial designs (people really seemed to struggle with the 2Ha Big Bang, and I think it was probably down to lack of experience with longform composition as such). There's also, 'oh but fandom might have moved on, by the time I'm done!!' I mean--in a month? In six? Maybe so, but a flurry of instantaneous bursts of some complex saga which takes even longer to write than a 50k one-off is subject to some of the same time pressures, and in fact might well exacerbate fandom-drift. If there's a lot of noise and not much signal to get purchase on, people will drift away faster. Really compelling work generates its own audience, and is its own reward. The deep esteem of ten readers means more than 1000 anonymous hits.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-09 01:26 am (UTC)That said, I do agree that there's a lot more... gamification of posting these days, and asking people to retweet fic, etc etc, which leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-09 01:30 am (UTC)Gamification feels like a good word for it.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-09 02:04 am (UTC)Yes, I think it might be more a symptom of fandom size/average age. Because in the fandoms I moved in as a teenager or even more recently, which skewed (I say this lovingly, not dismissively) younger and less cerebral 2-3k chapters are the norm, and a perfect fine size. I think all fandoms, when they get big enough, begin to accumulate bloated, overly long, perennial WIPs, but again, it might be a factor of size more than anything else...
no subject
Date: 2021-10-09 02:09 am (UTC)Mm, maybe a combination of fandom size and culture/norms, re the Forever WIPs.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-10 07:45 am (UTC)Writing like that makes it next to impossible to really pay any attention to things like structure, and most writers in fandom don't outline to the extent that it would take to really make that serial format work (if at all!). It leads to a lot of frustrating experiences as a reader where you're like "This could have been really, really great if you'd slowed down a bit."
no subject
Date: 2021-10-10 06:33 pm (UTC)