For the Love of the Game, or Why I'm Not a Fan of Fic-Pulling

[giselle_lx]

I don't get it.

And before you start in on it, YES, I understand that occasionally people have personal problems. And YES, I do agree that authors have the right to do with their fics what they want. For the life of me, I never understand why that's the counterargument. Maybe some people are saying the author doesn't have the right to take fics

Comments

Hear, hear.

[solareclipses24]

(Hopefully this isn't re-posting. LJ is giving me a hard time.)

I agree with everything you've said, but then I think you, as a fellow media / book industry nerd, know the value of fan fiction. It is, simply put, folk art. It's just digitized and shared with more people than it was a hundred years ago. However, few understand this or know to value it as being the antithesis of for-profit writing.

There's one argument--the most logical one I've heard--presented for fic pulling, and that's the professional one. Of course, whenever I hear it, I feel it begs the question of "Why on earth would someone want to work in an environment that attempts to control the time they aren't paid for?" I could understand it if more people used their real names, perhaps, but pseudonyms? As a freelancer, I can't begin to understand accepting that sort of controlling behavior without some major arguments

Re: Hear, hear.

[giselle_lx]

I wanted to address the professional argument for fic-pulling, but there wasn't a logical place to do it in this piece. To me, there are two sides to that one. Number one, the issue of why you'd want to work for someone who dictates what you do in your free time. And number two, the issue that fanfiction is public. The idea that anything you do on the internet is anonymous is wishful thinking at best. I may have an especially large amount of foresight, but I don't write anything in fic that I wouldn't want my real name attached to, even though I don't give out my real name

[miaokuancha]

This is completely off topic but I really love the pictures of Carlise/Peter Facinelli that you have up top there. That is all.

[giselle_lx]

Thank you! The framework of the layout comes from scholarslayouts but I made the header and did all the tweaking to the background and frame. I was rather proud of it. :)

(And I consider the dark-haired one still a photo of Carlisle--he's Carlisle in his eyes. That's why I used it for the Ithaca banner even though he isn't blond.)

oh wow

[ext_726532]

I read this post and all the comments, I can only say that I agree with the post and was surprised at the comments.

Not in the bad way, mind you. I've been a reader for maybe three years now and a writer for a year, but I had never seen this flouncing/pulling under this light.

I'm always sad (and shake my head a bit lol) when it happens, but I never realized how much it affected people. That's probably because I'm stupid enough to think that if it doesn't kill my 'faith' in other authors, other people must react the same way lol.

I'm a fairly new author so apart from a few "please update soon" I don't get any kind of pressure, but it's pretty sad that because you're a well known author people think you'll 'screw' them over.

I understand the stress; author/reader is a relationship in its own right and no one likes or want to feel untrustworthy, even less because of someone else's behavior.

Enough rambling. It's a wonderful post, thank you.

[ruby_wednesday9]

I really agree with what you've said here. I pretty much think it's bad form to pull fic and even worse to expect people not to share it.

The only exception, imo, is when people pull they are uncomfortable or embarrassed with what they've put out there. for a lot of fic writers, it's the first go at writing fiction and there's so many mistakes to be made. i think it's fair to give people a chance to hide away their shame lol

I don't ever intend to pull the fics I've written and I would certainly leave people the option of sharing etc if I had to.
But I wrote too porny one-shots when those competitions were all the rage. now they make me cringe. i thought about deleting them, but figured the people wondering where they were would draw more attention than leaving them there.

so ya, 99% of the time i think it's silly. but quality wise, i see why it's tempting