pandamoth

wip wednesday—foot edition

Fandom old here, been in fandom since I was 13 and I'm not in my early thirties. In regards to the Beta and Writer conversation I have been seeing on your dashboard as of late, I wanted to say that Fanfiction.Net actually had the ingenious idea a long time ago to make a list of beta readers. What you did was you filled out a beta-editor profile and your fandoms that you were willing to do. They still have it up. The issue is that Archive of Our Own Does *not* have this. There's no official list of active beta readers or what fandoms they will do publically. Instead, most beta readers that I have found are in fandom discord servers. Tumblr doesn't give enough traction to do a beta reader call because everyone posts and can get lost in the feed. That helps no one, not the writer and certainly not the beta whose looking for someone to help. The other issue that I am seeing is that there was a unspoken yet quite loud rule that betas were people who wished to be editors one day and just like many of us on fanfiction were hoping to become writers or were going to go into English Degrees, understood that we had to practice for our own rejection. So basically, rejective sensitivity didn't exist for us because the betas were in as much practice as we were. This is their craft as much as writing was ours. Now there were bad betas, don't get me wrong. But you knew a bad beta from a good one. Now, I don't know about everyone else's school. But in my high school we were taught how to give criticism. Art and English teachers used to make us grade each other's art and grade each other's essays long before the teacher ever got a hold of them. We had a rubic to follow in English to help us, and for art...that could get brutal. Big time. You didn't get a I'm afraid. We got "oh god, she's going to hate it and I'm going to be re-writing this again" because English teachers back in my day gave back essays and told you to re-write it. You had four drafts before you could turn in a "final". I don't know how classes are run now, but this is another huge problem that I am seeing. So, how does this work in fandom etiquette today? I don't think anyone really wants a "beta", they want assurance. Every time I see "it's my writing style" I leave because I already know they didn't want me to edit and it wasn't a writing style they just don't know how to break the rules properly. Betas can help you break grammar rules *properly*, because that's their craft. They know the rules therefore they know how to bend them, break them, and make them theirs. Writers, we should know how to do that too, but they know it better. Let them have it. Let them know what really is a writing style because if it's just insecurity, guess what? Here's the tough truth: you either get a beta and you enhance your writing and you learn how to hone your craft to be a better writer or you don't. And the problem is that you can get better if you don't. A beta isn't a have to...but a beta can make you get better faster. You'll be getting better slower especially with lack of engagement on fics on AO3 if you don't. Which is a valid way to go. And a whole other ask/blog entirely. Editors and writers go hand in hand, betas aren't an enemy you fight. People who are afraid of the red pen weren't afraid because of the mistakes they made, it was once more going to the typewriter and figuring out how to make it *better*.

I don't presume to know what sort of constructive criticism Anon provides, but I disagree with the general presumption that a thin skin is the only reason for pushing back on or rejecting criticism.