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He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

am i sitting in a tin can

here’s an article from brown university on the subject i’ll discuss further. there are 3 parts of practicing metacognition identified in this article: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. how might this look like for a fanfic writer? 

planning: asking oneself ‘what is my goal?’ ‘what strategies should i use to meet that goal?’ ‘how much time/length do i need to meet my goal?’. so maybe my goal is to write a meet cute where two characters kiss. i’ll need to use a perspective, an upbeat tone, and forward characterization to do this. it’ll probably take 5000 words and two days to write. 

monitoring: asking oneself: is my story making sense? am i reaching my goal, or do i need to summarize more succinctly to keep it to 5k? maybe you started with a lot of exposition and now you’re 6k in and the characters haven’t met yet. what went wrong/changed? is it ok that it changed or did you not realize it got away from you? what now? 

evaluation: asking oneself: did i reach my goal? was it effective? what would i change next time? 

this is where comments come in

it is incredibly difficult to evaluate yourself. comments like “i love this!” actually do begin to touch on the evaluation step of metacognition. it means, in general, the writer is on the right track. comments like “i loved the dialogue between x and y” or “the emotions of this section really hit me” begin to answer the questions of was it effective, did i reach my goal and conversely answer what would i change next time (by adding more of whatever was specified as working well). HYPER SPECIFIC comments, like analyzing the story between the lines or pasting in a line that you really liked and explaining why, is like jet fuel for the metacognition process and i’m not exaggerating. specifically pointing out what was effective and why is incredibly useful 

First of all: positive feedback absolutely is important and helpful to writers, or at least to me as a writer. It's actually more important, and gives me more useful information, than negative feedback. Constructive criticism is also useful, but constructive criticism, if you're doing it properly, incorporates positive feedback.

By this point in my life as a writer (if we're talking about fiction, I cannot call it a career, I am an amateur there) I can pretty much do my own critical feedback. Yeah, this is too long, it fucks up the pacing, I must grit my teeth and make it shorter. Doing this scene this way isn't working, I need to find another way. Too many clauses in that sentence, slow it down so the reader can follow the action. That kind of thing.

What I am really bad about is predicting how other people will respond to my writing. I know what *I* like about it, and usually there is some overlap between that and what other people like; but there's also usually a lot of divergence. No matter how accomplished you may be technically, the one thing you cannot do is read your own work from the perspective of someone who didn't write it. And this is why it's really valuable to get feedback from people who aren't you, during the process and afterward.

Pointing to things you liked about a story is helpful to the author even if you don't explain why you liked them. It lets us know what's working, and that is as important to know as what isn't. Cause you don't want to take out the things that are working because of some rule you're trying to follow regarding the things that aren't.

And also, the positive reinforcement helps with motivation, especially at the WIP stage. It's always been really helpful to me to know that people are reading and enjoying the story while I'm working on it; I am willing to disappoint myself by not finishing something but not to disappoint other people!

Because that's been my experience on AO3. Most of the stuff I wrote ten years ago makes me cringe now, it's awful in every way, but all I got was "I love this!"-type comments. Every time I backbutton out of a story because it's an unreadable mess of typos, or clichéd to the point of complete predictability, the comments are filled with sycophants.

If the positive feedback isn't genuine, or if the readers have no goddamn taste and would cheer on a bag of dog poop, it doesn't teach fuck shit. It teaches mediocrity at best. For positive feedback to have any desireable effect, it has to steer the author in a "right" direction. Plant watering, not carpet bombing. Targeted application.

But what comment culture on AO3 has taught people is to uncritically appreciative of everything and anything, to reward the attempt no matter the outcome, and to treat pulp fiction the same as high fantasy. That lack of discrimination has eroded any ambition anyone might have had left.

This post reminds me a lot of conversations we used to have about fanfiction and feedback in the 1990s. At the time, at least among the people I knew, there was a sense that we wanted fanfic to be taken seriously and that it was important for that reason for fan readers to give fan writers constructive criticism so that they could improve their writing and therefore support the argument that fanfiction was worthy of the vast investment of time and energy that we were all making in it.

Since that time, the following things have been established:

Fanfiction will never really be taken seriously outside the community of people who write and read it. It doesn't matter how many well-constructed arguments we make about how the Aeneid is fanfiction, etc. Fanfiction is not devalued by The Outside because of the quality of the writing. It is devalued because a) it is unmonetized and unmonetizable; b) it is largely created and consumed by women; c) often, the sex is the point. Even professional and profitable approximations of fanfic (50 Shades, Heated Rivalry) which command attention because of the money they make are devalued. Most mainstream media coverage of the Heated Rivalry phenomenon, for instance, is explicitly or implicitly answering the question, "How has a show that Can't Be That Good generated such a large and passionate fan base?"

Most fan readers aren't equipped to provide criticism which is useful to the author from a technical point of view. In my experience, criticism in AO3 comments is usually either the expression of a personal taste (I don't like stories where X happens), an attack on the writer's presumed beliefs/ideologies, or the airing of a generic pet peeve (you broke my favorite writing rule). The kind of critique you would get from a writers' workshop, in which the focus is on making the story better through revision, is rare and honestly, not part of the reader's job. If you want that kind of criticism what you need is a writers' group where everyone has agreed to do this work for others, so that others will do it for them.

No attempt to raise the general quality of fan writing has had any significant impact or staying power. And my theory is that this is because

Most readers of fanfiction don't care much about the quality of the writing. For some readers a certain level of technial skill is a basic requirement. But for a lot of readers, what they want is more of whatever they're consuming, and if it 'works'--if it produces the desire emotional/sensory effects--then its 'quality' is irrelevant.

Thus it is true that a lot of positive feedback on AO3 is instrumental rather than evaluative. It is often either a veiled attempt at marketing (readers praising a story because they want other people to see it and enjoy it) or a veiled attempt to encourage the writer to keep producing more fanfic. At the same time

It is also true that people wouldn't provide positive feedback, even for these reasons, if they weren't getting pleasure from reading it. So from that POV, the kind of positive feedback you're talking about is sincere, even if what is being appreciated is not technical skill.

To the question of "what can anyone learn from this unearned positive feedback?" I would answer: You learn that someone liked your work. I personally find that both cheering and useful. If the commenter is sufficiently enthusiastic you might find out *what* the reader liked about your work, which I find even more cheering and useful.

To the question, "Why bother improving when garbage rakes in the kudos?" I would answer: For the same reason most writers improve: because they want to. Or, to put it more idealistically I guess, for the love of the game.

Because here is the thing: many of us, especially Olds such as myself, have been taught that in order to become professional writers we have to improve our writing technically. Many editors do have a preference for distinctive voices, elegant style, complex plotting, etc., and also have Secret Style Rules that authors are not allowed to break. So we're used to the idea that you should improve your writing because it will make you more attractive to literary agents and editors and thus bring you closer to the dream of getting money and fame for your writing.

Whether or not things ever worked that way, they don't now. Look at what just happened with Shy Girl. Or things like the Left Behind series, or 50 Shades. Popularity and salability are not necessarily or even primarily linked to what critics and academics would consider good writing. Good writing as defined by critics and academics has always been something important to a relatively small minority of the reading population. Misconceptions about this are maintained partly because academics, who value innovation and complexity, select for those things when they teach literature. The number of people reading James Joyce's Ulysses in the 1920s was much smaller than the number of people reading, say, Paul de Kock, a bestselling 19th century French author whose trashy novels are name-checked in Ulysses (because Leopold Bloom's wife Molly likes to read them in bed).

So why bother to improve your writing? Because you want your writing to be better. That's the only deep and durable motivation any of us ever really have. Whatever reward you get from your publishers or your readers--whether it's money, fame, or comments and kudos--is as much a matter of luck, connections, and self-promotion as it is the quality of your writing.