I wrote a really long and—not quite angry, but definitely annoyed rant on things I’ve been thinking about, things I’ve observed recently, and my general absence from AFF these past few months (has it been months?) but I ended up deleting it because I feel better now that I’ve let it all out. I also don’t want that kind of negativity in my blogs.

BUT there is something I want to address:

Writing is hard.

Say it with me, friends: WRITING IS HARD!

The job of a professional author is incredibly tough. Not only do you spend months, maybe years struggling to get out a first draft of a manuscript (and then a second, and a third, and a fourth—so on), the journey doesn’t stop there. You have to go through editing, rewriting, querying. Basically, it’s a to see a novel through to publishing, but you know you’re going to be rewarded for it. You’ll earn money, people will enjoy your work, and who knows? Your novel might be optioned for a movie or a tv series! And once you have one novel published, future book deals will be marginally easier to get. If your book sells enough, all your hard work will be worth it.

Fanfic doesn’t quite work like that.

No, we don’t have to query. No, we don’t typically write a billion drafts of the same thing. But you know what? Some of us do write multiple drafts of a fic. Some of us submit fics to betas and go through an editing/rewriting process. We spend just as many hours crying in front of a laptop or making outlines of the plot, drawing up charts for characters, working our asses off to create content. And for what? We don’t get any of the rewards published authors do. We don’t get paid, we don’t see our book on a bookstore’s shelf, we don’t even know if people will read our work. It’s thankless; we get nothing out of writing fics.

Here’s the thing: we do it because we love to write.

We love to write and tell stories and we want to share those stories with other people, free of charge! Some authors squeeze in updates during incredibly stressful and busy periods of their life, others force themselves to power through writer’s blocks. Some of us are insecure about our work and it takes us a huge amount of courage to post up one of our works. All we ask for in return is some kind of feedback or a reaction from our readers so we don’t feel like we’re throwing our hard work into the void.

One comment.

Did you like it? Did you hate it? What was your favourite part? Who was your favourite character? What did you think of plot development X? Did you have any theories for the end? What were your ships? What did you think of the ending? What did you want to see more of? What were your favourite lines, scenes? Did it give you the feels? Share!

You don’t have to answer all those questions; just one is fine. But authors want to know. We want to engage in dialogue with readers. We want to feel like we’re being heard, that people are actually viewing and enjoying our stuff. You know what? We want to feel like we matter, that our stories matter. We want to know if they made you feel something. Do you know how disheartening it is to pour your heart and soul into something and be met with radio silence? Not even a single, “I liked it.”

It . It saps you of motivation and makes you feel like crap.

I know people say, “Write for yourself, not others!” but as artists, we create the things that we want to share. And we want to hear what people think about it. Maybe we just want validation, but I think it’s more the fact that we want all our hard work to mean something—we want some gratification for struggling to put out fic after fic.

Tinkerbell needs applause to live. Writers need comments to create.

No tl;dr, because if you didn't read it, that's cool. I can't do anything for you. If you did, then I hope you keep some of this suff in mind. I also encourage you to read headinthebooks101's blog entry which makes some great points I wish I could've expressed.

Peace.