Maybe it's just me...

I go to a lot of prompt sites to inspire my writing. Velvet Verbosity, Chuck Wendig, The Parking Lot Confessional, and today, Friday Fictioneers. Some of these are vibrant communities, and at least one is a ghost town, but all have one thing in common: they provide me with weekly inspiration. In fact, this blog started out as an attempt at founding a prompt site of my own.

Part of the bargain is that you read the pieces other people post in response to the prompt, in the hope that they will return the favor and read yours. (Which I do, except when it's poetry: I don't know enough about poetry to offer any intelligent criticism.) Frequently, when reading some of the entries, I come up against a problem that I really don't know how to address.

They can be mind-numbingly prosaic.

I don't mean in the sense that they lack 'poetry' in the sense of color and tone and metaphor; I mean that their subjects are commonplace to the point of being banal. And while style is important, any artistry devoted to such a dull subject serves not to elevate it so much as bring it into the realm of the absurd: to wax poetic about something so pedestrian is to tilt at windmills. Maybe it's a trap inherent in the maxim 'Write What You Know'.

Though many of the worst offenders come from the category, I certainly don't want to criticize 'Mommy Blogs' in general: they can be fascinating and hilarious and profound. Certainly such subjects can be leveraged to say something bigger, something important, something about life (much like, as I am constantly reminding people: good zombie stories are not about the zombies. They're about something else, usually humanity and what it means and implies). These particular offerings are just not, in my opinion, getting there. They're not about something bigger, something magical.

I need magical. I've read too much Ray Bradbury to accept anything else.

What do you think? Am I off the rails here?

Kindle Worlds

I've just read two articles about Amazon's new fanfiction-for-money scheme, one by John Scalzi and one by Chuck Wendig, both of which raise interesting points about whether or not the scheme is good or bad for authors of fanfiction, and here's my thought on the issue:

Don't write fanfiction in the first place; write original fiction.

'But I enjoy writing fanfiction because I love this universe/setting', you say. I respond: why do you assume you are incapable of creating an original universe/setting that you don't love as much, if not more because it is wholly yours?

'But fanfiction is good practice for aspiring writers', you say. I respond: that's like saying you can practice for the Daytona 500 by just driving on straightaways. The curves are part of driving too, and the creation of characters and setting are part of writing, too. Practice them. You might even discover that that's the fun part.

'But fanfiction has a built-in audience that I would lose if I wrote original fiction'. I respond: yes. I'll bet more people read my awful geocities-hosted Star Trek fanfiction from the late 90s in a day than have read a word of my original stuff in the past four years. But I earned the views I'm getting now all by myself.

'But there's an online community for my fanfic/fandom'. I respond: there are communities for writers of original fiction on the net as well. Google is your friend.

Just my humble opinion, of course. And none of this is meant as any sort of personal attack on people who write fanfic; I used to be one of them. If you want to write fanfiction, go right ahead. But I've never heard an argument for writing it that's not more true for writing original work.

Please feel free to comment, just keep it polite.