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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
On the last post, I talked about prompts, and spent a certain amount of time taking about how having too much detail is sometimes a hindrance for a prompt, because it restricts the creativity and ability of the author to put their own stamp on the narrative. Leaving room for interpretation is important when it comes to leaving something that a person will enjoy writing and reading.
This year, though, for a particular exchange, I got to experience the opposite of that problem. There was fandom and pairing and medium data, the minimum requirement for signing up for the exchange, but there were no prompts, no letter, nothing at all that have even the slightest hint of what the recipient might have wanted in the story they were asking for. It's a nonexistent set with two characters on the stage, and it's time to make a story, no really. That kind of thing could crack a writer and send them running into the streets, screaming about bears that won't leave them alone.
Thankfully, there were a few things that were working in favor of this not being a thing that required superior anything to achieve. First, it was a megafandom. I often include one or two in my signups, if they're available, to make it easier for matching purposes in case there aren't enough people in one of the smalller fandoms. Being a megafandom means less pressure that your work is going to be part of the small amount of works that are involved in that particular fandom's materials. And while the pairing was likely rarer than most, it certainly wasn't supposed to be between two characters that had a single sentence of description in the corpus of the canon. So there was still plenty of space for making it your own work, although the chasm yawned big.
I spent a particularly large amount of time in that space waiting for the recipient to provide more clue about what they wanted than just that. And when that extra help failed to materialize, I got some useful advice on what to do. It's not quite "throw penguins," but it's close. Given that I had nothing else to work with, someone told me to write a work that I would be proud of having created. Essentially, to treat it as though I were writing it for myself, and that I had decided on this pairing as something I would write.
There was an additional part that eventually made it an easier task than before, in that I realized I could work the situation into an ongoing universe that I had created before, which helped immensely in getting setting, plot, and characters going in the direction I wanted them to go, because now it was just writing characters that I had written before, and then adding a new one into the mix. That took a lot of the stress off, as well, since I had free reign to essentially write what I wanted and then gift it away.
Unsurprisingly, I didn't get any comments on that one from the recipient. Not even a "hey, I read this" kudo, either. A complete void, from start to finish, despite having a fairly extensive amount of fiction to their name. It was an exercise in frustration for the most part. The composing of the fic was delightful, because I was doing it to satisfy myself and nobody else. But all the rest of the bits that I like about exchanges weren't there. No peering into the head of someone else, no acknowledgement of how on the mark (or off of it) the work was, none of it.
Don't do this to your exchange participants, please. Give them something to work with and then give them at the very least a thank you at the end for the gift they created for you. (Or signal the account that might be specifically there to give thanks in case works get orphaned or defaulted upon or otherwise don't end up with a recipient. Even if the account itself can only give thanks, it's still a useful way of closing the loop.)
If you do end up not giving prompts, don't expect what you get to be anything you were expecting, because that's a free pass to your creator to do whatever it is they want, so long as they respect the DNWs and have the required fandom and pairing and it meets the requirements. That could mean a fantastic creation that everyone really loves, or it might be something done by rote without a spark involved in it, exactly at the wordcount required to be a gift, and then they'll go merrily off writing something for someone else who will appreciate it more than you are.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]On the last post, I talked about prompts, and spent a certain amount of time taking about how having too much detail is sometimes a hindrance for a prompt, because it restricts the creativity and ability of the author to put their own stamp on the narrative. Leaving room for interpretation is important when it comes to leaving something that a person will enjoy writing and reading.
This year, though, for a particular exchange, I got to experience the opposite of that problem. There was fandom and pairing and medium data, the minimum requirement for signing up for the exchange, but there were no prompts, no letter, nothing at all that have even the slightest hint of what the recipient might have wanted in the story they were asking for. It's a nonexistent set with two characters on the stage, and it's time to make a story, no really. That kind of thing could crack a writer and send them running into the streets, screaming about bears that won't leave them alone.
Thankfully, there were a few things that were working in favor of this not being a thing that required superior anything to achieve. First, it was a megafandom. I often include one or two in my signups, if they're available, to make it easier for matching purposes in case there aren't enough people in one of the smalller fandoms. Being a megafandom means less pressure that your work is going to be part of the small amount of works that are involved in that particular fandom's materials. And while the pairing was likely rarer than most, it certainly wasn't supposed to be between two characters that had a single sentence of description in the corpus of the canon. So there was still plenty of space for making it your own work, although the chasm yawned big.
I spent a particularly large amount of time in that space waiting for the recipient to provide more clue about what they wanted than just that. And when that extra help failed to materialize, I got some useful advice on what to do. It's not quite "throw penguins," but it's close. Given that I had nothing else to work with, someone told me to write a work that I would be proud of having created. Essentially, to treat it as though I were writing it for myself, and that I had decided on this pairing as something I would write.
There was an additional part that eventually made it an easier task than before, in that I realized I could work the situation into an ongoing universe that I had created before, which helped immensely in getting setting, plot, and characters going in the direction I wanted them to go, because now it was just writing characters that I had written before, and then adding a new one into the mix. That took a lot of the stress off, as well, since I had free reign to essentially write what I wanted and then gift it away.
Unsurprisingly, I didn't get any comments on that one from the recipient. Not even a "hey, I read this" kudo, either. A complete void, from start to finish, despite having a fairly extensive amount of fiction to their name. It was an exercise in frustration for the most part. The composing of the fic was delightful, because I was doing it to satisfy myself and nobody else. But all the rest of the bits that I like about exchanges weren't there. No peering into the head of someone else, no acknowledgement of how on the mark (or off of it) the work was, none of it.
Don't do this to your exchange participants, please. Give them something to work with and then give them at the very least a thank you at the end for the gift they created for you. (Or signal the account that might be specifically there to give thanks in case works get orphaned or defaulted upon or otherwise don't end up with a recipient. Even if the account itself can only give thanks, it's still a useful way of closing the loop.)
If you do end up not giving prompts, don't expect what you get to be anything you were expecting, because that's a free pass to your creator to do whatever it is they want, so long as they respect the DNWs and have the required fandom and pairing and it meets the requirements. That could mean a fantastic creation that everyone really loves, or it might be something done by rote without a spark involved in it, exactly at the wordcount required to be a gift, and then they'll go merrily off writing something for someone else who will appreciate it more than you are.
