Dear Fandom Friends

[seekingferret]

naraht and I have been discussing a fanfic meta challenge to write forewords for other peoples' fic, analogous to the way a novel might open with a foreword by an editor or fellow author or fan.

Forewords can serve a lot of functions for a story. They can introduce a new reader to the story, providing context or explaining why the reader should even bother. They can offer critical insight into parts of the story that prime the reader's expectations in a particular way. There might be biographical or historical information a reader might want to know.

I think forewords for fic is a really neat idea and I'd love to see the kind of things that could be written. I'm sure it would introduce me to stories I otherwise wouldn't read or wouldn't understand if I read. And it seems like a really fun way to recognize stories that have affected us.

Where we're stuck at the moment is on how to structure the challenge. My first impulse was to a Remix-style exchange where authors of fic offer their whole body of work and are matched to write a foreword for a story by another offer. The advantages of this are that it guarantees that someone will write a foreword for one of your stories, which is a nice inducement to participate, and it takes some of the decision-making out by narrowing down your field of choices. The major downside is that if you get a bad match I'm not sure how to deal with it. I think it's harder to write a critical essay on a story you're not interested in than it is to write a remix of a story you're not interested in, because with the remix you can always add more of your own fiction. I think exchanges also skew the field away from authors who aren't comfortable writing meta and meta writers who aren't comfortable writing fic. This leads to making it a challenge instead of an exchange, to open up the field of eligible participants.

One thing that Remix-style exchanges also short-circuit is the permission aspect. I wouldn't want to run this without getting author permission for their stories to be written about, but if we don't do it exchange-style, the challenge will have to involve writers in some fashion soliciting fic authors' permission in some fashion. Either we have to solicit blanket permission ahead of time from anyone who wants their stories to be eligible, which I'm hesitant to do because whenever that kind of challenge happens I'm always reluctant to surrender blanket permission, and also because I haven't seen a challenge that did a good job of making it easy for potential participants to browse the eligible authors' stories, or perhaps more pertinently, motivating participants to brose the eligible authors' stories. Or we have to provide resources to make it as painless as possible to individually ask authors for permission. I was thinking that we could provide a form letter to participants to send to authors, so all they'd have to do is copy/paste and fill in a few blanks with details about the story. Alternately, maybe mods could assume the responsibility of contacting authors. From a Ferret's Weird Issues point of view, I would have a lot easier time contacting random authors with my mod hat on than I would as just a random author. In general I don't have the same social anxiety when it comes to making phone calls for professional reasons that I do with potentially touchy personal phone calls. Is that true of other people?

Anyway, I want to gauge interest in this and see if you folk have suggestions about how to run it.

Comments

[musesfool]

You could do it the way the dvd commentary challenge works - authors comment to offer up their stories for a certain time period, and then people who would like to write forewords pick them, like picking prompts off a list. This way it can also include those who don't write fiction but do write critique or meta.

Though there is no guarantee that everyone will get picked, and there might need to be a rule that only one person can pick an author for a certain time period, to avoid having five people write for one person (or one person's most popular story), while a large number of other authors receive nothing.

[seekingferret]

That makes sense, but I think the devil is going to be in the details. I know that I typically have difficulty navigating the lists of offered stories for that kind of challenge, especially if there's some kind of investment of effort like stop, open a tab to browse the story, see if I'm interested, move on to check out the next story... I invariably end up distracted before I get to the point of making a commitment.

[lady_ganesh]

I suspect some people in question will already know each other though; I have a shortlist of about three people I'd love to do this for, off the top of my head. Perhaps a nomination period, where people offer themselves and prospective writers can browse stories, then a closed screened claims period, then pinch-hitting?

[seekingferret]

Hm... What would be the advantage of a screened claims period?

[lady_ganesh]

If twenty people try to claim the same person, no one feels bad. It's kind of Geek Social Fallacy of me, I know....

[seekingferret]

Hmm... I wasn't really worried about that. In my initial drafts of the rules, I have a lot of things designed to maximize participation, a lot of things designed to maximize good matching, but nothing designed to ensure 100% matching. As soon as we allow people to go outside the challenge and write forewords for stories by other authors, that goal becomes impractical.

What I have been considering is something which is not quite pinch-hitting, but just, a day before the claims period ends, putting up a post calling attention to unclaimed stories. To that end, I want to encourage authors who offer their stories to write some sort of summary/resume so that the list of available stories isn't just a list of story titles.

[lady_ganesh]

That's a good idea.

[mllesays]

I don't have any helpful ideas about structure — I think what musesfool suggests sounds really good — but I did just want to pop in and say that I would be really excited to participate in this.

[havocthecat]

Hrm. The problem with running it Remix-style is this: What if you're assigned to write a foreword for someone who mostly (or only) writes a pairing you can't stand? Because if I signed up and got stuck with an author who not only writes a pairing I despise, but who actively hates the pairings I like, that would be a problem for me. I wouldn't want to be that person who writes a mean foreword.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, that's my thing too. It seems to me that writing a mean foreword is a lot worse than writing an ill-fitting remix. Poor matches are a problem with every exchange, but they seem like a deal-killer to me for something like this.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, at least with a remix you can focus on a different pairing and ignore the original pairing. With a foreword, it's hard to do that.

[elf]

I love the idea. I'd think getting blanket author permissions wouldn't be too difficult--there's a difference between "permission to play with my settings and story concepts by making new fic" and "permission to write meta about them," which has never been required. (Not even by social standards. Nobody asks permission to squee about a fic and describe why it's awesome. And presumably, if this were to work as a foreword, it'd be a positive kind of introduction.)

It'd probably be easier on the participants if the mods volunteered to contact authors, although some authors have blanket remix permissions already in their profiles.

I suspect letting people choose their stories (possibly from a pool) would work better than assigning them. While you don't have to love a story to write a good essay about it, you do have to be interested, and not squicked, triggered or just bored of the features included. There are people who can't write about slash, or a particular pairing, and others who could, but are so tired of hurt/comfort stories that they couldn't write anything positive about one, no matter how well it's written.

[makioka]

I really like this idea. I think musesfool was a good idea, perhaps with a limit as to how many you can claim, and with something to note which have been claimed.

[elf]

Maybe, like many fests, you could claim a second after you finish writing (and posting?) the first. Claim as many as you want--one at a time.

[makioka]

That sounds good to me. If it's been done on journal as well, rather than comments, then encouraging everyone to use a lot of tags might help. Humour, literary, meta etc so people can perhaps find it easier to search genre wise for something they might like, with a masterlist of all of them.

[shewhostaples]

This sounds really interesting. I think the idea that others have mentioned, of compiling a list and letting people pick, is probably the most attractive - like other people, I'd be worried about getting assigned a story that I couldn't find anything to say about.

[kindness_says]

This sounds so interesting! I would not play myself, I don't think, but would be curious to see how it played out. :)

[dariaw]

I would be excited about something like this.

Maybe it could be a hybrid challenge -- like there is a list of authors who are offering up -- maybe each could offer summaries and links to 3-10 suggested fics among their own works that they think would be good (in addition to giving blanket permission). This could make browsing easier, and most authors have a sense of what fics got the most positive response from others.

And then also,maybe participants who want to write forwards can also have the option of contacting an author not on the list if they choose to ask permission (I know some people on my flist who would probably give me the thumbs up but might feel weird about giving blanket permission to anyone -- I know permission isn't required for meta, but as you point out, it's kind of like a remix and kind of like a meta.) Yes, this leaves it more open that some people won't get any forwards written for them, but could increase the number of overall forwards, which might be good for trying to shape a genre maybe?

Just some thoughts, I love that you're bringing this up. :)

[torachan]

Sounds interesting. I think like others have said it would probably work better as something where people pick the fic they write about rather than being assigned something, since I would think that in order to write a compelling foreword, you'd have to really, really like the fic.

[runespoor]

I love this idea. Like others said, I think it'd be better to let people pick what they want to write about.

To avoid that some people find themselves without a foreword at all, maybe set up a pinch-hit list? It's still not perfect, but that way if people know someone isn't getting anything, they might be more likely to offer (maybe they didn't because they didn't think they had anything to say, but on second though, better a short foreword than nothing?). Authors would have the possibility to refuse being sent on the pinch-hit list, if they don't want to feel like anyone's Plan B/are nervous about the results.

As to how to navigate the fics, I have no idea. The problem is that what a writer finds interesting and what their potential foreword-meta-writer finds interesting are very different things, if only because the foreword-meta-writer can bring up things the writer never thought about, for instance a comparison to another fic, or maybe an explanation of how that fic inspired them or changed their view on a character etc.

Maybe the fest could be focused on the people writing the foreword rather than the authors? I'm thinking there are/could be three categories of people: people who want to participate as foreword-meta-er, authors interested in a foreword to their fic, and authors who don't know about this fest. There could be a list of participants (fore-word writers); a list of authors interested. Participants who'd like to write a foreword for a fic by their favorite author who hasn't made an appearance on the fest would go through the mod to ask for permission to meta about their fic.

Sorry for the rambling, I'm just throwing out varied ideas how it might go. I hope one of them works out, it's an awesome initiative.

[sophia_sol]

Oh, dude, dude, this sounds like such a cool idea!

My one question is, well -- a lot of times forewords to books are ridiculously spoilery for the books they're about. And I don't find that a problem, but lots of people do, and I've always found it silly that forewords tend to work under the premise that you are already familiar with the work in question. Oftentimes I will read the book first and THEN come back to the foreword and read it after, because I will get a lot more out of it once I know what the hell it's talking about. So the idea of characterizing this type of meta as a "foreword" is kind of frustrating to me, because I find it really works better as an "afterword." Maybe this is just me having a hate-on for established Ways Of Doing Things, though, and I need to get over myself....

[seekingferret]

This is a good point. There are many, many different ways to write a foreword, and some of them are spoilery. I don't want to enforce what type anyone writes, so I should probably come up with a system for tagging to warn if they're spoilery.

Personally, I sometimes find that I like spoilery forewords, because like I said above, they can prime a reader to be on the lookout for certain ways of reading a story that they wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

[lady_ganesh]

It could always be a foreword/afterword challenge, where the writer could do either, and the policy could be 'please tag this as an afterword if it contains significant spoilers.'

[suzume]

Unfortunately, I'm not much of meta writer...but this sounds like a really cool idea! I love to see this happen! (At least I could promote it...)

[silver_spotted]

here via naraht, and this sounds like a really neat idea! I'm not sure if I'd be able to participate, but if you're open to rpf, of course you know that writingthewall is full of people interested in meta and fic, and you're welcome to talk about it/advertise there :)