Fanfic moaning

[galadhir]

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

Comments

[evilwriter37]

I completely understand this. There are fics that I put my heart and soul and energy into that get almost complete silence, and then fics that I bust out in half an hour or so get more of a reaction. It's just strange how that works sometimes.

Though, I'm currently taking a hiatus from posting, and I think it's helping my writing a lot, actually! I'm glad you're writing your fic for yourself, because writing for an audience can be stressful. I had to relearn how to write for myself, because posting was just causing too much anxiety.

[galadhir]

I had to relearn how to write for myself, because posting was just causing too much anxiety.

Yes, I think that's exactly it. I had stopped writing altogether and lost my confidence in my ability, and then I started doing a bit of fanfic again and that really helped me to rediscover the joy of it and the certainty that it is something that I can do. But posting is such a crap-shoot, and you never know whether you're going to get more comments than you imagined or none at all. And that's not great for the nerves!

It is so odd that it's always the fic you care about most that seems to do unexpectedly poorly. I suppose it's some sort of tax you pay for writing something that is specially for you, but it does make you feel like you're a bit of an outcast from humanity because your tastes are so strange to everyone else.

[watervole]

I think some people only read short stories, because of lack of time. I know one of my ultra shorts got a lot more hits than my novel.