I was thinking...

[leethet]

...as I am wont to do, about fanfic and response, and it occurs to me ... am I the only one who finds that the strongest responses do not come for the fics I think are best? There seems to be no correlation between my favorites of my own stuff and readers' favorites (if one can assume based on locs). Do other fanfic writers find that to be the case?

Comments

Hm...

[leethet.livejournal.com]

The ones I struggle and believe I've gotten, more or less, right, don't always seem to be understood the way I intended. I love the idea of reader-response and how everyone reads everything differently, but it does sometimes worry me when no-one even vaguely seems to get what I was going for in the first case. I makes me wonder just exactly how bad and obscure this fic, that I thought decent enough, really is.

I think you've hit something here that makes sense to me. Your lighter fics are perhaps easy pleasures, something that makes a reader grin and hit that reply button (whatever that process may be that generates an loc). But with your longer more complex stuff, readers don't feel a strong and instant response -- or perhaps not a clear response, anyway -- and if one is muddle about a story one is probably less likely to repond to the author. One's less likely to send a note saying "Um...I'm not sure if I understood this and I'm not even sure if I liked it" than one is to send one saying "You made me laugh! Great story!"
So...yeah...hm...

Of course, it's also possible that writer satisfaction will never correlate with reader satisfaction, even though I'm thinking "yeah, good read" the reader may be bored simply because they're not me.
Or we may have a totally wrong view of our stuff and the ones we think are best simply suck. ;)