Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
This may or may not turn into a venting thread, but I wanted to know if anyone else has noticed this becoming as bad as it appears to me.
I first started posting fanfiction online back in 2010. It was a Dragon Age story that I've since taken down because I can't read a word of the first thirty chapters without cringing anymore. The writing was amateurish, the prose long-winded, and there was way too big a cast of primary characters for me to keep consistent, never mind do justice to all of them without burning out beforehand. Which I did.
But it was around the 700,000 word mark.
Part of it was it was my first foray into writing literature and I had a LOT of beginner's enthusiasm.
But the BIGGER part was that the people reading it were very engaged and encouraging. They considered good foreshadowing and the pre-planning of multiple plot threads to be enough to forgive the very lackluster presentation. They liked seeing multiple plot lines steadily coming together, and they not only didn't mind not having everything spelled out beforehand, they actively disdained it. I also, at least, have never had trouble throwing the stations of canon out the window, which together with being able to weave multiple plot threads was apparently enough to make up for the bad everything else. Readers enjoyed guessing what might happen next that would throw canon off the rails, and they did it avidly and ethusiastically thanks to that passion that was so standard of fandom before the current era of 'let's feed people shit and throw more shit in their face when they don't enjoy it.'
Fast forward to now, though, and the same people I'd have expected to engage with writing in that same manner just... don't anymore. They don't like mystery, they don't enjoy multiple plot threads, when I temporarily shift perspective to a different character (to show consequences or plotlines that the main character isn't privy to) many more people than before consider it a point of criticism, even when the protagonist is still present on page, they don't have fun piecing together causes and culprits, they don't even notice the chekov's guns and foreshadowing, never mind want to predict what would come next based on them. Even when I depict all the possible evidence on page that the readers should easily figure out what's happening, often they just... don't. Unless the character whose POV they're reading goes 'it was x, he did y' they get either frustrated or skim by. It's particularly noticeable when I deliberately write something intended to make something obvious to the reader but not the character. That's maybe the most discouraging thing of all, they don't seem to bother trying to separate their perspective from that of the narrator anymore. It's not everyone that give feedback, but it's a much bigger share of my readership than even just five years ago.
In what I had hoped (vainly, it seems) that the Hollywood bigotry of low expectations (i.e. the steadily decreasing depth of Hollywood writing) would fail to achieve, people just don't think about what they read anymore. These aren't dumb people, but even with me becoming objectively less shit as a writer - especially at integrating relevant information into less word count - many just keep looking forward to a character giving a written summary explanation of what they just read, and get frustrated when it doesn't come.
I'll never be of the opinion that you should have to put effort into enjoying entertainment, that's why it's entertainment. But this isn't about effort, it's like... they've been locked out of the best ways to enjoy a story, if that makes sense.
I've been seeing similar phenomena with the readerships of other stories or authors I follow. Has anyone else noticed something like this? Or can I still hope the problem is (still) just me?
Doesn't exactly bode well for the original novels I'm planning, either way.
I first started posting fanfiction online back in 2010. It was a Dragon Age story that I've since taken down because I can't read a word of the first thirty chapters without cringing anymore. The writing was amateurish, the prose long-winded, and there was way too big a cast of primary characters for me to keep consistent, never mind do justice to all of them without burning out beforehand. Which I did.
But it was around the 700,000 word mark.
Part of it was it was my first foray into writing literature and I had a LOT of beginner's enthusiasm.
But the BIGGER part was that the people reading it were very engaged and encouraging. They considered good foreshadowing and the pre-planning of multiple plot threads to be enough to forgive the very lackluster presentation. They liked seeing multiple plot lines steadily coming together, and they not only didn't mind not having everything spelled out beforehand, they actively disdained it. I also, at least, have never had trouble throwing the stations of canon out the window, which together with being able to weave multiple plot threads was apparently enough to make up for the bad everything else. Readers enjoyed guessing what might happen next that would throw canon off the rails, and they did it avidly and ethusiastically thanks to that passion that was so standard of fandom before the current era of 'let's feed people shit and throw more shit in their face when they don't enjoy it.'
Fast forward to now, though, and the same people I'd have expected to engage with writing in that same manner just... don't anymore. They don't like mystery, they don't enjoy multiple plot threads, when I temporarily shift perspective to a different character (to show consequences or plotlines that the main character isn't privy to) many more people than before consider it a point of criticism, even when the protagonist is still present on page, they don't have fun piecing together causes and culprits, they don't even notice the chekov's guns and foreshadowing, never mind want to predict what would come next based on them. Even when I depict all the possible evidence on page that the readers should easily figure out what's happening, often they just... don't. Unless the character whose POV they're reading goes 'it was x, he did y' they get either frustrated or skim by. It's particularly noticeable when I deliberately write something intended to make something obvious to the reader but not the character. That's maybe the most discouraging thing of all, they don't seem to bother trying to separate their perspective from that of the narrator anymore. It's not everyone that give feedback, but it's a much bigger share of my readership than even just five years ago.
In what I had hoped (vainly, it seems) that the Hollywood bigotry of low expectations (i.e. the steadily decreasing depth of Hollywood writing) would fail to achieve, people just don't think about what they read anymore. These aren't dumb people, but even with me becoming objectively less shit as a writer - especially at integrating relevant information into less word count - many just keep looking forward to a character giving a written summary explanation of what they just read, and get frustrated when it doesn't come.
I'll never be of the opinion that you should have to put effort into enjoying entertainment, that's why it's entertainment. But this isn't about effort, it's like... they've been locked out of the best ways to enjoy a story, if that makes sense.
I've been seeing similar phenomena with the readerships of other stories or authors I follow. Has anyone else noticed something like this? Or can I still hope the problem is (still) just me?
Doesn't exactly bode well for the original novels I'm planning, either way.
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