Internet Fiction (OR: In Which I Make Myself Incredibly Unpopular)

It’s a little known fact that the word ‘clusterfuck’ was coined to describe internet fiction. All right, that’s not entirely true (read: is an outright lie), but you’ll know exactly what I mean if you’ve ever trawled through the dregs of a website like fictionpress.com – and trust me, 99% of that site could accurately be described as ‘dregs’.

There used to be (and, to a smaller extent, still is) a kind of ‘apprenticeship’ system among authors of SF (speculative fiction). Young writers generally got their start in short-story magazines before moving up to publishing novels or weird transhumanist manifestos. Getting a few professional credits in Asimov’s was a great way of catching an editor’s eye and was guaranteed to put you on the fast track to reclusive-author stardom and whores. Just ask Arthur C. Clarke.

Now, thanks to such ‘web 2.0′ innovations as DeviantArt and fictionpress, anyone with a keyboard and a semi-functioning brain can put their masterpiece online for the world to read. If you’ve never browsed these sites, believe me when I tell you that doing so will leave you with an EMP fetish.

Have you ever gone into a bookstore and come across a full-length novel about painfully shy author-insert Mary Sues who get transported into an alternate Universe and have banal, derivative adventures with talking animals? Yes?

….okay, maybe that was a bad example. Have you ever come across a full-length novel about a group of talking foxes who have sex ten times a day and enjoy bouncing on over-inflating balloons to get their jollies? This is, believe it or not, an actual example of something I’ve seen on DeviantArt, and yes, it was as weird and off-putting as you’d imagine. There’s an entire Universe of bizarre fetish material out there, but that’s not what this post is about; that stuff might be awful, but it’s just too easy to poke fun at.

Instead I’d like to talk about the earnest young men and woman who really do want to write good fiction, but who are actually being held by the very tool that they use to promote their work – the internet. As much as I dislike websites like DeviantArt, they do have one huge, potentially invaluable advantage: they let writers communicate with their readers immediately, in a way that no other format can match. Before I start bad-mouthing this system, let me say that it can be hugely advantageous to young or inexperienced writers, and I’ve used it in the past myself.

With all of the potential on display from these websites, it’s disheartening to see it wasted to thoroughly. The vast, vast majority of comments out there are of the ‘omg I really like ^___^’ variety, and most writers will never get any sort of constructive or meaningful feedback. Worse, some of them assume that every sycophant who comments on their latest fan-fiction is actually being sincere when they say that it’s the greatest work of English literature in history, and so become intolerant of real criticism. When you desperately need to improve, and most of us do, the worse thing you can do to yourself is inflate your opinion of your own work to the point that it becomes immune to criticism from the unwashed masses. Doing so is a great way to ensure that you’re stuck writing bad Naruto for the rest of your life.

Oh yes, that’s another problem: the anime. A lot of the kids on DeviantArt (in particular) seem to think that watching a few Naruto fansubs is the same thing as taking a four-year creative writing class. Hey, it’s got ninja and super powers and lots of exciting shounen action! All I have to do is write something with ninja and super powers and lots of exciting shounen action and it will be great too!

No. First of all, Naruto sucks balls. Secondly, something that ‘works’ in an animated or visual medium is not going to automatically carry over to written fiction; it just doesn’t work that way. And, let’s face it, there are only so many ways you can tell the story of a bratty 12-year old ninja with a demon sealed inside of him before you start repeating yourself.

On DeviantArt you’ll find ‘original’ stories populated entirely with people who have Japanese names, in a faux-Japanese setting, with plots lifted wholesale from Japanese cartoons or comics. While you could argue that this is no worse than Christopher Paolini creating the most generic Western fantasy novel imaginable, Western fantasy at least doesn’t have hordes of thirteen year old fans who’ll go googly eyed every time they see the word ‘-chan’ attached to the end of someone’s name. What these people really want to do is make manga or anime, but since that’s really really difficult, they write bad fiction that’s like manga or anime instead. If you surround yourself with people who’ll say fantastic things about your work just because it’s ‘Japanese style’, you’re never going to improve.

I’d like to say that it’s only the lower-rung writers who suffer because of their dependence on internet feedback, but if I did that I’d be a filthy liar. I’ve come across a lot of good writers – great writers, even – who never quite broke out of the internet communities they flourished in. Maybe they’re more concerned with doing a short story for internet-based competitions than they are with finishing that novel they’ve put so many hours into, or maybe they become interested only in writing for their pre-existing fans and so (altogether now) never improve beyond a certain point. Whatever the scenario, it’s a sad state of affairs.

I’m going to make myself terribly unpopular here by saying that the publishing system in place at the moment, with all of its evil, soul-crushing editors and snooty New York agents, is a good thing. It’s not perfect, but it’s also not a torture machine strung together by Satan. There’s a reason why most writers keep their eye on being published by one of the big houses or signing a contract with a reputable agent. The system generally awards those who are good and casts aside those who aren’t, and while there are plenty of false positives and people left unfairly in the dust, overall it works pretty well. POD (print on demand) services, coupled with the immediate gratification of getting 10,000 pageviews every time you post a new short story, have led some people to the conclusion that they don’t really need to bother with the heartache of trying to get published. Hell, they already have fans! They can get their books published themselves! (For a small fee…) I disagree. If you want to improve, and especially if you want to make writing what you do for a living, you need to work with the system. Remember, publishing houses hire editors, experts who can look at your manuscript and tell you exactly what’s wrong with it and exactly why you have that niggling little doubt at the back of your mind about how good the last scene really is. Joe McRetard on DeviantArt probably doesn’t have the same level of expertise.