Getting the Monkey Off My Back (or Why FanLit is Hard to Quit)

That's right, boys and girls, another round of FanLit has come and gone. I am pleased to say my entry, The Best Little Whorehouse in London, did not win.

Yes, you heard me right. I'm glad I didn't win. Recent events have convinced me that wearing the fishbowl head is not all fun and games. It can be an out and out pain in the neck. And while it would have been nice to have a teeny-tiny publishing credit as a result of a win, I'm not sure it's worth all the hassles that go along with it!

Here's the thing: I set out very deliberately to get at least one entry into the top 20 this round. I wanted to know whether I could "write to the market" that I saw developing in FanLit. That "market", as I understood it, wanted fun and witty with a good hook at the end. So that's what I tried to write, mainly as an exercise to prove to myself that I could do it if I set my mind to it.

As it turned out, I proved it to myself twice over. Not only did the aforementioned entry finish in the top 10 (its final ranking was 6th), but my other entry (written and submitted first), And Snydley Makes Three, wound up 12th. So all in all, it's safe to say I nailed my goals in this round and there's really no reason to keep playing, especially since I need to work on Living in Sin! (Anyone who posts comments may feel free to flog me over my neglect of my manuscript. A little public humiliation would probably do me good.)

But deciding it's time to bow out has made me examine my addiction to FanLit with a more analytical eye. It took me four weeks to figure out why it's so seductive. Because it's certainly not that it forces you to write compelling stories with strong character development and solid goals, motivations, and conflicts! And it's not that it forces you to put in peculiar elements dictated by the panel such as a feather or a pot of chocolate. And it's certainly not that we all produce our very best work when we are constrained by characters and a story premise created by someone else. Or that we have only 72 hours in which to craft our small miracles. So what, exactly, is it?

My epiphany came when I finished writing And Snydley Makes Three on Saturday and sent it to Lacey and Darcy, hoping for validation of my feeling that it was the best thing I'd written for the contest thus far. I think I even titled the e-mail, Quick, before I succumb to temptation and post it!

As it turned out, I couldn't even wait an hour for them to get back to me. Okay, maybe it was two hours before I gave in, but when I hadn't heard from them for what seemed like forever to me, I did give into the temptation and posted it. And immediately hopped over to the My FanLit area of the site to watch my scores roll in.

For those of you who haven't been sucked into the FanLit universe (and if you're reading my blog, it seems highly unlikely), My FanLit shows you all the entries you've submitted in the current round and their "last rating" on a scale of 0 to 5, as well as all the entries you've read and rated with the score you gave and the last score they received. And based on the forum posts I've read, most of us spend an inordinate amount of time in the My FanLit area, periodically clicking the refresh button to see if our scores have changed. And then hopping over the forum to moan that our poor little darling has just received a low score (a 0.5 or a 0 or, worst of all, the dreaded "--", which we have been told is a 0 but somehow looks even worse than a 0) with no comment from the voter explaining what s/he didn't like about our masterpieces.

I'm sure there are some people who submit a chapter to FanLit who are actually able to submit it and then pay no attention whatever to its scores. They just let their entries fend for themselves and find out how they did first when the finalists are announced and then, if they didn't finish in the top ten, on Friday when the final rankings of all the entries in the round are announced. I'm just not sure who they are or whether they are actually human.

And the fact that so few people are able to ignore how their entries are doing is part and parcel of the reason FanLit is so compelling. It's because you get virtually instantaneous feedback. The problem with being a writer is that you do so much of your work in a vacuum. Even if you have critique partners, you can write something and not have any idea for a very long time whether it "works" as well as you thought it did or not. In addition, critique partners don't constitute a particularly wide audience. I have an unusually high number of critique partners, but that's still less than ten people who read my work and provide me with feedback on a regular basis. When you compare that to the hundreds of people who are voting on FanLit entries, you can see why it's hard not become obsessed with watching those scores.

And even if the voter doesn't leave a comment for you, the score you get tells you something. Maybe most of the really lowball scores are coming from people who are trying to help their own entry (or a friend's) by giving exceptionally poor scores to everyone else. But maybe it's also just that some voters give their scores based on their gut level reaction to your story. It might be well-written, but for whatever reason, perhaps they just didn't enjoy reading it. And a low score without a comment is no less valid as feedback than a high score with no comment, yet everyone seems to like those!

In the end, I suppose all writers have an obsessive-compulsive need to find an audience and, more, to gain approval from that audience. In the "real" world, of course, there are agents and editors to accept or reject us, but that generally takes a long time. If we are lucky enough to be accepted by an editor and have our manuscript published, then we have the audience of book buyers to accept or reject us. That generally takes even longer. Worse, once you get to the stage of being a published author, it's hard to judge your audience's approval by book sales unless you're one of the lucky few to reach bestseller status. And that takes even longer than getting published in the first place.

FanLit is so successful because it offers a shortcut to audience and approval (or rejection, though of course none of us wants rejection). Instead of the weeks or months it might take for an agent or editor to get to your query or partial and respond to you, you discover within minutes of clicking the Submit button whether your audience likes you or not. You read the comments on your entry and find out what some of your readers liked or didn't like about your story. And you keep finding out, score after score, comment after comment, hour after hour, what your audience thinks. For writers (even published authors, some of whom have participated or continue to participate in the contest), this is almost as irresistible as the urge to breathe.

But I've decided it's time for me to resist the urge. Not because it hasn't been fun and not even because it's been a colossal waste of time (okay, I admit sitting on the My FanLit page and hitting refresh every few minutes was a colossal waste of time, but writing my entries was not as I definitely learned from doing them), but because I want to have to suffer with the longer route to audience approval. And FanLit has been distracting me from that goal.