A Steemit Future for Fiction
NOTE: This post mentions two projects that no longer exist (at least not in a form I can support). It also relies on it being impossible to edit after 7 days.
Everything that has come to light in the past week with the flagging incidents and the discussion of the potential for fiction on Steemit has me thinking and rethinking what I post as an author and blogger and worrying about what other authors post as fiction.
I happen to be a curator for two projects. It is already known publicly that I'm one of the fiction curators for @muxxybot. Less well-known--because we don't run around advertising it--is that I'm also a curator for @sft. The goals of the two projects are different and I find my roles complement each other nicely.
With Muxxybot we try to encourage authors who have potential--to let them know that their work is being seen, help them connect with potential readers, and hopefully encourage them to spend some more time honing their craft. It is focused on lower reputation authors with decent stories but low payouts.
SFT looks only at quality--the quality that you'd be happy reading in a mainstream or genre publication at a high level. An SFT curator doesn't care what your reputation is, what writing experience you have or don't have, or what the potential payout is on your post. We only care about the quality of the individual story. Yes, even the small flaws can keep you from being curated by the SFT. We aren't looking for something that might be good enough for an Indie publisher. We're looking for the kind of quality that would be approved by an agent, a publishing house, or a mainstream magazine.
With these two roles, I spend a lot of time reading things tagged fiction on Steemit. At this point, I am finding going through the New pages increasingly terrifying. It isn't just all the missing NSFW tags, the copious erotica, and the blatant tag abuse that scares me though. What I find more terrifying is the number of people who think it's okay to publish rough drafts.
PUBLISH.
Steemit is publishing. What you release is going to be on the blockchain forever. Any other publication--magazine, book, ebook--will be a re-release. Legally it is already published. The rights to the work are yours, but you can never give a publisher exclusive rights.
Do you dream of taking your novel to an agent? Don't publish it on Steemit. Getting an agent to have a serious conversation with you is hard enough to begin with. You don't need one googling your work and finding the rough drafts of the book you're trying to sell scattered all over the block chain.
You need beta readers? Go join a writing workshop. There are plenty of them out there. Keep looking until you find one that works for you.
One of the current trends that really worries me is the prevalence of freewrites. Don't misunderstand me here. I think freewriting can be a great exercise. But it's an exercise.
I don't have an issue with people posting prompts and suggesting freewrite exercises. But the result of a freewrite is a very rough draft. You wouldn't send it to a magazine. You wouldn't push it out to Amazon and expect people to download it. You probably wouldn't even be happy seeing them in a college literary magazine.
I also wouldn't mind people publishing freewrites if the post also included a nicely polished and well-edited story that resulted out of the initial freewrite. That would be a great demonstration of the value of the exercise. You take the prompt, freewrite for a while, then spend some time working on it and turning it into a real story. Or at least a vignette.
The thing to remember is that when you publish a post on Steemit you are asking people to pay you. The pay might not be great, but it is still pay. So do the work. Put your best foot forward. Give your reader some value to warrant those two cents, or two dollars, or two hundred dollars that you want your post to payout.
The past tendency of some curation groups and high-vote curators to curate sloppily written and insufficiently edited posts hasn't helped anything. There are a lot of people out there with my reputation or higher who are used to getting big payouts on junk. On stuff that is so bad the blurb on Amazon would keep me from downloading it if it were free. On stuff that if I somehow downloaded it by accident, I'd be giving it a 1 star review on an unfinished book. And I'm not the type to put books down lightly, especially if I intend to trash them. I usually feel like I have to finish it just in case the author pulls off a miracle.
Am I saying I expect every fiction post to be perfect? Of course not. My own aren't perfect. But I spend time editing every draft. I workshop them. Being a writer means a lot of hard work. Hard work that the fewest writers will ever make minimum wage for doing.
If you're on Steemit and you're posting fiction because you think it will make you a lot of money in a hurry, you're wasting your time.
If you're on Steemit because you need to write and you want to share your work with an audience and keep on working to be a better writer, welcome.
I think it's a good idea to be patient with, and respectful of the level which everyone brings to the table. Not everyone is ready to be a professional writer, and you are not required to pay them, either... maybe they posted the draft because they want help... idk... I think it's a dangerous road to tread on... as a blogger, I came here wanting my blog to be as top notch as possible... at the same time, the roi dimishes as I get further into the details of making it perfect. Especially considering what else is out there... so for my relative excellence (and free time to make the kind of posts that I do), I could easily get annoyed because people dont follow my rules. the only thing I bother getting bothered about is blatant spam... for the rest I just let people be themselves
There is a difference between having a lower skill set or linguistic challenges and knowingly putting something out that is not reflective of your own best abilities. I have a great respect for authors who are pushing their limits, be it writing in a second language or just being new to the craft. Each person is in a different place in their writing journey. If I seemed to imply they should not be posting, this was not my intention.
And some people just aren't going to care about whether fiction has a place on this platform. They just care about getting their two cents while they can.
But for those of us who want to be here for the long haul--who want a future where fiction has a place on a mixed genre platform like this--we need to put our best foot forward when we post. And scratching out something in five minutes and posting it, no matter how talented you are or aren't and no matter how valuable the exercise is, is never going to be putting your best foot forward.
I would really love to see some posts showing both a free write and the resulting story. That would be an interesting demonstration of the work involved in writing. I don't write like that. And if my drafts go out to a media like this, it will be because someone is using them with my permission to show how I've evolved as a writer or how I've implemented feedback in the critting process.
Yeah, but still judging people by your standards and time availability, Imo.
I agree, in the long run, steemit is a place that will benefit professionalish writing... But how much energy do you have to be concerned about someone's lack of effort (or lack of time)?
I agree with Bex, I must admit. I curate for Muxxybot among others, and the amount of posts that are out there with little to no effort put in, are astounding. And as an ESL writer myself, I understand better than anyone, how hard it can be to polish your writing to a certain standard. And I will never point a finger at someone who can't produce a grammatically perfect post. But I find it exasperating to wade through posts of people who haven't even tried to work on their writing, on the editing of their drafts, or on their style and voice as a writer.
I'm sorry if this offends anyone. That is certainly not my intent. But a lot of people don't even care about the quality they put out there, and that bothers me to no end.
Don't you see how you are reflecting your needs into the situation, while I'm trying to point out that the needs of the writer are not always the same as the needs of the curator. Being a "real" curator is a lot of work, I do not envy your job, but I do appreciate what it does for the platform...
Don't you see what I just wrote there? I'm also a writer.
I take pride in my work. Both as a curator and a writer. And I hope people are all capable of doing just that: creating something they can be proud of. Because if you post a draft on Steemit, it is there to stay. If you improve and learn to do better, that draft will still be there. Poking your eye out with mistakes you'll learn to hate, but you will be unable to correct them.
Where did I say I was going to go flagging people or something? I was trying to make a post to encourage people to think about their own behavior and what they want and care about. To look at it from another angle. And hopefully think a little about what impact their behavior might have on others. I can't control anyone else. I also started out saying it has me rethinking my own posting habits.
Also it's really hard to find a decent post to curate when drowning in so much that isn't worthy of consideration.
I guess I was responding to how it "came off" to me.... Seemed less encouraging than..... [Fill in the blank]
I love the hard truths here. I share your opinion with regards to publishing drafts. A writer is ONLY judged by the works that he/she publishes. If I want to do something well, I don't want people to judge me by what they see when they look behind the curtain. I don't want them to see 'the sausage being made'.
Fiction is a suspension of belief. If a story is badly written, the writer is not doing his job properly, and the reader is left wondering if this is all fiction really is, and that this is as good as it gets.
Its not. Done properly, even in the wild west of Steemit, a good story can draw you in just as well as anything you'd pay top dollar for on Amazon or Audible or Barnes & Noble.
Putting out bad writing just turns good readers into bad readers, and they'll just end up spending their minutes on Youtube instead.
Ok. A bit of a ramble. Great post.
You have made me think with this post. In fact, I have been thinking about publishing my stories under the #fiction or #writing label since yesterday. Although it was not your initial intention when you wrote this post.
All the texts that I have published take hours of work not only writing but also trying to translate it to keep the ideas that flow from my head to a language that I thought I had mastered.
Just as my commitment to this social network is a long-term commitment and my recent passion for writing increases with each post I write, I have decided that everything I post from now on in #fiction or #writing will go through the writer's Block .
And if with my popularity, which is not much I can help in something to improve the image of fiction in steemit that I will do. Because of course what I do not want is to bring a bad image to a genre that I love since I was a child.
See you at The Writer's Block. :)
Teks, you are the kind of author those of us at the block want to work with and encourage. The language difference adds to your challenges when you write and some flaws might slip through, but you are willing to work and learn and later you will be able to look back and see your author growth in your history. It is not my intention to discourage those with challenges, but instead to encourage everyone to do the work to put their OWN best work out, instead of settling for something less than their own best.
It is also a dreamat the Block to some day be able to support authors who aren't working in English. We just don't have enough people who come from the same language background to do that right now. So if writers out there are reading this and thinking, "but I am only comfortable writing in my native tongue," please do consider checking out the forum anyway. If we can get a few authors who want to work in the same not-English language, these authors can be teamed up for their own peer review groups. And all of us benefit from building our understanding of other cultures, as things will always come up where you wish you had someone to ask...
I agree with all of this, Bex. It’s not a matter of talent or skill, but of pride in one’s work. It’s about how much people care… or don’t. Very well said.
The problem here is the subjectivity of quality. There are plenty of big published novels that don't deserve to be out in the world, and yet they are. The most egregious example being Fifty Shades of Grey. It's no secret that plenty of critics and readers alike find the writing to be spectacularly subpar.
There's this insistence on quality but the publishing market hardly cares. It's a popularity contest. If something has a large audience, no matter how good or bad it is, it's likely it'll be published.
Another example being Beth Reekles from Wattpad. She garnered a million dollar contract with Random House to publish three YA fiction novels. If you stroll through reviews, you'll find that her writing isn't the greatest either.
Why, praytell, would she be published then? Because she had a massive following on Wattpad. And followers = dollar signs for publishers.
I agree that quality needs to be prioritized, but when publishers themselves show seriously lax standards, one can hardly blame communities like Amazon or Steemit for having droves of poorly written novels/short stories.
However, you cited two examples where something else got the writer in the door instead of quality. A lot of things are published today by "reputable" authors that would have gotten thrown in the trash if any other name were on it. Amazon is also a community frequented by authors who are in it for the money. Or who think it's okay to publish drafts--I know, I've reviewed more than one that turned out to be intended as a free beta read.
But if we authors want to prove fiction belongs in this community, we need to up our game and put our best foot forward. Otherwise a bad reputation for fiction in general will become well-deserved.
Go, Bex! Preach, Sweetie. Know that I'm 100% behind you on this. I have a hard time understanding how one can post a flawed draft and leave it where it will soon become untouchable, uneditable. The knowledge of those flaws would eat at me...
Great write-up!
Hugs
I must say what you wrote really makes sense and hits a nerve. I have never been published except for literary journals back in college and being an associate editor for the literary arm of the college paper.
What you say is true. Once you hit publish on that short story, poem or rough draft of whatever story line you have been working on in internet will always be there. I cringe at some of the blog stories and articles I have written through the years and I have lost access to those mediums. Even if you delete it their will be a cached version somewhere. Whatever you publish in the net stays in the net forever.
Lately I have been joining those free writing assignments and I have been fleshing out a continued story. I know I would never have this publish or have someone pay me to put it out because at this point I am still trying to polish my skills. I am not even that confident.
I get cents for what I right and of course I would like to get something higher but I primarily write to exercise the demons out of my system. Writing has been always a cathartic exercise for me especially when depression hits.
Hopefully the style, the feedback that I get here will help me grow as a writer. If ever I get enough courage to publish, I would look back and say the seeds was from here.
Incidentally what's your take on Wattpad?
She has a way of doing that. ;-)
I have no knowledge of wattpad really, to be honest. I had installed it on something at one point years ago when looking for free reading material--my book budget is zero and libraries here will primarily hand me stuff in translation, unless I limit myself to Danish authors (which I've done in the past, but it challenges me more than I find enjoyable in many cases, especially when the historical stuff is what appeals to me and it's written in old fashioned Danish that is too different from what I'm able to read and write)--and I wasn't impressed. I didn't find much that was worth reading. I preferred libraries and thrift shops to the options there. If you want to work on your writing, you might want to check out the Block. I know what you mean about writing to get rid of demons... but even then I found it worked better when I worked on the story and got feedback on it. It turned it around into something I could be proud of instead of something that dragged me down. I don't write that way so much anymore, but it was an important part of my growth as a writer.
Those last two paragraphs sum it up for me. Couldn't agree with you more.
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