Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Dealing With a 'Snobby' Response

General Writing Discussion
#1

Hello. I was wondering if this ever happened to anyone here:

I once did a submission for a fanfiction archive and asked one of the moderators to read it after it had been beta read and edited. As far as I was concerned, the story was as done as I was going to get it.

However, when the moderator finished with it, he had this to say:

“The story didn’t go in the direction I was expecting it to go.”

Long story short, the story was rejected from the archive, but that comment really stuck with me. I mean, a story not going in the direction they wanted it to go? That makes no sense.

Has anyone else here ever gotten that kind of comment? Just curious.

#2

Sure, all the time. And much worse. :slight_smile:

It’s just one person’s opinion, and I don’t tend to worry unless at least one other person says a similar thing. In this case, it could mean that you’d set up some expectations or questions early in the story that weren’t satisfied or answered by the end – for example, maybe he was expecting an adventure story and it turned out to really be a romance, or something along those lines. Or it could mean that he was expecting the plot to advance in a predictable way and you went a different, less predictable route. Or he was expecting to be surprised and felt it was predictable instead. In the end, there’s just not enough information there to really get anything constructive out of it, so to my mind it’s not worth worrying about.

#3

From the stories I’ve heard from Jeff Eddy and Tim Susman about editing novels, this is a surprisingly common occurrence. Each genre (and sub-genre) has its own set of expectations (in a murder mystery, there will be a murder), promises (in a murder mystery, the murderer will be revealed by the end of the book), and subtle hints along the way (in a murder mystery, a missing or misplaced item early in the book will often clue the reader in that it will be significant in the end). It’s not uncommon for writers to unintentionally mix some of these and end up confusing the reader: a writer may have been wanting to write an adventure story all along, but they kept dropping the type of subtle hints that made the reader think they were reading a mystery; or a writer may have written a mystery, but at the end of the story fulfilled all the wrong promises and made it seem like an adventure story at the end.

But as Poetigress mentioned, it was one comment by one person.

#4

I will repeat what is said above and comment that it’s only one person’s comment.

In the end, the story didn’t go with how they thought it would. Maybe the payout wasn’t what they wanted, maybe they personally wanted something else. In the end, you can’t and won’t win everyone over, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’m sure a lot of my stories didn’t go how people expected them to, and in some cases I planned it that way. (Look at my story in Fang 5. :P)

#5

Yes, it was one comment by one person. Unfortunately for us writers, that person has power.

One of my first mainstream sales was to a collection of cat-themed stories. The editor really liked my story, but removed nearly all the question marks from it despite the fact that questions were clearly being asked. After passing the edited work around to a few friends for a sanity check (they all sided with me on the correctness of my usage) I pointed out that I thought this might be an editing error. The reply was, “Do you want to make the sale or not.” (Note, no question mark.) So, naturally, I made the sale.

He who has the gold, or in this case the power, makes the rules. We have customers, and they must be made happy. If we want to be customers we should go into publishing.

#6

Kudos to you. I probably would have told the editor to stuff it and have spent my next several nights dreaming of how to set him on fire via email.

#7

Thanks for all the replies.

As an addendum, this person who had the power wasn’t very well-liked, even by those who made it into the archive. Given that I ended up not finishing the entire series, I’m kinda glad the first story was never admitted.