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community, AO3
via https://ift.tt/3EaPFc5
little-brisk https://little-brisk.tumblr.com/post/662786802080464896/little-brisk-the-fact-that-fandom-is-a-space :
little-brisk https://little-brisk.tumblr.com/post/652153124584407040/the-fact-that-fandom-is-a-space-where-unfinished :
the fact that fandom is a space where unfinished works proliferate is something to be celebrated. where else can you start a novel and never finish it and still people read and engage with what you’ve done and share your interest in it. where else can we get to read the work of people who do not have the time or capacity or resources for commitment to long projects over long time. i don’t know if there’s a way to measure the total volume and proportion of unfinished and abandoned works on ao3, but i’d bet good money it’s a large majority of multichapter works, and do you know what would happen if fandom required all works to be finished? none of that great volume of work would exist! what a tremendous loss would that be! fandom’s permissiveness of unfinished work is one of its greatest strengths as a creative environment, productive for readers and liberating for writers, and if we better recognized that, if we stopped allowing the dominant discourse of unfinished WIPs to be about failure or betrayal or whatever, we would get more stories, not fewer, more story, not less.
people reblogging this post to say that some of their all-time favorite fics are abandoned WIPs 🤝 people reblogging this post to say that it made them feel better about their own abandoned WIPs
I struggle with guilt over my own abandoned WIPs but– it was part of my learning process, for one thing, and in a more general scale– how fucking amazing to see people try something too big for their skills, and be applauded for it. I was too depressed to finish the SGA epic I started– but I started it, and dragged myself through it as far as I could, and– boy I made some beautiful stuff, and it got me out of despair and back into writing again, which I needed more than anything. And the MCU things– well, some of that was still depression, and some of that was not knowing how to manage my ADHD, and some of that was being tied to a canon that so painfully disrespected me, but I learned so much and I really did make some beautiful things there too.
And then by the time Star Wars broke my heart, I knew how to weave in my dangling ends and still make something finished, even if I’d hoped to have more to say.
I hope now with the Witcher that I can weave back in all the ambitious threads I’ve put out there, but if I don’t, I know how to wind them out, I’m prepared now– and I know what I’ve already done is more complex than most published authors ever accomplish. (Meet Death Sitting https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717 is currently over 600,000 published words, and yes, it all does tie back in.)
But I couldn’t have done any of that without all of it, and just the idea that you’re free to attempt something bigger than you know you can do is so rare in this world and so important.
I’ve been trying to write an original novel since 1991. (Yes, I was in middle school.) I’ve never managed to finish one. I was never going to learn what I needed to do to finish one on my own, either, laboring alone like that– I would never have been able to grow, without a supportive community that I wasn’t going to be able to get alone in the dark on my own. (Your picture was not posted)
