headspacedad:

emotionalmorphine:

Somewhere along the way fanart become worth more than fanfic to fandom.

Artists have Patreon accounts where people pay real money to view their art early or to access special pictures like scraps or tutorials.

Whereas writers are expected to produce more and more, faster, for nothing in return. No one wants to see our “scraps” and writers who do provide Tips and Tricks often get crap for “policing” how people write.

And it falls into the prevailing notion that somehow writing is something easy, something anyone can do.

This isn’t an attack on fanartists. You deserve to receive some sort of compensation and accolades for your work. And so do fanauthors.

Writing fic is hard work. Yes, anyone can type out a story, same as anyone can pick up a pencil to draw, but what makes the difference, what makes a good piece is the experience and talent of an author. It’s all the stories no one saw, it’s all the writing books we’ve read, it’s the classes we have attended, all rolled into a package that works weeks, months, years to bring the fandom their fic. Yes we write for ourselves but we also write to contribute to fandom – just like artists do.

We’re just the same – artists and authors – and we deserve the same respect for our work.

It’s because everyone thinks they can write.

Publish a book.  One of the first and most continuous comments you’ll hear whenever you tell anyone is: ‘Oh! I’ve been meaning to write a book!’.  People use words to talk.  Writing is just putting words down on paper.  Logically, therefore, anyone that can talk, can write.  Ta da!  See?  Writing is something even small children can do.  Obviously it doesn’t take Real Skill.

Except all those people that will tell you they’ve been meaning to write a book? They never will.  Because, fun fact – writing is hard.  Writing is very hard.  Its hard to sit down and focus your mind and string words together on paper in sentence after sentence after sentence.  For hours.  Days.  Months.  Until you finish your short story or poem or book.  Its hard to take what’s in your mind and paint pictures of it but without using actual pictures.  Its hard to come up with interesting ways to say things, with characters that matter to people.  Plotting is hard.  Multiple plots are harder.  Multiple plots with multiple characters all using only words – not voice tone, not hand gestures, not pictures to help people understand what you’re saying – is hardest.   Writing is not talking.  Writing is, in a lot of ways, the stripped down version of talking because you have to do it all on paper without any noise or facial expressions to carry the words.  Telling a story is time consuming and requires you to concentrate even when you’d rather not.  It makes you pull out pieces of your soul and give them to other people, who are probably going to misunderstand them because they’re going to see them through their own soul’s view.  But you still have to find a way to connect so that they’ll still care about what you’re telling them.  And at the end of it – you’ll be exhausted and burned out and exhilarated and excited and scared and happy and sad and

someone is going to look at you and say:

‘oh!  I’ve been meaning to write a book!’.

People know they’re not artists because they can pick up a pencil and quickly see that they don’t have the practice to draw.  Everyone is a writer because writing is word art and everyone knows

they can use words.