Percyness quality guidelines.

[icarus]

Over the last several months I've received stories at Percyness: The Percy Weasley Archive that were of questionable quality.

Many of them were completely unbeta'd and written with the care you'd put into sketching a fic on the back of a cocktail napkin. Some had formatting so strange the story was unreadable. I'm not speaking to the person who uploaded their story as a solid block of text.

I've struggled with some truly bad poetry. Other stories were borderline. They seemed to be beta'd, but consisted of minimalist verbal tags floating in a sea of nothing, or epithets overused to a point that it seemed dozens of people occupied the bed and not just two. There were excellent characterisations of Percy with all other characters as cardboard cut-outs dancing around him.

It has stretched my original policy of "accept everything if it's at least beta'd" to the breaking point.

I didn't want to be the arbiter of taste. But neither do I want to host an archive of stories no one would want to read. Where does one draw the line?

What do you think? What do you want in an archive?

[Poll #695887]

Comments

[usually9-15.livejournal.com]

I think the spelling and grammar issues would drive me crazy were I to be in charge of anything like that. I mean, I have a hard enough time TAing without going batshit on my students. I can only imagine what it would be like to not have to worry about being a bitch because I'd just see them in class the next day...

I'm 100% for the 3rd option.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I have no qualms about bouncing a story for spelling and grammatical errors. That's standard in the fandom and easy for them to fix with some quality beta help. It's more the difficult to define problems that concern me.

For example:

- overuse of epithets
- strange and confusing formatting
- poorly executed first-person narration (where the inner voice is not connected with external events and rambles without a plot)
- gratuitous violence (non-con where no motive is established)
- a lack of setting (reads like a script)
- insufficient dialogue tags (you can't tell which character is speaking)

Characterization issues annoy me but I'll let them go, likewise weak plots and stilted dialogue.

It doesn't have to be a great story by my standards or even something that I like. But there are certain basic story-building skills that I suspect need to be present, or else I worry that people will click on a recent submission and judge the entire to be an ff.net of Percy fic.

Icarus

[usually9-15.livejournal.com]

Gotcha on the clarification :)

I guess one of my biggest questions is how a fic can be beta'd and still have many/all of the concerns you mentioned as well as spelling and grammar problems. It makes me wonder if all of the people requesting readers aren't the ones doing all of the reading for everyone else, which, of course, means that everyone's pieces have all of the same problems. Besides, if you're a good writer who's able to pinpoint these problems, what's the likelihood that you'll want to beta a shitty fic? It's terrible, I know, but I know that it would be really difficult for me.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Actually, isiscolo is an excellent writer who routinely does very beginning-level beta work.

In general though, different betas look for different things.

From me, I might miss a word you skipped, but I've a good eye for characterisation and why a characterisation feels off. When it comes to other people's stories I can see structural problems. Don't have me do your SPAG errors, I'm only average at catching them, but talk to me for writing advice and 'big picture' stuff. Meanwhile, wildernessguru's spelling is atrocious, but he can spot a plothole or inconsistency a mile away. And if he knows the canon you can't stray. I always run my stories by him.

We all have different talents.

Some of what I list there is personal taste, say, the gratuitous violence, and wandering first person narrative.

But the other things-? Basic story-telling skills.

Icarus