Percyness quality guidelines.
Mar. 22nd, 2006 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusOver 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]
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]
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-23 12:49 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-23 03:22 am (UTC)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,
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