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butterflyOne of the things that's tough for many artists to get used to is the fact that some people won't like their work. And that is, by the way, something that I can absolutely guarantee every person who attempts creative work. How strong the reasons are for people disliking your work varies, but someone isn't going to think that it's good. There are no works that are universally admired.
Depending on the social climate and the personalities of the people who don't like your work, the fact that it's disliked may be something that people talk about. This isn't something that you can do anything about, so my personal advice is to (mostly) ignore it and to do your own thing. If someone talks to me about my own work, I consider that feedback and I try to respond (though between the number of responses and the fact that I'm going through a depressive spell - roughly half a year long at this point - I have fallen behind on responding to people). If, though, people are talking to each other about my work, I do my absolute best not to interact. My personal approach to other people's work is to start off with the notion of the writer being dead (incapable of further input into the work) and thus all the interpretation begins reader-based.
All of which means that I will generally only react to people regarding my work (whether good or bad feedback) if they directly contact me via a comment or an email.
Why? There are two big reasons.
1) I'm not a fan of stifling conversations. And the creator butting in to tell you the 'right' interpretation of a work is a potential conversation-ender (depending, of course, on the audience's feelings re: the importance of authorial intention). The point of recs and anti-recs and discussion that occurs outside the creator's personal journal is to create that audience-based bond, where everyone is coming at it with, basically, the same knowledge set (the story and not all the backstory that's up in the author's brain that never made it into the story proper).
3) Dude, it's depressing when people don't like your work. I mean, I can say all I want that people have the right to hate me as a writer or as a vidder or whatever, but if I see people saying it, it makes me sad and doubtful re: my ability to create. Likewise, while it's thrilling to see people loving your work, sometimes people get shy when the creator pops their head in.
I don't always succeed in my attempts to stay out of public conversations about my own work - convenient as it would be for me, I'm not perfect and don't always live up to my own standards - but I try.
This is something that, for me, applies not just to my fictional creative work, but also to meta or opinions that I happen to share. I mean, even the stuff that I put under friendslock is not stuff that I consider 100% 'safe', considering how many people that I have friended. Anything that I put up for public or relatively public discourse is open to, well, anyone who sees it.
Again, this is a policy that I've worked out over time - I had a brief period in my Doctor Who-focused years when I flocked all my entries because I was getting flames on my meta (some people feel very strongly about Doctor/Rose shippers). I hated flocking. Really hated it. So, I opened up my journal, turned off anon commenting, and started banning people who said stupid shit. Because anyone who hates me - honestly, they are free to hate me as much as they want in the freedom of their own journal or the big, wide internet; I will just get annoyed if you hate me at my own place.
Side note: critique and flaming are very different and I have no issues with critique. Example: in my most recent American Idol story, some percentage of the readers felt that rather than a particular scene expressing Adam's fucked-up-ness (which was the authorial intention behind that part of the story), I was, instead, showing approval of domestic abuse. That's a valid interpretation, as there is domestic abuse which is not directly disapproved of by the narrative voice; there is now a warning up on my story for people that scene could potentially trigger. That's critique.
Saying that by shipping Doctor/Rose, I am destroying the fabric of fandom and that it's people like me who are ruining Doctor Who - that's a flame. Again, I don't care if you say that I'm doing that if you say it on your own journal or in an anti-D/R comm or any random public place. But I consider it rude to say that to my face and will, if someone posts something of that nature in my personal journal, consider it well within my rights to screen the comment and ban the user.
All that aside, this actually applies (as I implied above) to everything in the world. Every opinion. I'm going to share some opinions, right now, and I know that on some of them most of the people on my flist will agree and I'm sure that some people will dislike and/or strongly disagree with others.
Eight Random Opinions
1) I don't like the Beatles. I don't like their voices. I find that I do like their songs when other people sing them, but I can't actually listen to 'the Beatles'.
2) I don't think that divorce is 'bad'. I think it's neutral. It's just the dissolution of the legal contract between two people. Oftentimes, divorce can be quite ugly, but it doesn't have to be and I don't consider it to be evil or a doom of society. I am, no doubt, influenced by the number of people in my direct orbit (family and friends) who have divorced.
3) Smoking sucks. It doesn't just hurt the smoker, it hurts the people around the smoking. Also, being around cigarette smoke gives me a headache (that part isn't opinion, but it informs my opinion).
4) I'm pro-choice and support abortion rights.
5) With regards to musicals, I am more likely to support couples who sound pretty singing together. This is one of the main reasons that I like movie!Mimi and Roger more than the stage ones that I've heard - I thought Dawson and Pascal sounded great together but I haven't been enthused about the other actors' duets in the RENT stage plays that I've seen.
6) I didn't see Avatar and have no plans on seeing it. I don't think visual effects trump story and I don't have any interest in seeing that particular story (with all the issues that come along with it).
7) Brokeback Mountain was all right. I enjoyed it. It wouldn't make my Top 100 list of favorite films (though some queer-focused films including Saving Face, Imagine Me & You, Soldier's Girl, Heights, and Straight-Jacket all would).
8) After much consideration, I'm of the opinion that higher powers of any variety don't make much sense to me and so I am an atheist.
This sort of leads into my friending policies:
People will (and do) disagree with those things. And, you know, that's good. On LJ, I have Beatles fans as friends, smokers as friends, believers of various faiths as friends. People who watched and enjoyed Avatar and people who think that Brokeback Mountain is ground-breaking, spectacular and timeless, etc.
As long as people aren't coming into my journal to tell me that I'm, say, a bad person for having no issues with divorce (in and of itself), I don't care if they generally disapprove of divorce. However, if they were in the habit of posting about how people who get divorced go to hell or something similar, I would probably stop following their journal, because while they are still well within their rights to post that, I have no obligation to force myself to read it. Likewise, if someone posted on their journal that I'm a bad writer or vidder, I would probably stop following them because that would be hurtful to read.
I follow people because I find them interesting and/or likable. If someone starts posting things that I find hurtful or damaging (whether on a personal level or a social level), I stop following them. I have never stopped following someone just because our fandoms diverged, both because I have a passive level of interest in fandom even after I've stopped following it and if I see something really interesting, I'd still be interested, and also because I do get personally attached to people and live in hope that we will reconnect in a later fandom (*waves at all the people I've had on here a while who I ended up meeting again in AI fandom*).
Depending on the social climate and the personalities of the people who don't like your work, the fact that it's disliked may be something that people talk about. This isn't something that you can do anything about, so my personal advice is to (mostly) ignore it and to do your own thing. If someone talks to me about my own work, I consider that feedback and I try to respond (though between the number of responses and the fact that I'm going through a depressive spell - roughly half a year long at this point - I have fallen behind on responding to people). If, though, people are talking to each other about my work, I do my absolute best not to interact. My personal approach to other people's work is to start off with the notion of the writer being dead (incapable of further input into the work) and thus all the interpretation begins reader-based.
All of which means that I will generally only react to people regarding my work (whether good or bad feedback) if they directly contact me via a comment or an email.
Why? There are two big reasons.
1) I'm not a fan of stifling conversations. And the creator butting in to tell you the 'right' interpretation of a work is a potential conversation-ender (depending, of course, on the audience's feelings re: the importance of authorial intention). The point of recs and anti-recs and discussion that occurs outside the creator's personal journal is to create that audience-based bond, where everyone is coming at it with, basically, the same knowledge set (the story and not all the backstory that's up in the author's brain that never made it into the story proper).
3) Dude, it's depressing when people don't like your work. I mean, I can say all I want that people have the right to hate me as a writer or as a vidder or whatever, but if I see people saying it, it makes me sad and doubtful re: my ability to create. Likewise, while it's thrilling to see people loving your work, sometimes people get shy when the creator pops their head in.
I don't always succeed in my attempts to stay out of public conversations about my own work - convenient as it would be for me, I'm not perfect and don't always live up to my own standards - but I try.
This is something that, for me, applies not just to my fictional creative work, but also to meta or opinions that I happen to share. I mean, even the stuff that I put under friendslock is not stuff that I consider 100% 'safe', considering how many people that I have friended. Anything that I put up for public or relatively public discourse is open to, well, anyone who sees it.
Again, this is a policy that I've worked out over time - I had a brief period in my Doctor Who-focused years when I flocked all my entries because I was getting flames on my meta (some people feel very strongly about Doctor/Rose shippers). I hated flocking. Really hated it. So, I opened up my journal, turned off anon commenting, and started banning people who said stupid shit. Because anyone who hates me - honestly, they are free to hate me as much as they want in the freedom of their own journal or the big, wide internet; I will just get annoyed if you hate me at my own place.
Side note: critique and flaming are very different and I have no issues with critique. Example: in my most recent American Idol story, some percentage of the readers felt that rather than a particular scene expressing Adam's fucked-up-ness (which was the authorial intention behind that part of the story), I was, instead, showing approval of domestic abuse. That's a valid interpretation, as there is domestic abuse which is not directly disapproved of by the narrative voice; there is now a warning up on my story for people that scene could potentially trigger. That's critique.
Saying that by shipping Doctor/Rose, I am destroying the fabric of fandom and that it's people like me who are ruining Doctor Who - that's a flame. Again, I don't care if you say that I'm doing that if you say it on your own journal or in an anti-D/R comm or any random public place. But I consider it rude to say that to my face and will, if someone posts something of that nature in my personal journal, consider it well within my rights to screen the comment and ban the user.
All that aside, this actually applies (as I implied above) to everything in the world. Every opinion. I'm going to share some opinions, right now, and I know that on some of them most of the people on my flist will agree and I'm sure that some people will dislike and/or strongly disagree with others.
1) I don't like the Beatles. I don't like their voices. I find that I do like their songs when other people sing them, but I can't actually listen to 'the Beatles'.
2) I don't think that divorce is 'bad'. I think it's neutral. It's just the dissolution of the legal contract between two people. Oftentimes, divorce can be quite ugly, but it doesn't have to be and I don't consider it to be evil or a doom of society. I am, no doubt, influenced by the number of people in my direct orbit (family and friends) who have divorced.
3) Smoking sucks. It doesn't just hurt the smoker, it hurts the people around the smoking. Also, being around cigarette smoke gives me a headache (that part isn't opinion, but it informs my opinion).
4) I'm pro-choice and support abortion rights.
5) With regards to musicals, I am more likely to support couples who sound pretty singing together. This is one of the main reasons that I like movie!Mimi and Roger more than the stage ones that I've heard - I thought Dawson and Pascal sounded great together but I haven't been enthused about the other actors' duets in the RENT stage plays that I've seen.
6) I didn't see Avatar and have no plans on seeing it. I don't think visual effects trump story and I don't have any interest in seeing that particular story (with all the issues that come along with it).
7) Brokeback Mountain was all right. I enjoyed it. It wouldn't make my Top 100 list of favorite films (though some queer-focused films including Saving Face, Imagine Me & You, Soldier's Girl, Heights, and Straight-Jacket all would).
8) After much consideration, I'm of the opinion that higher powers of any variety don't make much sense to me and so I am an atheist.
This sort of leads into my friending policies:
People will (and do) disagree with those things. And, you know, that's good. On LJ, I have Beatles fans as friends, smokers as friends, believers of various faiths as friends. People who watched and enjoyed Avatar and people who think that Brokeback Mountain is ground-breaking, spectacular and timeless, etc.
As long as people aren't coming into my journal to tell me that I'm, say, a bad person for having no issues with divorce (in and of itself), I don't care if they generally disapprove of divorce. However, if they were in the habit of posting about how people who get divorced go to hell or something similar, I would probably stop following their journal, because while they are still well within their rights to post that, I have no obligation to force myself to read it. Likewise, if someone posted on their journal that I'm a bad writer or vidder, I would probably stop following them because that would be hurtful to read.
I follow people because I find them interesting and/or likable. If someone starts posting things that I find hurtful or damaging (whether on a personal level or a social level), I stop following them. I have never stopped following someone just because our fandoms diverged, both because I have a passive level of interest in fandom even after I've stopped following it and if I see something really interesting, I'd still be interested, and also because I do get personally attached to people and live in hope that we will reconnect in a later fandom (*waves at all the people I've had on here a while who I ended up meeting again in AI fandom*).
