Welcome to
The Guide to Graceful Posting

Please note that this is a guide to posting your fiction on the web, not to writing itself.

So, you wrote a story and want to make it available to be read and, hopefully, responded to. Wonderful! Have some tips on how to do so gracefully.

1. Pick the forum you feel most comfortable with. If you feel a constant urge to apologize for your story appearing in the location you have chosen, you should probably choose a different location. Nervousness often makes for gracelessness.

2. Once you have made your choice, format your story appropriately, according to whatever guidelines are set forth by those who maintain the virtual location in question. If this is your own website or fic journal, then the format is yours to choose. If you are posting in a community or mailing list, adhere strictly to their posting guidelines. If you don't like the guidelines, the graceful thing to do is post your work somewhere else. It is also graceful to do so without stirring up trouble in your wake. If you leave community Y because, for instance, the guidelines require far more metadata in the story labels than you like to give, and start community X, where no metadata at all is required, it is not especially graceful to leave a parting post in community Y advertising your new creation and the reasoning behind it. Advertise all your creations in places congenial to your purpose.

2a. Do not deliberately post a story whose content runs counter to the theme or specified genre of a given comm or ml. If it is a location that specializes in yaoi, don't go posting a het romance there, and vice versa. Unless, of course, your goal is to be a nasty, small-minded, trouble-making little troll, in which case, why are you reading this Guide? If you don't like the theme or genre, the graceful thing is to go find or start a comm or ml with one you do like.

2ai. The alteration of theme or guidelines for a given comm or ml is a matter of fandom politics, which are never graceful. This makes the topic a bit difficult to cover, here. Suffice it to say that I believe such an agenda should be pursued by reasoned debate rather than by posting something in violation of existing guidelines. Treating comm/ml guidelines as if they were objectionable legislation by a totalitarian government, which only determined civil disobedience can overcome, is a gracelessly hysterical over-reaction.

3. Feedback is a delightful thing, a thing all authors hope for, but demanding it is exceedingly ungraceful. I would even go so far as calling it disgraceful. While certain online forums have instituted a system in which feedback is explicitly offered as an exchange for stories, this is not common in English-speaking fandom, as yet. By and large, please remember that fic is a social exchange, not a commercial one. Feedback is not the coin with which readers must buy your stories. Readers have no contractual obligation to you, just as you have no contractual obligation to them, bar what individuals may arrange between themselves on a case-by-case basis (fic in return for art, for example). Any stipulation such as "I won't write the next chapter unless I get X number of comments" invites the response, "Fine, don't." The assumption that you are entitled to feedback just because you posted your work is self-centered, insensitive and rude. These are not graceful things. Begging for feedback is not particularly graceful, either. If you wish to invite feedback, the graceful phrase is "I would love to hear if you enjoyed this/what people think of this."

3a. If you wish to invite constructive criticism, be sure you are prepared to receive it gracefully. A good way to make sure of this is to be specific in your invitation. If you say only "Constructive criticism is welcome", you leave yourself wide open. Remember that one person's idea of concrit is another person's mortal insult. Having made such a broad invitation, the graceful author is in no position to complain when someone offers a comment that they think is the former and you think is the latter. Therefore, the graceful preparation is to know your own piss-off buttons and try to arrange for them not to be punched. If you can't stand criticism of your characterization, try saying "Any comments or corrections to mechanics and overall plot will be extremely welcome." If, on the other hand, you detest people trying to advise you on plot, you might say "I would love to hear if anyone thinks the characterization could be improved."

3b. The graceful thing to do with feedback is reply to it. Feeling like you don't know what to say is no excuse for shirking this courtesy. The graceful way to do this is to reply in kind whenever possible. If someone squees at you, go ahead and use a few exclamation points and emoticons when you reply. Squeeing back over the source text is a graceful option for this kind of reply. If someone offers the beginning of a discussion over one of the characters, feel free to reply with your own perceptions and how you reached the conclusions you did. If someone says "That was wonderful, I loved it!" feel free to reply "Thank you very much!", no matter how many times you repeat yourself. "Thank you" is always a graceful reply.

3c. The graceful thing to do with a flame or hate mail directed at your story is ignore it and, if possible, ban that person from future commenting in that forum. I freely admit that I am not always graceful enough to do this. The least graceless thing to do, if you cannot stifle the urge to reply, is to reply with sufficient force, precision, and intellectual artillery that the person in question is afraid to reply back and the matter ends there. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to start a dialogue or reason with the offender; you will only encourage them. Crush them mercilessly with the first blow, and move on.

4. Do not engage in negotiation with your readers. This is a slippery slope, and there is no graceful way to slide down it. You are the writer. You make the choices regarding your story and its presentation. It is graceful to acknowledge that your readers, in their turn, are the sole decision makers on whether they will read your work. It is also perfectly graceful to make what provisions seem reasonable, to you, to meet the desires of your readers where they intersect your own. If a reader mentions that she thinks you would do a wonderful job writing Pairing Y, and the idea catches your imagination, go for it. Do not, however, allow your readers to dictate your course. This encourages a lack of grace in everyone involved.

The relation between writers and readers is, for the most part, a symbiotic one. Do not allow it to become parasitic. You must choose what to write and how to present it, taking into account that the choices you make will influence who reads and responds to your work. Make sure you are comfortable with the choices you make, so that if any reader threatens to stop reading your work unless you change them you can gracefully wave that reader goodbye.

Last modified: 10/11/06
First Posted:  8/09/04

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Make attributions by name (Emily Ravenwood) and a link or url to this site.