Wiscon-Related Thoughts pt 2
Jun. 7th, 2011 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ann_leckieII Slush
So, at Wiscon, in the "Reading with a Squint" panel, I made the assertion (as I frequently do--regular readers of this LJ will have heard it before) that the gender ratio of slush shouldn't actually be the same as the ratio of its corresponding ToC. That is, 70/30 male/female in slush might not actually translate to 70/30 in the ToC, all other things being equal.
This is because ninety percent of slush is just not in the game. The panelist sitting next to me, who...well. The panelist sitting next to me corrected me. "Ninety-five."
"Well," I said, "I'm being charitable." But it's true, that much slush isn't even actually under consideration. It's just not there.
The other panelists took issue, contending that they didn't actually see so much of what they would call "crap." One said, she saw a similar distribution as in her classes--she's a teacher--where the majority of subs were, say, Cs, with a few Fs and a few As and chunk of Bs, just like you'd expect.
I agree with her about the letter grading, if I were giving letter grades to slush, if subbers were students I was teaching.
But I'm not teaching, and I don't grade subs. And C work isn't in the game. If you're only calling F papers "crap" then I don't see much of it. I've only seen about the F work you'd expect, and only one of those was Eye of Argon bad.*
Mostly, the slush is entirely grammatical, but the sentences aren't put together right. The words are dictionary-correct but utterly the wrong words. The idea is thin, and what there is of it is hidden behind wheel-spinning openings and characters cut from the finest cardboard, or even punched out of a book of paper dolls. The paper dolls utter (once again, perfectly grammatical) sentences no human being would ever actually say, in language so clunky it leaves a dent on my desk. And so forth. In classroom terms, this is "not bad. Now do better." In slushpile terms, this is "Nope." It's not actually competing with the stuff that's B and A level. It's not part of the pool the ToC is actually drawn from. It is difficult to read in large quantities, kind of like eating one stale peanut butter sandwich after another. And another. And another. My hat is off to teachers everywhere.**
But. Ratios. Women have less free time. No, seriously, they do. Despite a lot of very big cultural changes, women are still expected to pick up the majority of housework and childcare. And they do.
And writing takes hours. Hours you aren't helping kids with homework, or doing laundry, or any of the other million things people (including yourself) judge you for not doing, that other people in the household could be doing, yes, but it's your job. And if you've got small kids? Forget about free time, you're lucky to be able to shower by yourself.
There's also nothing like living as a woman to make you check your appearance twice and three times before you walk out the door.*** Nothing like knowing taking hours away from the stuff you know your neighbors are tsk tsking about--the stuff you're probably feeling guilty for neglecting in favor of your writing--might not amount to anything anyway. You're going to make darn sure what you send out is as good as it can be. And maybe you never do get to that point, maybe you figure you'll never be that good and just write fanfic for your friends. **** Who will, at the very least, be a supportive community for you.
But I think men are taught--expected!--to be more confident and assertive. I think way more men sit down for an hour or so, slap down some words and say "that's brilliant!" and send it out. Maybe they proofread, maybe they don't. Certainly all of the F-grade fiction I've seen has had male-sounding bylines. So, I hypothesize that more men are sending out very beginner-level work than women. Which will tilt the percentage in the slush.
And even without that, if fewer women have time to write seriously, if the few who do submit are the ones who are really invested in it, and hence work harder at it and have more skill, then maybe the ratio of A and B grade slush will look really, really different from the ratio of raw slush. Maybe. I wish I could see those numbers.
I hypothesize that, once the slushy slush is cleared away, the ratio will be much closer to 50/50.
*Writers! If you buy an economy sized bucket of punctuation, please don't feel compelled to use the semicolons all up at once. They keep forever, and you don't actually need them all that often. It's much better to have one when you need it than have them sprinkled liberally all over the first half of your story as decoration, and then have none to use when, you know, the sentence actually calls for one. And I know it seems like you'll never run out of commas, but when your page has more commas on it than your bagel does poppyseeds, you might want to rethink your approach.
**Writers who are in this phase--or fear they are--ought not despair. Everyone starts somewhere. Editors and slush readers know this, and don't hold it against you. In fact, if they see your work improve over time they're often quite pleased, and sometimes secretly cheer you on.
*** Of course, this is a hilarious demonstration of your messed up focus on trivial stuff like makeup and clothes. And also of course, if you neglect them you're unfeminine and unattractive. Gotta love that double bind!
****I've got nothing against fanfic, or the idea of writing without the goal of paid publication. I quite like the idea of communities of fans sharing their art and their enthusiasm. It's just, it's kind of interesting how many women there are in such communities, isn't it.
Part 1
Part 2 Slush
Part 3 Ann Likes Red
Part 4 Bias Is Inherent in the System
Part 5 Women Write Different Stories From Men?
Part 6 Fight for Your Right to Party
Part 7 Ending on Felicitous Seven
So, at Wiscon, in the "Reading with a Squint" panel, I made the assertion (as I frequently do--regular readers of this LJ will have heard it before) that the gender ratio of slush shouldn't actually be the same as the ratio of its corresponding ToC. That is, 70/30 male/female in slush might not actually translate to 70/30 in the ToC, all other things being equal.
This is because ninety percent of slush is just not in the game. The panelist sitting next to me, who...well. The panelist sitting next to me corrected me. "Ninety-five."
"Well," I said, "I'm being charitable." But it's true, that much slush isn't even actually under consideration. It's just not there.
The other panelists took issue, contending that they didn't actually see so much of what they would call "crap." One said, she saw a similar distribution as in her classes--she's a teacher--where the majority of subs were, say, Cs, with a few Fs and a few As and chunk of Bs, just like you'd expect.
I agree with her about the letter grading, if I were giving letter grades to slush, if subbers were students I was teaching.
But I'm not teaching, and I don't grade subs. And C work isn't in the game. If you're only calling F papers "crap" then I don't see much of it. I've only seen about the F work you'd expect, and only one of those was Eye of Argon bad.*
Mostly, the slush is entirely grammatical, but the sentences aren't put together right. The words are dictionary-correct but utterly the wrong words. The idea is thin, and what there is of it is hidden behind wheel-spinning openings and characters cut from the finest cardboard, or even punched out of a book of paper dolls. The paper dolls utter (once again, perfectly grammatical) sentences no human being would ever actually say, in language so clunky it leaves a dent on my desk. And so forth. In classroom terms, this is "not bad. Now do better." In slushpile terms, this is "Nope." It's not actually competing with the stuff that's B and A level. It's not part of the pool the ToC is actually drawn from. It is difficult to read in large quantities, kind of like eating one stale peanut butter sandwich after another. And another. And another. My hat is off to teachers everywhere.**
But. Ratios. Women have less free time. No, seriously, they do. Despite a lot of very big cultural changes, women are still expected to pick up the majority of housework and childcare. And they do.
And writing takes hours. Hours you aren't helping kids with homework, or doing laundry, or any of the other million things people (including yourself) judge you for not doing, that other people in the household could be doing, yes, but it's your job. And if you've got small kids? Forget about free time, you're lucky to be able to shower by yourself.
There's also nothing like living as a woman to make you check your appearance twice and three times before you walk out the door.*** Nothing like knowing taking hours away from the stuff you know your neighbors are tsk tsking about--the stuff you're probably feeling guilty for neglecting in favor of your writing--might not amount to anything anyway. You're going to make darn sure what you send out is as good as it can be. And maybe you never do get to that point, maybe you figure you'll never be that good and just write fanfic for your friends. **** Who will, at the very least, be a supportive community for you.
But I think men are taught--expected!--to be more confident and assertive. I think way more men sit down for an hour or so, slap down some words and say "that's brilliant!" and send it out. Maybe they proofread, maybe they don't. Certainly all of the F-grade fiction I've seen has had male-sounding bylines. So, I hypothesize that more men are sending out very beginner-level work than women. Which will tilt the percentage in the slush.
And even without that, if fewer women have time to write seriously, if the few who do submit are the ones who are really invested in it, and hence work harder at it and have more skill, then maybe the ratio of A and B grade slush will look really, really different from the ratio of raw slush. Maybe. I wish I could see those numbers.
I hypothesize that, once the slushy slush is cleared away, the ratio will be much closer to 50/50.
*Writers! If you buy an economy sized bucket of punctuation, please don't feel compelled to use the semicolons all up at once. They keep forever, and you don't actually need them all that often. It's much better to have one when you need it than have them sprinkled liberally all over the first half of your story as decoration, and then have none to use when, you know, the sentence actually calls for one. And I know it seems like you'll never run out of commas, but when your page has more commas on it than your bagel does poppyseeds, you might want to rethink your approach.
**Writers who are in this phase--or fear they are--ought not despair. Everyone starts somewhere. Editors and slush readers know this, and don't hold it against you. In fact, if they see your work improve over time they're often quite pleased, and sometimes secretly cheer you on.
*** Of course, this is a hilarious demonstration of your messed up focus on trivial stuff like makeup and clothes. And also of course, if you neglect them you're unfeminine and unattractive. Gotta love that double bind!
****I've got nothing against fanfic, or the idea of writing without the goal of paid publication. I quite like the idea of communities of fans sharing their art and their enthusiasm. It's just, it's kind of interesting how many women there are in such communities, isn't it.
Part 1
Part 2 Slush
Part 3 Ann Likes Red
Part 4 Bias Is Inherent in the System
Part 5 Women Write Different Stories From Men?
Part 6 Fight for Your Right to Party
Part 7 Ending on Felicitous Seven
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 02:36 am (UTC)Yesterday's post was fun to read, my little mind exploded with what was in it. And today's post was even better. My aproned self was jumping up and down and going "yes, yes, yes, that's it!" And no, I'm not talking about what the teacher said. Sheesh. Apples and oranges and she can keep her polished teacher apples, thank you veddy much. You have to throw out the crap that would never be considered for publication, period. And golly, does your description of a man's fiction-writing and submission pattern sound just like a friend of mine. :::shakes head::: Or more than one friend, actually.
My laundry gets done last. My bathroom gets cleaned last. And it depends on whether I'm going to be in my little country town or go to a proper suburban one whether I'm wearing my quilted flannel shirt or not. Though it irked me last winter when a woman called me "sir" in the grocery store because I was wearing that and a down vest in a snow storm.
Anyway. Thanks for posting this. Renews my faith, it does.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 05:06 am (UTC)So, semicolons are related to tribbles.
Don't feed them!
no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 05:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 11:59 pm (UTC)There's a lot that can be said -- and probably has already been said! -- about the "gift economy" of fanfic fandom and how female-dominated it is, but in the context of writing fanfic instead of aiming for paid publication, I'd say that ... one of the things about how many women there are in fanfic fandom is that it's part of a continuum of examples of how women's work and women's art is devalued. So if fanfic writers wrote the same kinds of stories but filed off the serial numbers perhaps they would not be paid for them anyway, or perhaps they would struggle to get them published because they have been written so explicitly for a female audience. (I am speculating; this is not necessarily true as I know there have been cases where serial-numbers-filed-off fanfic has been published.)
The other thing is that if you write on the margins you have freedom. If you aren't aiming for the approval of the establishment in the form of the publishing industry, you can take risks, and maybe make something better because of that. (I am thinking of the first producers of Japanese literature, women who wrote in Japanese when the establishment was writing in Chinese, though it's not quite the same situation.) But also, I would rather see lots of women writing exactly what they want to in communities that value and understand their art, than to see them tone their stories down and reshape them to fit the demands of the market.
Anyway, thanks for the very interesting posts, and sorry for rabbiting on!
no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 02:36 pm (UTC)Absolutely! The scorn with which some people utter the word "fanfic" is pretty amazing. It reminds me of the way some people say the word "romance."
I'm not a fan of romance, and yeah, part of what I don't like about it is the form seems to me to reinforce assumptions about gender roles and relationships that I find...problematic. But does it deserve that sort of scorn, as though romance=trash? Ninety five percent of everything is crap, surely there's a top five percent of romance that's awesome, just like there's a top five percent of everything else, right? Right? Of course there is--I've read romances that I did, in fact, enjoy, and thought were well done. So, why the contempt?
Three guesses, and the first two don't count. Same with fanfic.
The other thing is that if you write on the margins you have freedom. If you aren't aiming for the approval of the establishment in the form of the publishing industry, you can take risks, and maybe make something better because of that.
Absolutely. There's a trade-off, isn't there.
But also, I would rather see lots of women writing exactly what they want to in communities that value and understand their art, than to see them tone their stories down and reshape them to fit the demands of the market.
Also absolutely! But I admit I dream sometimes of a market that has room--and money!--for those stories, as they are. It will probably never happen. But if I just say, "Well, it's a lost cause, why say or do anything," then it will certainly never happen.
And no apology necessary!
no subject
Date: 2011-06-25 10:40 pm (UTC)I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised. I do think it's interesting that the big self-publishing success I've heard of, Amanda Hocking, writes what sounds like the purest self-indulgent guilty pleasure romance (and also used to write fanfic! awww bless).
no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 06:24 pm (UTC)What is ToC?
Date: 2011-06-26 03:20 pm (UTC)Re: What is ToC?
Date: 2011-06-26 03:27 pm (UTC)