Definitely and there are a few authors who IMO are as good as, if not better, than the mainstream published authors, writing longform magical realism, crime and/or romantic comedy stories.
Definitely and there are a few authors who IMO are as good as, if not better, than the mainstream published authors, writing longform magical realism, crime and/or romantic comedy stories.
I 'discovered' fanfic (in that I overcame my erroneous long term assumption that it was not good, weird, and not to be taken seriously) quite recently and there are writers on AO3 whose skill at world building, plotting and characterisation would make some mainstream authors feel quite inadequate.
I was discussing this with one of my favourite AO3 authors and she likes writing fanfic because she thinks it's fun, and (most) people understand that it's a low stakes free thing and leave their critiques at the door. Can't help but feel a lot of what could have been brilliant literature has instead emerged in fanfic because of the gate keeping of the publishing industry for anyone other than middle aged white men as JB mentioned in his article. Her horror of critique also came from being an academic, so it's not just students whose creativity gets snuffed out.
Definitely and there are a few authors who IMO are as good as, if not better, than the mainstream published authors, writing longform magical realism, crime and/or romantic comedy stories.
I 'discovered' fanfic (in that I overcame my erroneous long term assumption that it was not good, weird, and not to be taken seriously) quite recently and there are writers on AO3 whose skill at world building, plotting and characterisation would make some mainstream authors feel quite inadequate.
I was discussing this with one of my favourite AO3 authors and she likes writing fanfic because she thinks it's fun, and (most) people understand that it's a low stakes free thing and leave their critiques at the door. Can't help but feel a lot of what could have been brilliant literature has instead emerged in fanfic because of the gate keeping of the publishing industry for anyone other than middle aged white men as JB mentioned in his article. Her horror of critique also came from being an academic, so it's not just students whose creativity gets snuffed out.