On Authorial Responsibility · 3:18am Apr 2nd, 2023
Been a long time since I did a writing blog...
When you hit that "publish" button and make your story publicly readable, what sort of responsibilities do you have about it? In most cases, the real answer is "none," or at least "none beyond the ones you decide to take on voluntarily," but there are common ones that most authors would agree they'd try to uphold.
A bit of housekeeping first: I can think of several authors who will probably feel like this blog is targeted at them. It is not. Well, it kind of is, as it's based on interactions I had with two authors long ago (one was four years back and the other was seven years ago), but those just got me thinking about the topic, not wanting to address those instances specifically. Plus neither of those authors are people I've had any other contact with regarding writing, and neither is someone likely to ever read one of my blogs, much less still active around here. So no, if you're here reading this, then it's not aimed at you.
In general, artistic integrity would say that any of your creations should be the best it can be, but really, who does that with every single effort? I've certainly written things on a lark that I didn't put my fullest effort into, and I'd have no interest in going back to rewrite them. If people come back with criticisms of one, I might agree or disagree, but I'm not going to do anything with that feedback. Maybe. Depending on how extensive the changes would have to be.
No story is perfect. I'll bring up an old programming joke:
Every code has at least one bug. Every code can be shortened by at least one line. Therefore, by induction, every code can be reduced to a single line that doesn't work.
So there's always something that can be improved about a story. I'll divide them into three categories: the factual aspects, the quality of the writing, and the technical aspects.
How cut-and-dried the factual part is depends a lot on genre. If you're writing nonfiction, then it's your job to be factually accurate. It's the whole point. In fiction, it'd be more like if your story depended on a canon reference that you got wrong. I've done this once. It escaped my notice that the girls had encountered Cherry Jubilee in Dodge Junction. I wrote in a story that it had happened in Appleloosa, and a reader comment pointed that out. Fortunately, that was easy to fix. As will become a repeated theme, the likelihood that an author will change something (and imo, the degree to which they should) will track with that. If it requires a rewrite of the entire thing to fix that factual error, then I wouldn't blame the author for throwing up their arms and saying they'd just have to live with the story as is. Or doing the lazy fix and labeling it AU to justify the difference, which is cheating, since that difference isn't explored at all, as is the point of AU.
Next, how about the writing quality? Here, I'm talking about the plot, characterization, and stylistic things like "show, don't tell." These take more work to fix, and they're the ones more subject to the author's original intentions. If this is to be their magnum opus, then they'll be more receptive to improving such aspects. If they wrote it in half an hour as a shitfic and posted it unedited,, then not so much. Similar to the factual things, plot holes and out-of-character behavior can run the gamut from a quick fix to an extensive rewrite. The stylistic things will more often than the other two be systemic to the author, and thus are probably more pervasive throughout the story rather than being a few very localized spots here and there.
The mechanical stuff is more germane. If a story is riddled with spelling errors and the author isn't self-sufficient to handle proofreading, then it may be a losing battle. This is only worth addressing if the types of errors aren't too numerous and are easy to locate, like a consistent spelling error being fixable with a search-and-replace command. Mostly, this would be relevant to stories that are in good shape overall, but have a small-ish number of individual errors or repeated instances of the same few. I'm sure you've all done this: read a story and noticed the author made the wrong choice between its and it's, or had a notable typo, and thought about leaving a comment to let the author know. Then you see someone else already did. Two years prior. And the author's been replying to other comments, so it's not like they're inactive and likely hadn't seen that one or has moved on and doesn't participate in this fandom anymore. Maybe it's just my OCD speaking, but if I become aware of a typo, I'm going to fix it. I find them regularly, on stories of my own that I've read over and over again. It's highly likely that any random story on the site as at least one typo. If an author is really fastidious, maybe a random story of theirs wouldn't be likely to have a typo, but there's likely at least one in their entire body of work somewhere. When we're talking about something that takes just a few seconds to fix, why not?
It's not like fixing it will make the story worse. Many readers may not care either way, but by fixing it, you avoid irritating the ones who do care. I can see it taking a little longer: in my case, I'd want to edit the copy on FiMFiction as well as the one I keep on GDocs, so it doubles the work there, and I imagine many authors do the same. Editing a repeated error through every individual chapter of a 100k-word story, yeah, that'd be more time-consuming. I still would, but I guess I can see an author not being willing to. But getting back to that example I cited, of a reader comment bringing a single, one-time typo to an author's attention, the author almost certainly having seen the comment, and still doing nothing about it? Opinion time, but that feels lazy to me, and disrespectful to readers. It says that the author doesn't care enough about their readers, the ones who are put off by proofreading problems anyway, to invest less than a minute.
More than that, are there times an author really owes it to someone to fix such errors? I can think of (and have experienced) two cases where I feel it does.
Case one: the person has asked explicitly (or it's somehow implicit under the circumstances) to provide editing feedback. I have had people ask me to go over their story, and when I give them a list of corrections, they use none of them. Of course, some of those things are subjective. I'd leave a comment that a word is misspelled, and I'd leave one that I find a point of characterization suspect, and the latter is YMMV. I've said before (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that I'm as suspicious of the author who uses all of my comments as the one who uses none of them. The former looks like they're not thinking for themselves and is relying on me to write their story for them, while the latter is wasting my time. And especially on the latter, do they really think I'd ever entertain another editing request from them again?
Case two: the story is a commission. I've seen stories that were poorly edited, and the authors were paid to write them. If that's normal for the author, then the person paying the commission knew what they were getting into. But I've also seen ones where the editing was uncharacteristically poor for the author, they were paid to write it, and upon being informed of a small number of typos, the author couldn't be bothered to fix them. If I'm the person who paid the commission, I'd find this upsetting. Maybe they don't mind, but it's risky to assume they wouldn't, and like I said earlier, it just shows a profound lack of respect. You've got their money now, and you don't care anymore.
So what do you think? What responsibilities do you take on for your stories? What responsibilities do you think all authors should?
I'm onto you, rock! You lie, I am targeted, I am threatened! I shall smash you with a bigger, harder rock! As soon as I figure out what the hardness of pascoite happens to be. And research the hardness of other rocks until I find one that's suitable. Then figure out where to get that particular rock I've chosen for the smashy-smashy. Uh, just stay right there until I figure all this out...
Getting on topic: I have a ground rule that I never go back and "fix" my stories, even if the issues are glaring. However, this extends strictly to big plot elements, i.e. the things that would require me to do a lot of work. Fixing a typo, correcting that missed and simple plot hole, maybe improving a sentence, things of that nature I'm fine with going in and correcting, even years after I've published. But if there's something that can't be fixed without writing a new scene, redoing a chapter, etc. then I feel no obligation to touch it. It's far better left as a "lesson learned". If I really feel like dealing with the problem, I'll do a total rewrite from scratch (see: The Gentle Nights: Audience of One).
Typos are easy as far as my own writing goes: every time I become aware of one, I feel I should fix it -- and as soon as I can, I will. I'm always grateful when they're pointed out, whether in the story comments, by PM, in person, whatever. Yes, I'll get the occasional "error" that's just a British spelling (pyjamas, furore, etc) but that's a very small price to pay.
As far as typos in other people's work are concerned, it depends what they are. The very occasional typo I tend to let slide (reviewing isn't the same as editing, after all). That said, if I do mention one, perhaps because it could cause confusion,* and the author responds and acts on it, then that is something I appreciate. Special case: typos in names really irritate me. "Pinky Pie", "Rainbowdash", etc. Seeing those immediately lowers my opinion of a story.
* For example, "mare/male"
As for plot elements, as it happens I made a small fix of this type in one of my own stories recently. In The Book of Ended Lives, Applejack kills a timberwolf. (That's in the description, so not a spoiler.) However, a reader pointed out that in the show, they can reform after being smashed up. I hadn't allowed for this originally. Since a quick and dirty fix was available (that Sweet Apple Acres is built on a site of powerful old magic that protects against this) I made the edit. However, I like that fic quite a lot. Would I have done the same with a story I had less feeling for? Quite possibly not.
I agree with your two cases. If you ask someone for feedback of that kind, that request surely includes an implicit promise to act on it. (Considering a particular suggestion and then deciding not to implement it still counts, as you say.) And not doing your best for someone who's actually paying you is bad manners and unprofessional -- not to mention self-defeating in terms of your reputation and chance of future commissions.
I just like the programming joke :)
How to describe it? It's not that I don't intellectually agree or concede the point, so much as the rest of me just ends up digging in its heels at the prospect of actually doing anything.
Getting anything at all written to the point of publication can be a trial in and of itself. Once a work's complete and published, I start feeling distanced from it or move on to something else, so the idea of going back and modifying it feels vaguely contaminating and/or embarrassing.
It's not the best attitude to have, but it's a persistent and difficult one.
Sometimes, I can get over that, but not always. More usually, the best compromise I can come up with is to try and anticipate potential problems before launch, carry the lessons forward to the next project, and hope I don't have a blind spot.
In this as in so many other things, "don't deliberately waste peoples' time" tends to lead one in the right direction. When the cost of improvement is a few seconds on the author's part, and the reward is unambiguous on the reader's (as with the typo example), it's kind of a no-brainer. When the benefit is arguable or uncertain and the effort necessary to achieve it is greater, then the calculus may be different.
This might be specific to you, Pasco, rather than a general fact of editing life, but I don't think you've ever made a suggestion which I elected not to take (or which I addressed more gently/less fully than you suggested) which at least one reader didn't then take issue with after I published. Maybe I should just rely on you to write for me...
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Heh, I did say "tongue-in-cheek." If it's an author I know I can trust to give it some actual thought, then I'm not suspicious of them, period. It's the ones who I think are blindly adopting everything I tell them, to the point (and this has actually happened) that I give what's supposed to be an example of how to rewrite a sentence, and the author just copies it word for word. Examples are great for illustrating a point where the explanation can be kind of academic and detached, but if I find an author is just doing a cut and paste job of them, then I stop providing examples, or else I come up with my own "before" version that has nothing to do with their story so the "after" version wouldn't fit if copied.
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Seems like we all have the same kind of attitude about it. Something that takes only a few minutes to fix, and it seems like it's a no-brainer to do so. Something that'd take more significant work to adapt, like having to rewrite an entire chapter or more, and... I like the way Paul described it: call it a learning experience and move on.
Also, I found two typos in this blog post. I'm going to leave them there for the irony of it.
Say it loud, and say it proud!
When publishing blogs or essays, authors have a certain responsibility towards their work. While individual choices vary, there are general expectations that the authors adhere to. Ensuring factual accuracy is critical in non-fiction, while respecting canonical references is important in fiction. The plot, characterization, and stylistic elements also require attention, although the level of commitment may depend on the author's intent. Mechanical aspects such as correcting spelling errors are important, especially when they are easy to correct. It's good that you pay attention to these subtleties. Authors should be responsive to feedback, especially when asked to help edit or commission work. I often loking here to find examples or inspiration for my stories on completely different topics. Ultimately, the level of responsibility authors take on for their stories varies, but what matters is the desire for improvement and respect for readers.