Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Putting validation and reward for writing into perspective

I was creating fanfiction from an early age, yet I only started to post in 2005 when I got stuck in an endless rejection cycle from book publishers stating, ‘your writing is good, but this isn’t what we’re looking for,’ and wanted to get validation from elsewhere.

I didn’t really define what validation I wanted at the time, I just felt that it would be good if someone other than a publisher or a family member/friend read my stories and gave me some feedback.

The first thing I posted was my Airwolf Lost Season series.  Airwolf is my all-time favourite TV show.  I always felt the show ended too soon and the reboot attempt was not great (despite the cast and crew’s best efforts).  With story after story bubbling away after finally watching Season 4 and pondering the ‘what happened from the end of Season 3 to the beginning of Season 4,’ I just ended up writing them and the first ten were written when I decided to post.

I had no clue about online fandoms.  I posted to fanfiction.net which was the fanfiction site I knew about and was thrilled when the first story got a few reviews.  As I posted more stories, I gained a small readership who loved the series and who stayed with me the whole way.  I’d average maybe a half a dozen reviews per story in the immediate aftermath of posting and maybe up to a dozen in the following weeks. 

By then, I had discovered fandom forums and, with my first Airwolf series completed, had started to stray into writing Stargate SG1 fanfiction, giving into my want to write my OTP Sam/Jack as I had already pretty much deduced that I’d likely never see it realised fully on screen.

Stargate was a much more popular fandom.  It had the advantage that it was still on air at that point, was a popular sci-fi show, and Sam/Jack was a popular pairing.  I suddenly went from writing stories getting a handful of reviews in the first days of posting to stories getting triple that.   

It was seductive and addictive.  It’s easy to be tempted into simply writing stories in a popular show or pairing for that reason. 

But.

I’ve never been great at writing stories simply to feed a fandom. 

I was an active forum member on Gateworld and, later, in various livejournal Stargate spaces.  I loved being part of the Stargate fandom community and so tried my hand at challenges. I really struggled to be inspired by the prompts in an organic way where I’d immediately think of a story. 

Coming up with the idea could feel like a slog.  Writing the story would sometimes feel like a chore. And I never wanted my writing to feel like a chore.

Taking part in a challenge to be part of the fandom community felt good, but I had to face up to the fact that I didn’t always enjoy challenges with specific prompts. (I much prefer broad themes where there is more scope for the muse to latch onto something).  It was rare that my muse and the prompt challenge matched up and I did a story I was happy with.

Taking part in some challenges also gave me a much needed reality check about revelling too much in the quantity of reviews I got.

The Women of the Gate challenge was set-up to celebrate the female characters and I took part since Sam was and is my favourite character of the show.  My first WOTG story Goddesses garnered some reviews, but it definitely had less interest in it than a Sam/Jack focused story.  All my WOTG stories trended this way. 

Rare pairings or friendship-focused stories would trend similarly.    

And yet I was inspired to write and wanted to write stories in these spaces, so I set aside the idea that achieving a certain number of reviews equalled validation – reminding myself of all the time I’d spent in the Airwolf fandom with only my very small loyal readership leaving regular reviews.    

Of course, I had also by this point gotten the reality check on finding validation of the quality of my writing in reviews.

I remember reading one Stargate story and thinking it was awful; the trope was a very popular and common OTP trope, but the plot was very bad, the characterisation was terrible, and the grammatical writing issues made reading the story difficult.  I turned to the reviews wondering if someone had, in a kind way, addressed that with the author.  Nope.  Not only were there no critical reviews, there, at the top, was a review from someone who commented on my own stories all the time praising my writing.

Now, I have no way of knowing if this particular reviewer was providing encouragement to all writers, perhaps simply being kind to everyone, or if they really thought the quality was equivalent, but it brought my own ego back down to earth with a bump.

For the most part, with these experiences in mind, I set aside the idea of gaining validation from my publishing fanfiction.  Instead, I’ve focused on writing the stories I want to write and hoping that some people enjoy them when I do post them up. 

There have been a couple of times when I’ve slid back into questioning whether I can write (usually after a set-back in my original writing) and set up new pseuds to test out the theory that I can draw a readership.  I started posting A Marauder’s Plan as Catsarecool essentially to test that out since Harry Potter was a completely new fandom for me, similarly with my taking part in Rough Trade challenges under the pseud TrekCat.

And admittedly, I am very proud of A Marauder’s Plan getting a shout-out in Oprah Daily’s 51 Best Harry Potter fanfiction article back in 2020, and in December 2023 appearing in Screen Rant’s Harry Potter: 10 Must-Read Fanfics, According to Reddit. I won’t lie and say that there isn’t a sense of validation in seeing one of my stories in these articles.

However, today, I’m very at peace with the idea that as much as I love reading reviews on my fanfiction, they do not equal validation.  Instead, I enjoy the sense of reward from completing and posting the story. If then I discover someone enjoyed something I’ve written (whether reviews/comments or kudos/likes) – that’s a bonus. 

Am I sad when I think a great story doesn’t seem to have gained much attention?  Yes, but it’s not the end of the world.  The story is still out there, and people may still discover it and enjoy it at least.  

Why bring this up right now?

Because occasionally I’ll post something like Rebuilding Broken Monsters with the knowledge that it probably won’t get the same attention as my posting in a more popular fandom or with a popular pairing or character, and get reminded of my journey.  

As I kick start my original fiction self-publishing this week with plotting out a murder mystery which I intend to be my first project, it’s a good reminder.  I just need to write the stories I want to write, and if I manage to sell a few books and build a readership, if someone else enjoys the stories I write and they end up being mentioned in an article somewhere, well, that will be a bonus.