Why We Validate

Posted by Susan in Sound Bytes with SusanAshlea | 4 comments

Why we validate…

by SusanAshlea

I have always loved writing, but I have never considered myself a writer.  Sure, I wrote short stories in high school, and I got a kick out of writing satirical essays, but that was ages ago.  I graduated from high school in 1996 and I think the last short story I wrote was when I was a freshman or sophomore in college.  So, I think the last time I picked up a pen, figuratively speaking, was roughly 12 years ago.

Fast forward 12 years later, and I would now consider myself a writer.  However, that would never have happened if it hadn’t been for one thing: my first Twilighted rejection.

I got the writing bug after I discovered Twilight fan fiction in January of 2009, and insisted that what the world really needed was Twilight written from another character’s perspective.  We already had half of Midnight Sun, and SiDeAdE had done an amazing job at penning Luniere (Twilight from Alice’s point of view).  After I read those, I was convinced the world needed to read Twilight from Jasper’s POV. Jasper was my favorite character at the time (my how things have changed in one short year), and I figured I had some good source material to start with.  I penned the first chapter, a few people liked it, and so I posted it on fanfiction.net.  After falling prey to the wonders of Twilighted, I decided to hold my breath and post Cause & Effect on Twilighted after a month or so.  Two weeks later, I got my rejection letter.  I was ticked off.  I was at lunch with my mom and started calling my friends, Saluki and Morgan, complaining that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my story, and there were absolutely no grounds for the rejection.

I calmed down and sent the chapters to Saluki for a run through.  She had offered to be my “beta” (even though I had no earthly idea what the hell that was or what it meant), and she started taking the red pen to my chapters.  What we mutually discovered was that, grammatically speaking, they were very, very bad.  My aunt, who is an English teacher, would have winced at the tense changes, lack of commas, and myriad of other grammar “don’ts” contained in the very first paragraph of the story.  I realized, “huh they do know what they are talking about,” and my beta and I hunkered down and tried to get the chapters up to par.  Eventually, I decided to abandon Cause & Effect after 7 or 8 chapters, because I had started a new, original, Post-Breaking Dawn story called Supernova.  By then I had learned my grammar lessons and it was accepted to Twilighted on the first go around.

Which brings me to the point of this blog: why we validate.

There are many fan fiction writers out there who abhor the validation process.  There are many people who refuse to read a story posted on Twilighted (or here, for that matter) because they don’t agree with the validation process.  There are plenty of people who just don’t want to put in the work to get their chapters grammatically correct before posting it for the world to see.  And that is fine; fanfiction.net will let anyone post pretty much anything without regard to sentence structure, proper dialogue formatting, or even punctuation.

As an avid reader, I read tons of books. I’m running out of shelves in my house to store the books I’ve bought in the last year.  I have a “book allowance” worked into my monthly budget.  When I read a book, it has been edited to the point where it is extremely odd to see even a single typo.  That is how the world of published fiction goes.  A book doesn’t get published unless it’s grammatically perfect.  So, why would I assume that anyone would want to read anything I write unless it’s the same?  Once I figured out how bad my grammar skills were I was determined to get better.  I had the basics right, such as dialogue formatting (in which each new person who speaks should be given a new paragraph), sentence structure and some punctuation.  But my tenses were awful and I couldn’t have used a comma correctly to save my life.  I have spent the last year working hard on perfecting my grammar skills and learning how to incorporate them into my writing.  I have even graduated to the level in which I am comfortable editing other people’s work.  Had it not been for that first rejection letter, I know I wouldn’t be at that level.

So, why do we validate?

There are two main reasons.  The first is that it’s really a courtesy to our readers.  There are a lot of improperly written, improperly formatted stories out there amidst the properly written ones.  As a reader, I read for enjoyment, and if I have to do a great deal of work trying to differentiate who is speaking and what is going on because everything is written in one long paragraph, I won’t find that enjoyable.  It’s safe to say that a majority of other readers feel the same way.  That isn’t to say that an improperly written story can’t have good plot; I have seen some excellent stories that had improper grammar, but as a reader, it was difficult to overlook that to get to the story.  On the flip side of that, there are plenty of properly written stories that don’t hold my attention as well, but I appreciate the fact that the writer took the time necessary to make sure his or her work was edited.

The other reason is that we truly want to help people become better writers.  Every staff member at MVF is passionate about reading and writing.  Every one of the Validation Betas have gone through the same trials and tribulations that writing offers, including having to learn the rules of grammar along the way.  Some of us have been out of high school for a very long time and don’t have careers in education (I’m a Phlebotomist – not much need for proper comma usage there), so we had to hunker down and do some studying to reach our goals.  If someone wants to write and post at MVF, if they are passionate about writing, passionate about their story, and passionate about their characters, we want them to have the best story possible, and the best story possible always includes proper grammar.

I can’t speak for any other fan fiction archive because I don’t work for them and I don’t know their ins & outs.  I can only speak for MVF.  When we read the stories in the queue, we don’t accept or reject a story based on the plotline, or general content.  With the exception of taboo topics such as incest, pedophilia, and the like, we don’t discriminate on the content of the story.  We simply look to see if it meets the basic grammar requirements listed on the Submission Rules for the site.  That’s all.

It’s hard to reject a story.  We don’t do it often, but when we do, it’s difficult.  I know that for someone to sit down and put their ideas to paper is not an easy task.  It’s even harder to build up the courage to post it on a site where anyone can read it.  I’ve been there, I know.

So…in a nutshell, that is why we do what we do.  It sounds trite, but we do it because we care.  We care about our readers and we care about our writers.  At the end of the day, that is what makes it all worthwhile.

As a side note, I did run grammar & spell check on this particular article. *lol*  Now get on over to the Dungeon and check the place out! :)