a defense of scratch fiction (v.0.1)

why internet fiction is not the same as print fiction (for readers or for writers) and why it's a mistake to confuse the two.

(this may be obvious to everyone but me. if it is, move on and read something else, and there's the beauty of internet fiction instantiated. but of course, if this is obvious to you, then you already knew that.)

Many people want to write fiction. Few people are published fiction writers. Simple mathematics suggests an artistic no-man's-land where would-be writers fall by the droves into anonymous water-filled graves.

Writing short fiction for the internet--I call it scratch fiction, but you can call it whatever you want--provides a cozy bunker along the way, stocked with margaritas and green-tea kit-kat bars. It can even be a destination in and of itself. In any case, it gives you somewhere to go aside from straight up that blood-soaked hill.

Is internet fiction really any different from print fiction?

Yes, very.

And before I go any further, let me just say that I can see how that statement could be argued to be both stupid and obviously wrong. Hear me out. Because mistaking internet fiction for print fiction is a good way to make sure you don't write any of it, and while the rest of us are rubbing a slice of lime around the lip of our margarita glass, you're rushing face-first into a 155mm shell as you charge the gates of Simon and Schuster.

Internet fiction--or, wait, let's call it 'scratch fiction' from here on out just to be clear I'm talking about my specially defined category. Scratch fiction is different from print fiction in four key ways:

1. Lack of polish. Scratch fiction hasn't been through the kiln of the publishing process. It hasn't been carefully finished by its writer, hasn't been glazed by an agent, hasn't been fired by an editor (to bake our metaphor positively to death, because this is the internet, and we can -do- things like that). If it's my scratch fiction, it was probably written in a matter of minutes by a writer dangerously loopy with lack of sleep.

2. Small circulation. If you're not famous already, not many people are going to be reading your scratch fiction. If you -are- famous, the rules are all different. We'll leave you out of consideration for the rest of this document.

3. No official sanction of any kind. No one is marketing or promoting your scratch fiction, and it has none of the trappings of legitimacy that published books get by virtue of showing up on a shelf somewhere.

4. Transience. Not all lights burn half as long because they are twice as bright. Some of them burn half as long because they're lame and in a small space with no oxygen. Scratch fiction gets produced quickly, read quickly, and disappears quickly. Like leaves. Or bunnies. Or humans, for that matter.

So, sure, in some ways scratch fiction is just an idiot sibling of print fiction--fast, cheap, and transient. The negatives are obvious. But there are positives:

Why scratch fiction is not just lamer than print fiction: the reader's perspective.

If you were to hack into my blogger account, wipe out all my posts, and replace them all with the message "STOP READING LAME INTERNET FICTION UNLESS YOU'VE READ ALL OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S STORIES," I would be sad, but I would understand your literary fervor, and freely admit that nothing that ever appears in this blog will ever be even remotely as good as even one of her second-string stories. However, I think your vigilantism would be misguided.

The nifty things about scratch fiction for the reader are intimacy, brevity, and novelty.

1. Intimacy. Say you read "The DaVinci Code" and love it. So you write a coronet of sonnets and send it to whatsisname hand-lettered on pink fold-out construction paper. His assistant bins it, and maybe even gets a restraining order on you. You send that to me, on the other hand, I frame it. Hell, you leave me a five-word comment and I feel all warm and fuzzy, and I look back over my piece with a happy feeling and see the good bits instead of just the rubbish. If you read my blog, you comment on my stories, you become my friend. When I read other people's scratch fiction, I become their friend. Little amorphous micro-communities pop up around and between scratch fiction blogs, and the amount of love in the universe grows by an infinitesimal amount every time (of course, the love goes back down every time you say a bad word or make your sister cry or start drilling in the ANWR, but that's another topic altogether).

2. Brevity. Scratch fiction at its best is short. Blog reading fills a different niche from a real book. You're at work, you're trying to put off fixing that COBOL bug or firing that punk down in sales who keeps taking bites out of all the pastries in the break room, and you want to be distracted for two minutes.

3. Novelty. Scratch fiction is weird and random. Things that would never make it into print, sometimes for very good reasons, can nevertheless amuse in small doses.

Why scratch fiction is not just lamer than print fiction: the writer's perspective.

While it is true on some level that all writing is done for the satisfaction of the writer, that is most obvious with blogging in all its incarnations, and scratch fiction in particular. If I may be permitted to wax rhapsodic for a moment, I shall enumerate the joys of scratch fiction thusly:

1. Audience. Posting scratch fiction provides an audience, however small. Writing is communication. Writing that never gets read by anyone is slightly unheimlich, like a suit of clothes you only ever wear by yourself in the basement. I've heard it said that you have to write a million words to get good at it. I used to think that was insane; now that I've been writing for a while, I'm not so sure. In any case, writing a million words all by yourself is a total bummer.

2. An achievable goal. Scratch fiction gives newer writers a way to write without always whipping themselves toward publication that they will, in all probability, never achieve. Lots of people want to write fiction, but they don't want to try and write a million words--they just want to tell a few stories. Scratch fiction gives everyone a way to be writers in a small way, which is good, because the numbers tell us that a small way is as much as most of us are going to get.

3. Impetus to keep writing. If you have an empty blog nagging at you, it gives you one more reason to quit wasting your time playing in the sunshine and hanging out with friends and family, and helps you retreat to a dark, lonely room to write.

4. Lowered expectations defeats writer's block. Trying to write something perfect is a great way to write nothing at all.

5. It's good for your brain. Writing begets writing. When I first started, I hesitated to write some of my best ideas, because I didn't want to use them all up. No, no, no. Write them. The more ideas you use, the more they come, and the more you gain an intuitive sense for the shape of a good idea and how to seek out the delicious, chewy center. I started this blog to keep me busy while I thought of a good novel to write (having finished a first bad novel). I thought I would abandon it once I started the novel. But I haven't, because sneaking out and flirting with other ideas a couple times a week keeps everything fresh.

6. The lessons of the short form are applicable to the long. Like 5. above but more specific: it's very easy for a novel to get boring. Far, far easier than you'd think if you've never tried to write one. Learning to distill the essence of a character or scene into a few paragraphs is damn handy when it comes to cutting a huge, bloated, lumbering D.C.-lobbyist of a scene into a svelte little gazelle prancing across whatever svelte gazelles prance across.

And, finally, a few miscellaneous points because I can never shut up:

(I note here that I have broken one of my own chief tenets for scratch fiction: that it should be short. Flaunting rules without fear of tangible repercussion should perhaps have been added as 7. to the list above.)

1. The benefits of scratch fiction as I extol them here were not created with the internet. The internet just made it so any monkey with an internet connection can gain access to them. Back in the day, you had to be born into the Brontë family if you wanted someone to read your wonky stories of Gondal and Angria. With the internet, you just need to be able to type.

2. Publication of course has wonderful things all its own and I'm not saying for a second that scratch fiction is better. Publication lets you reach thousands of people instead of dozens, gives you a degree of professional validation, and even a little bit of money, although if you're writing because you want to get rich you should be aware that you'd have a better R.o.I. at a casino.

3. This argument could apply to things other than fiction--take my photo blog for instance. I can't take pictures as well as a pro, but I have fun noodling around with a camera. But photography is just a hobby, while writing, for me, is more like some kind of incurable brain fever which keeps me up until the small hours of the morning. So I'll leave the debate about photography for someone equally wrapped up in taking pretty pictures.

4. I wrote this defense in the spirit of scratch fiction--fast, cheap, and largely un-edited. The sloppy argument excuses the sloppy argument. The dog chases its tail, the logical vortex spins faster and tightens in on itself, the universe collapses back into a tiny dense point of everything and then BAM! It all starts all over.

(this post has replaced an earlier explanation of what this blog was about that I wrote when I first started it. now I think I understand everything (EVERYTHING) better, but as you see there I've linked to the old one because... because... because this is the internet and we NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY.)