Metawriting – Newness

At the end of the day, the MC/TF genre is very, very small, and lacks any sort of foothold in any sort of broader publishing industry. As such, I want to state, first, how thankful I am for the various people who run sites like the NCMC, CYOC, and all the rest of the sites I mentioned, because without them, there most certainly wouldn’t be any of these stories on this here blog of mine at all. That said, these various sites also exert tremendous influence on the kinds of stories that tend to proliferate in the genre, because of how they are structured. I spent a moment talking about various ways these sites might be “improved”, but because I don’t necessarily value the sorts of stories and approaches some of these sites use, it’s difficult for me to be very objective here. More than anything, I’m a relativist, which puts me in a contradiction. On one hand, I think it’s vital to this genre that we be open to as many kinds and forms of story as we possibly can, which puts me directly at odds with a site like the NCMC, which is structurally designed to inhibit certain kinds of work. But at the same time, the moderator of the NCMC ought to be able to do with their site what they want–if they want to focus the stories towards a certain format, that should be their prerogative. More than anything, what I wish for is a larger, more neutral archive of the size of something like MCStories, but with a better system of curation and organization like some of the features of the NCMC. But as always, if wishes were horses, etc. etc. etc. I might have a bit of a radical solution, however, but first, onto the main topic–newness.

In this sea of repetition superficial and thematic, purposeful and accidental, between authors and within one’s own work, how is anything new possible? Certainly one easy way of thinking about newness is simply a new story, but it seems that the main problem we have is that not every new addition to a collection is necessarily “new”. After all, if a story simply retreads the same themes and superficial features of hundreds of stories that have come before, what is really new about it? For lack of a better term I’m going to term this a “conservative story”, a story which fits neatly within the themes and features of stories that have come before it. It treads no particularly innovative ground, it doesn’t stretch the genre in a different direction, all it does is reinforce the themes and superficial features which are already prominent within a genre. Conservative writing isn’t necessarily politically conservative of course, but I merely mean that it sits comfortably within the confines of a space already defined. There’s also nothing necessarily wrong with writing and enjoying a conservative story–I would say the vast majority of stories put out, especially by new authors, are conservative in form and substance. If we don’t bother cutting our teeth on the writing that’s come before us, then we’ll never understand the genre well enough to produce anything original at all. I would also say that people who complain about the fact that these types of stories are prominent aren’t really complaining about the fact that they are conservative in nature–they’re complaining that the current conservative form doesn’t cater to their particular desires, both thematic and superficial, in the same way that people who ask for more of the same want more of the same precisely because all of their boxes are being sufficiently ticked.

So then what exactly is newness? Obviously it stands in opposition to conservatism, but I think it’s more complicated than an either-or. After all, a story which might be radically new in superficial qualities might be perfectly conservative in terms of its thematic undertones, like, say, someone like Pericedskin writing a story not about skinheads but perhaps twinks, but with the same fundamental story structure as his other work. Would that story really be new? New to Peircedskin’s work, certainly, but new to the NCMC, where stories like that are posted on a daily basis? How new would it be then? It could also occur in the reverse–a story might appear to be, on the surface, very similar to previous stories, and yet on a thematic level diverge wildly, which is the best description I can give of my own anti-porn posts. So how do we go about trying to define the new at all? The best definition I can give is a story which bucks the conservative norms of the canon that it is placed within, but this creates a few kinks.

First, it means that a whether or not something is “new” relies on the context of the other stories it is being placed with. This might seem a bit odd–shouldn’t newness be rather objective?–but it actually helps explain how some stories can be received wildly differently in different communities. For example, “Daddy’s Little Man”, in the context of my own work, was not particularly new–perhaps in the extremeness of it, but nothing that I hadn’t tread before in previous work. But as soon as I placed that story in the context of the canon at the NCMC, it was deemed radical–too radical, in fact–and it was removed. If we tried to understand newness as an objective fact, this response would be impossible to understand. Second, it means that newness isn’t a static feature, but rather a sliding scale, depending on how much the story pushes back against the established norms of a context. A story can be just a little new, say, if it just introduces a new wrinkle or variation in an established trope, or it can be extremely new, it it bears no resemblance to anything in the canon that came before it. Similarly, this means that no story can be entirely new–there will always lie at least some conservatism within any story, or else it would simply be incomprehensible. Third, it means that newness is necessarily disruptive. No story can be new without upsetting expectations and the status quo, and it is this disruption which I find most fascinating of all.

Because stories are always judged against a prior context, “newness” is really outside of the author’s control. Once they make the choice to insert their work into a given context through the act of publishing, what sort of reception it receives depends entirely on its audience, and it is here that the structure of communities as I discussed before becomes so important. Communities built like the NCMC can’t tolerate newness in the same way a site like CYOC can. This isn’t necessarily because the audience doesn’t have an open mind, because the audience at the NCMC is so larger I doubt any broad statement like that could ever apply. Rather, what it means is that the vocal minority who use the rating systems and leave comments have an outsized influence on what sorts of stories and authors are encouraged to keep contributing or not, and it is much more likely that these sorts of active users are going to prefer more conservative stories. CYOC has a different structural problem–while the new is able to proliferate easily, this is largely because these stories don’t receive enough of an audience to spread widely and gain momentum. As such, it falls victim to what might be called enclaves–small groups of devotees to a certain kind of story who exist in their own interactive universes. These universes possess the same weakness at the NCMC—stories that don’t fit their conservative vision are squashed and ignored.

The original question then, that began all of this was, “Why aren’t there more ‘new’ stories?” Here we have a bit of an answer–most of our communities have no real support system for new authors or new ideas, meaning they are either crushed by conservative trolls, or buried underneath a steady stream of conservative fiction. This is the core problem–not that there aren’t people who want to produce new stories, both radical and conservative, but that the communities we rely on as publishing platforms provide no real support for new authors or their visions. So, what’s the radical change I mentioned at the beginning? If we could find a way to use these platforms to better encourage and highlight new authors and new ideas, in order to counteract the natural advantage conservative repetition holds over the genre. I don’t have any particular ideas how to do this, unfortunately. I doubt a site like the NCMC could ever change itself to prioritize this, nor do I think the moderator would have much interest in doing so. CYOC might be more capable, by finding a better way to highlight and encourage the growth of younger story branches written by new authors. Until then, newness is simply going to rely on the courage of new and established authors to challenge the conventions and conservatism latent in these communities, and on those communities to be open minded to other sorts of themes and ideas which might not cater to their established desires.