things that make me go "um..."

[edenfalling]

Recently I got a very long and thoughtful review for a little Harry Potter 15-minute fic I wrote ages and ages ago, which segued from agreeing with the meta point I was trying to make and praising my characterization and use of humor, to saying, "But it's so short, and you could flesh it out into something richer, with other perspectives added as contrasting voices, and also maybe toss in this and that and the other thing, because I love world-building and long, plotty stories, and have you thought about how the approaches to this issue might be different in the wizarding world and the Muggle world, and..." etcetera, etcetera.

Which is flattering in a way -- the reviewer clearly thinks I could write such a difficult story and do it justice -- but...

Um...

If I'd wanted to write that story, don't you think I might have already done so? Instead of writing the story I did write?

Also, you can try writing your awesome ideas yourself! Yes, you may not do them justice, but it's fun to try! Or failing that, you can find a writing community and offer your idea as a prompt in a setting explicitly geared toward giving people ideas for new stories to create, instead of in a setting geared toward talking about the stories that actually exist in front of you right now.

Just saying. :-)

Comments

[branchandroot]

*wry* Yeah, moments like that I want to get out the "not a fandom gumball machine" sticker.

[edenfalling]

The reviewer clearly understood my story -- which is always nice, since I often get the feeling people are reading something completely different from what I tried to write -- and just as clearly had a long, complicated Ideal Story on that same theme stuck in hir mind. To be fair, hir description of this phantom story does sound pretty awesome. I would read it myself! But it's not a story I am interested in writing, certainly not now, and probably not when I wrote the 15-minute fic in question either.

And also, yeah, I am not a machine to produce hir wished-for stories on demand. I don't know why people move from "I like this thing you wrote" to "Therefore you must immediately write this other thing I would like to read." :-(