You Say Potato, I Say Potahto or, Why I Hate Recommendations
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| Title: | You Say Potato, I Say Potahto or, Why I Hate Recommendations |
| Creator: | Emily Brunson |
| Date(s): | January 21, 2002 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fan Fiction, Recs, The Sentinel |
| External Links: | You Say Potato, I Say Potahto or, Why I Hate Recommendations/WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
You Say Potato, I Say Potahto or, Why I Hate Recommendations is an essay by Emily Brunson.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
Excerpts
A few years ago, when recommendation pages and criticism sites began springing up on the web like mushrooms after a nice rain, I was fascinated. I put together a TS Jimbabe rec page, because (at that time) there seemed to be few Jim-centric stories around, and I really liked the stories that I featured. But I got busy with other things, didn't keep it updated, and it's now sort of a page preserved in amber, if you will -- a still-life of the state of TS fandom and Em's taste oh-so-many years ago. In other words, dull as dirt.But then there were more and more of these phenomena. I ran across a web ring for recommendation sites, and feverishly checked: Was I on any of them? If I wasn't, did that mean I sucked? I was on some of them -- yippee! But I wasn't on more, and it sent me into a crashing tailspin.
And of all the rec sites out there, there was one I achingly wanted to be on. It was the sine qua non of rec lists, for me. People celebrated when they made it. Some friends of mine made it. Some authors I didn't much care for made the list. And I wanted to. Oh, I wanted to. But I never made that list.
A while back, I finally realized how silly I was being. And how personally destructive. What did it matter that one person did not care for my work? Others did, and their words of support, their comments, their *existence*, reminded me of why I write. Yes, I write to get tales out of my head. But mostly I write because I like to write, and because I love knowing that readers have come to my world -- willingly -- for a little while.
And yet, there was a kernel of truth that was so very, very hard for me to swallow: You will not be everyone's favorite. You will not even be everyone's least favorite. For some people, you simply will not exist.
I don't look at rec sites anymore. I appreciate -- deeply -- ones that recommend various of my stories. I respect ones that do not, because we are talking about personal taste as well as critical examination, and I do recognize that I am not always going to make the cut. Far from always. In fact, I might only make the cut 10% of the time, or 5%. And that's simply the way things are.