Posting WIPs

[respoftw]

As a reader, I hate WIPs. I don’t like reading on someone else’s schedule and I’ve been burned way too many times with amazing fic that just never got finished. So I don’t read them. I actively avoid them.

As a writer, I love WIPs. I love the feedback and the motivation they give you, I love the guessing that readers do when your WIP is plotty. They’re so much fun as a writer and, frankly, sometimes necessary. Like now; I’m struggling to make words, worse than I have in a long time. So I posted the first tiny part of a fic I’ve been working on (on and off) for about a year now in the hopes that it’ll give me the motivation I need to actually finish something!

Which, of course, means I expect people to read my WIP.

Does that make me a hypocrite?

Where do you guys fall in the WIP debate?

Comments

[runpunkrun]

When I was reading in busy fandoms, I never read wips; I waited until they were done because I didn't like the uncertainty of whether it would be finished or not.

Then as my fandoms slowed down, or I got into smaller fandoms, I would occasionally read a wip. In some fandoms, wips are all there are, so I've gotten used to them. I read a lot more wips these days, especially if I know and trust the author, and yeah, many of them never get finished, but, oh well. Sometimes ten chapters of a story is better than nothing.

As a writer, I have never posted a wip because it's too much pressure; I edit while writing, so that I'm constantly going back to earlier pieces to make them match what I just wrote. Also I would probably never finish them and I don't want to be that person.