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

[goddess47]

I almost never post a WIP; I'm posting a fic now in pieces, but only because it's already written... I'm fiddling as I'm posting, but minor stuff... so technically it's a WIP but it's kinda not.

And, honestly, I'm getting more feedback and interaction on the smaller posts than I ever would have gotten from posting it in one piece. So that's an attraction for working on a bigger piece and then parsing it out when it's done.

I read a ton of WIPs... although sometimes it depends on the author on how invested I get... there are some folk I trust to actually finish the fic and others I give a chance to... so I subscribe to the fic and check the progress and read it when it's closer to the end...

But if it's a good start, I'll try to make a comment on that first part, mostly so the author has some feedback, as well as an incentive to keep going... who knows, maybe a couple of enthusiastic responses on a first chapter will help keep someone motivated...

I do have like a bazillion notices in my mail about 'next chapter posted' that I poke at to see what might look interesting... ;-)