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

[hopelessheathen57]

I love reading WIPs because I get that nice dopamine hit every single time a "new chapter posted" email pops up instead of just a one-time pleasant experience. Also, in some fics, the comments by other WIP readers turn into a fascinating second read every chapter as well (I'm thinking in particular about "With Understanding" by Apokteino, where I spent almost as much time reading the comments section as I did each chapter).

Personally, though, I could never post a WIP as a writer because I abandon too many projects, and even when I finish them, I'm still going back and making changes to the first chapters all the way up to the end.