Playing to the Audience

I have a pseudonym at the OEDILF by accident: when I joined I didn’t realise that my login name would be my screen name, and by the time I learned it could be changed I’d already become established as speedysnail. But I’ve had my URL on my forum avatar since the beginning, in case anyone wants to know more.

I’m not bothered about pseudonyms, because what matters to me is how people are in workshops and the forum, not what they might be elsewhere. When I turned up, the OEDILF was mostly populated by Wordcrafters who all seemed to know each other; to me, they were all as unknown as any pseudonym, because I’d never visited that site. I got to know most of our members through the OEDILF workshops and forums (with one exception, a weblogging friend who arrived just after me).

The trouble with relying on potted histories in our profiles to explain who we really are is that they encourage people to jump to conclusions. “Oh, you’re Australian—you must drink lots of beer and be a lout.” “Oh, you live in Edinburgh—you must drink lots of whisky and wear a kilt.” “Oh, you work in a university—you must think you’re better than me.” I try to take people as I find them, not as I think they should be. Pseudonyms can actually make that easier.

I’m just a guy who turned up in 2004, wrote three hundred limericks in four months, and considerably smaller amounts per month ever since, and workshopped many, many more. As for my non-OEDILF qualifications, beyond knowing my way around grammar and punctuation they don’t mean much in this context. The fact is, we’ve all learnt more about limericks through the OEDILF than 99.9% of the population, and that’s qualification enough. Nobody apart from us knows what it takes to compile an Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form.

I know it can be tempting to feel that there’s an OEDILF hierarchy where some get preferential treatment; it takes vigilance to keep such feelings in check. That’s why I still spin through the New queue and workshop stuff by brand new members, take part in pushes to get people promoted to Workshopping Editor, tackle the Tentative backlog now and then, and try to treat everyone even-handedly, in the same way I would want to be.

Instead of focusing on the hierarchy and “cliques”, think of them as audiences. The main audience for my own work is a subset of all the editors; I’ve seen the comments and RFA patterns over time. And that’s fine—I’ve found my audience.

Compare what we’re doing to the music industry: there are hundreds of different musical styles, let alone individual artists, all with their own fans. Where would jazz lovers be if Miles Davis kept hearing from pop fans who didn’t “get” his work, but kept asking him to turn it into their kind of music? We too are creating a collection of pieces written in many different styles, some of which appeal to some more than others.

When I was working through the backlogs of some of our UK members in the early days of the OEDILF, I suspected that if a random American had been the first to see their work, they might think there was a lot more wrong with it than I did, because they wouldn’t necessarily have the same ear for British pronunciation. But to an audience of me, their pieces looked pretty good, and I RFA’d a lot of them. Did that make me part of their “clique”, or part of their audience?

When we introduced the RFA system, some suggested implementing a No vote as well. I’m glad we didn’t go that way, because I already felt at the time that the odds were more against my work getting approved than they were for our American contributors. How our contributors feel about the chances of their work being appreciated is clearly important.

We would never want to stop editors from expressing their approval, but expressing disapproval is a more vexed issue. There’s a big difference between a single heckler and a chorus of boos; groups of people can coalesce into “collective hecklers”, even if their individual comments are reasonable enough when taken in isolation. The chilling effect on authors with minority appeal can be significant.

Pieces that get multiple RFAs but still have what others see as deal-breaking problems represent the effect of our different audiences—jazz lovers who can’t stand the Beatles, say. What we should be more concerned about are how close some of our favourites come to having the best parts workshopped away (or, indeed, how they have had them workshopped away). Nobody wants to be the Miles Davis purist hearing Kind of Blue after the techno remixers have had their way with it.

Reworked from forum and workshop comments from March 2005–February 2007.