Apparently nobody opposes the idea that there are no rules, just guidelines, and it’s demonstrably possible to get Permission not taking the formalities serious.

I don’t know how much the current Permission Givers depend on writing examples being about the prospective agents. "I don’t like writing out-of-context scenes for my agents, I’d rather show you my latest canon-compatible Harry Potter fanfic and a silly adventure in the Dungeon of the Board" may work with some PGs, while "I’d rather show you my very dark twenty-thousand words fanfic set in a fandom you apparently don’t appreciate" certainly wouldn’t.

Getting Permission should be easy for everybody who knows what to do with it, while going through several iterations should be a valuable learning process for everybody who needs and actually wants to improve.

Maybe we should blatantly say that "There is actually only one requirement: Convince the Permission Givers (at least one of them) that you won’t do anything bad with your Permission and that you understand what would be considered bad in the first place. If you got a medium understanding of the PPC, you may already have an idea of how to do this, so just do it, but don’t complain if it doesn’t work because you didn’t do the research. In case you don’t know what to do, here are some guidelines, which may be followed to the letter or in spirit, or may just be taken as hints to what might work, or completely ignored – if you really know what you’re doing."

Or would this confuse Permission seekers even more?

Concerning mentoring, there is already a mentoring system, although none of the Sib Houses specializes in guiding newbies through the Permission process. Is this because there are no volunteers or did just nobody ever think of it?

HG

I thought it was obvious, but if someone doesn't want to use the prompt, they should make up one on their own after they write the interlude.

Which to be fair was discussed by basically no one here on the board. It was dismissed out of hand by hS but that's about it.

So, revised edition of Data's suggestion: keep the prompts as optional. Change requirements so instead of two PPC -based works you have one in the PPC and one other of whatever the author chooses. Set the word limit for each between 500-700 words.

Unlike what hS has said, this isn't 'just write anything (but make sure it's the right sort of thing)' it's 'write whatever you like as long as the quality is good.' In fact I would recommend a set of optional prompts for the second piece as well, to help those who have problems coming up with something. Maybe something along the lines of the prompts from the "imagine your ocs" tumblr blogs. Counter to what people seem to believe, I am not out to tear down the whole system, nor am I out to make things harder. On the contrary, I want to make it as easy for new people to get permission as it was for me.

In the five years since I got permission it has only gotten progressively harder, and I think that's wrong. I was able to get it in one try with the first chapter of the second worst fanfic I've ever written, and Nesh even complimented me on the writing. If it was that easy once upon a time, why should it be so hard for everyone else?

It was, specifically, to edit the wording of the Permission article and the prompts document to say that if you couldn't/desperately didn't want to deal with an actual prompt, you should come up with something similar yourself.

Do let me know precisely why this is a bad thing to say.

hS

I think that's a solid idea, but I don't know what it would entail; writing for the PPC is different from a lot of other styles of creative writing in part because it's a running commentary, much like an MST. There's not a single way to "do it right."

That said, I can definitely think of a few things I'd like help with in my own writing, and I'll go as far as to bet that most of us can. Perhaps, if a petition is rejected, the author is paired with someone who's considered good at whatever the problem is as a mentor until the next submission.

Despite the example I set by eventually getting permission not even trying.

Being around for a long time may have advantages:

• The time may be used to watch lots of permission requests succeeding or failing, thus getting a feeling for how to do it right.
  
• The time may be used to pay attention when Boarders talk about their favorite spin-offs and to consider why these spin-offs are so well liked, thus getting a feeling for what does work.
  
• The time may be used to listen when the Permission Givers try to explain what they expect, and are promptly scolded for limiting the possibilities.

But Permission seekers may have done all this while lurking for years before they joined, and may already know exactly what they need to do. (I admit that many don’t.)

On the other hand, having been on the front page for one year by doing nothing but posting some random nonsense once per week doesn’t help at all.

HG

If I had to wait four years to get my Permission, I would most likely quit after the second attempt tops. If you ask me, a quarter of a year is long enough.

A year sounds like a long time, and would daunt an otherwise valuable contribution to the community. Besides, it takes several tries, which should shake off anyone who's not too patient.

The prompts aren't bad in and of themselves... My problem was partly just how I approach writing, and they were a valuable place to start.

If you hadn't stepped in, I would have tried to pass "The agents do laundry" off as a legitimate prompt.

Raise the standards and make everything more difficult and give more hoops.

So we should ask for a fic they've written in the past, possibly any original stories they've done, a lengthy profile for each character, an in-universe sample, and where applicable a CV for their RPing.

-July

...But I'd like to just say one more time that the writing should change a little. I don't know what the answer is, but I don't see a lot of variety in the writing that I see around here. "Good writing" doesn't mean writing that's almost identical to something else.

Sure, we're writers, and we're fanfiction writers here. A large amount of similarity is inevitable as we try to emulate a style of writing that we enjoy. Seeking variety within those parameters should be our goal.

...hardly important or vital.

The PPC existed and gave permission without them for far longer than we've been using a prompt system.

Once upon a time it was a simple rep check "you seem cool, sure". Then it became "hey your fic you linked is alright, you have permission", then "your fic and agent ideas look good, you have permission" to "your short story set in the PPC looks good and your agent bios look sharp and you have a fic set out for missioning, you have permission" to "you followed the prompt well, your agent bios are long and we can see everything about them and you picked a suitably bad story".

The prompt system is a crutch and does not us a good idea of a person's ability to write.


Your own personal failures to understand PPC canon isn't something that intersects perfect with what you're trying to argue. If you wrote a different prompt, we would have found out you didn't know basic PPC canon some way or another, and you probably would have been more embarrassed had it happened when you revealed it post-permission. Getting basic facts right is not part of proving you know how to string sentences together into a cohesive role, getting them right means showing you are willing to do the research and double-check things instead of going with simple assumptions.

Also, while I don't entirely agree with Bram on the fact of creating agents to be primarily mission-focused, not all characters are suited to actually be interesting or even good as PPC agents. People who have agents who are SI-types of themselves have tweaked them a bit, for the most part, to be able to work on missions. Agents July and JF are not, oddly enough, not exactly like me, something which, for example, Neshomeh and Phobos are probably very relieved about.

You are giving very short shift to every single other method we had in place prior to a couple years ago based on a lack of knowledge. I'm not saying people need to know every random tidbit of PPC knowledge, but if you are going to base your argument on stating that something must be done this way because it is important and we have done it thusly, you at least need to know how long it's been the case instead of presenting it as an 'always' sort of situation.

-July, who is apparently bad at hiatuses

Designing agents specifically to be good at missions is a mark of bad writing. It shows they're flat, two-dimensional characters with no depth other than "good at assassinations/exorcisms/detangling/what-have-you". That's another reason why the prompts are there: to show who the agents are when not on missions. To show who they are when dragged outside their—and your—comfort zone.