this is the light of autumn, it has turned on us

It continues, “it” being the DVD commentary to panting like a dog at the edge of your bed, my TGCF fic about He Xuan, sexual trauma, and gender as a (ghost) ship of Theseus. The first half is here.

( Read more... )

This wip. It’s evolved a lot! I’m really enjoying where it’s going now! It's proving really difficult to write, but so is everything else right now, so I think it's just a me problem.

I've never been Like This about a ship before... but y'all knew that. They just mean a lot to me and these are fictional worlds I love to play in time and time again. But I'm in the dumps with my writing at the moment so this is just one of those posts I write to convince myself it's worth sticking out creative projects even when I feel about as capable of writing interesting things as a slug.

( say my name in the morning, so that i know when the wave breaks )

DISCLAIMER THAT YMMV AND MY EXPERIENCES ARE NOT UNIVERSAL

I don’t claim particular expertise or authority on writing longform fiction, but it is factually true I have spent a lot of my one wild and precious life on it. I like to talk about it because I find it fun and exciting, and I know it’s something a lot of people express intimidation about, which is something I also used to feel (and sometimes still do, sometimes starting a new longfic project feels like a criminal sentence.) I felt like yakking about it, so I asked if any folks I know on Mastodon had AMA-style questions for me on the subject. A couple people did, and I… wrote like 4k about it. The curse. Of being longwinded.

There will be a lot of generalizing, personal opinion, etc below, and no writing advice works for everyone. If you read something and you’re like “wtf I totally disagree” that’s cool! I’m talking about me~

( and now I will go to CostCo )

There are lots of ways in which beginning to focus more on my original work over the past year or two has, in turn, made my fic better, but I'm running up against some areas now where it's not exactly that it's making my fic worse, but introducing some minor complications. At the moment, this is largely around OCs--obviously, if you're writing original work and you think, "it would be great for [protagonist] to have an opportunity to interact with a person of [x] background/social standing/etc in order to illuminate things about their character (or whatever)," and don't already have any characters fitting that description, you'll just invent one. It gets more complex with fic, as there are a lot of preconceptions about Including OCs In Fanfiction. I keep finding myself in this position lately, and expending way too much effort avoiding including an OC in a story because it's cringe and blah blah, but then undercutting my own ability to tell the story well because I'm not letting my choices be guided by my (fairly reliable) instincts about what needs to happen, but by these semi-arbitrary rules about How Not To Write Fanfiction that I internalized reading anon meme threads as an impressionable teen.

There can be a tendency to course-correct too hard in this area, where people will avoid including OCs in fic at all costs because they've internalized that it's inherently cringe to do this and any OC they come up with will be a Mary Sue and readers will bail en masse etc--this definitely isn't the only reason people do this, there's also just simple laziness, as well as the desire to give other canon characters an opportunity to show up in the fic because the author/readers already have attachments to those characters, but I don't think it's not a thing, either. But I really hate when canon characters get shoved into a contrived background role in a fic that doesn't make sense and ends up distracting me/disrupting my suspension of disbelief way more heavily than just coming up with a utilitarian OC to help move the plot ahead.

And then there's the plain and simple truth that a lot of fic OCs just aren't very well-written, or they're well-written but in a way that distracts from the story the reader came here for, which is usually about the canon characters. This isn't to say I've never encountered OCs in fic that I thought were compelling on their own merit--I'm thinking of this one Fallout 4 longfic where the author's Sole Survivor was way more interesting than anything coming out of the actual game, for example--but I think there's a bit of a delicate tightrope to walk between underwriting an OC out of fear of making them seem Super Cool and Special in a cringe way (and I think this is the side I've erred on out of caution in the past), vs. having them take up up too much narrative breathing room.

I'm trying not to hem myself in unduly by what I think Fandom At Large's tastes are, because to be blunt Fandom At Large has bad taste and isn't a reliable metric of what is or isn't a good storytelling choice for any given fic. But it still makes me way more anxious than I can actually justify, lol.

This has been a bit of a stumbling block with Beefleaf 2, as it's become increasingly clear that writing this as actual factual casefic is probably the best route to make it a serviceable narrative, but casefic requires so many OCs! And also so much planning and outlining and work--you have to write a mystery!--but oh god the OCs!

I'm trying to push through my internal resistance... I think this would be good writing practice, since it's a type of story I've never written before and I think it could be helpful to get myself to do the exercise of coming up with and writing a mystery story instead of having my plot just be Vibes and Feelings like they generally are, and it's nice to have some scaffolding in place re: canon characters and details so I'm not overwhelmed with all of the stuff I need to come up with at once. Even so, this is an example of a time where a story being fanfic poses some challenges compared to original work... Beefleaf are lucky that I'm so obsessed with them or else I'd be sparing myself this misery and enjoying playing around in my mind palace of 70000 OCs that no one else knows or cares about.