ladderax, posts by tag: writing - LiveJournal

I was going to write a rare personal post, but I seem to have lost the ability to talk about myself except to blurt out TMI pity party crap on Twitter like "so restless, ugh" or "I can't write!!!" (These are not direct quotes, but they may as well be.) Taking a Twitter hiatus has been good for me. I think. I'm really quite terrible at assessing my own emotions or knowing what is, in fact, good for me, and that's one reason I've gone back to therapy. The therapist I'm seeing takes a cognitive-behavioral approach and also makes me do a lot of work--there's a lot of recursive stuff, looking back on things I've just said and contextualizing/interpreting them, and sometimes I'm frustrated and think I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT PATTERNS THAT'S EVIDENCE OF but then when I really think about it I actually do.

Well, look at that, I've actually talked about myself.

And that actually fits in (sorta?) with what I wanted to talk about in this post, which is POV in writing and especially in fanfic. I'm currently writing a fic in first person (it's not for Inception, don't worry), and in order to do so I had to overcome a lot of internalized norms like "YOU NEVER WRITE A FIC IN FIRST PERSON! NEVER! NEVARRRRRRRRrr". I've had a number of conversations with people about this, and heard a lot of different interpretations for this rule, but I've never really heard an explanation that made me think "oh, OK, I understand; first person in fanfic really is a bad idea."

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I recently put out a meme-ish call for constructive criticism here, and I'm really glad I did. After I went through the obligatory knee-jerk reactions of "WHAT IF I CAN'T FIX THESE PROBLEMS AND AM TERRIBLE FOREVER", it made me begin thinking about constructive ways to improve that DO NOT involve staying up all night until my eyes turn red and creepy feather-bumps start growing out of my shoulders.

-I am fortunate enough to have some magnificent betas; extremely gifted writers and readers who pull no punches and (most importantly) genuinely care about my writing. One thing I want to start doing is asking more questions to begin with--I find that I'm a better beta when I know what the writer's biggest concerns are. It helps sharpen my eyes to those areas, and it makes me feel much freer to comment on certain things I might otherwise have avoided pointing out because I was afraid to offend the writer--or thought the writer would see it as a non-negotiable part of the fic. I like to think I can be a pretty hardcore, honest beta, but there are certain things I'm afraid to touch. And there are areas I've rarely spoken about in betaing as either a beta or a writer. So from now on I'm going to ask things like "please tell me if this story is entertaining" or "do you think this character is funny?" or "do you think this character is unsympathetic? If so, how might I keep the character's basic integrity but make the character a little more likeable?" Lately I've been in awe of how George R. R. Martin (and Weiss and Benioff--mostly familiar with the TV series) could make Jaime Lannister so sympathetic (YMMV) despite pushing a small child out a window, having creepy sex with his twin sister, killing an innocent kid to get himself out of capture, and manipulating and insulting everyone and never shutting up.



-Also, writing habits. I write well past my point of burnout. Rather than breaking writing tasks up into small chunks, I try to write EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE and then get burnt out at the end of it. Or the middle. Or somewhere halfway between the beginning and the middle. I also try to write too fast--I often use Write or Die, and it may very well be that my current WPM (won't say what it is in case you're all like OMG THAT'S SO SLOW) is too fast. I could easily cut it in half and still write ten pages in a reasonable number of hours. But really, 700 good words in one day > 6000 mediocre ones. Really, really.

-Somewhat related: am about halfway through Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer (I can see why China Mieville likes him so much), which is so unbelievably exquisite and so far everything I want my worldbuilding to be and more, and it has this gorgeous and perfectly accurate passage about writing:

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I wasn’t sure I was going to tackle this one, but then I found schwa's post about epithets here.

A linguist and native German speaker, he reminds us that stylistic trends may vary in non-English speaking contexts, writing that “my teachers (German and foreign languages) always told us that actually using names all over is bad writing. I don't know what to believe anymore.”

I’m going to assume that most of us in fandom (at least in Inception fandom) are familiar with the epithet controversy. I’m not even sure it is a controversy and more of a widely accepted rule—No Epithets. Epithets are a well-accepted “automatic backspace”. And what’s more, people’s definition of an offensive epithet varies. It’s not just “the point man” or “the lithe soldier” or “the violet-eyed purple trouser snake”. To some, saying “the girl” or “the other man”--seemingly neutral, non-descriptive placeholders—are just as unacceptable.

I know that this is a loaded subject, so before we go any further, I’m just going to say that my intention is not to tell anyone what to do; it’s just to discuss my personal feelings and observations about this subject. Everyone has things they hate to see in fic, so I’m not here to judge anyone for liking or disliking epithets. ( moreCollapse )

I have a shameful confession to make: I'm a shame-deleter. If I'm really ashamed of something I've written, I will delete it. I'll always try to leave it up *somewhere*, if someone really wants to find it, but won't link to it anywhere. And I realize that's completely unfair to people who may actually like it. And it's not like it will erase it from my memory, or make it so that the people who may have read it and hated it didn't actually read it and hate it. So...I guess part of being an adult is learning to live with my mistakes. Basically I know I need to stop doing it. 

This is an aspect to the topic of "what do fanwriters/artists/creators owe their audience" that I hadn't yet considered. And I'm still not entirely sure. Do we owe it to our audience to keep our works available (partly so they don't have to go through the trouble of correcting broken bookmark links?) Obviously people often delete things for reasons other than being ashamed of them, and many times we don't know exactly why someone has removed something. Is it OK to take something down if we offer an explanation? Is It OK to take something down with the intention of editing it and re-posting it later? Lots of people I've talked to have the belief that if you've put something up on the internet that's its final form and they have to learn to live with it. But it can be tempting to tweak--there's always that EDIT and DELETE button. 

And if we're just like "oh my god this SUCKS I can't deal with it anymore", is it insulting to assume that our assessment of our work is superior to theirs? If I am ashamed of something I've written, I certainly don't think that the people who like it have terrible taste--I tend to separate the two in my mind in some illogical way. But I'm curious to know what you think about this, so I've made a poll. (If the poll doesn't address something you have to say, please say it in the comments & feel free to discuss any you've had with this subject.)

If you haven't read this essay by saucery about why some pairings become more popular than others, do it. It's incredibly thought-provoking and funny.

"Something about it speaks to you, beyond the mere socially acceptable forms of fannish liturgy; something about it is exactly what you need, the call of Self to Other, a binary opposition resolving itself. Something about it is basal and basic, a primordial chemistry, an ancient balancing-act in the process of... well, balancing itself."

It certainly explains why, for example, Sirius/Remus was infinitely more popular than Sirius/James--aside from James being dead at the time of the novels, Sirius and James were also maybe just too similar. (They also both had dark hair. I found a thing on Tumblr that said that dark hair/light hair couples* tended to be most popular, and I might be inclined to agree.) Everyone loves a good binary, or apparent binary, when it comes to relationships.

And I think that things like power dynamics (official or unofficial or some combination thereof) play a role in this too. It's why agekink and student/teacher pairings are so popular. First of all, we've got that Platonic cultural inheritance where student and teacher relationships (in the broadest sense) are often seen to be infused with an erotic power. Writes Kathleen Hull,

Plato’s own thinking—indeed, his whole project in philosophy—had its source in his love of his teacher, Socrates. Plato’s eros was real. Illuminated by the reality of his concrete experience, his love for Socrates was eventually transformed into a love of wisdom. Thus, Jaspers suggests, for Plato, thinking—good, hard, philosophical thinking becomes an upward-tending enthusiasm. In other words, both desire for wisdom and the intellectual means to it emerge through eros."
(Hull 26)

Which dovetails nicely with Saucery's point about the ideal shippy relationships being especially dialectical. We, or the characters we ship, are not only in love with the other person, but with everything around them, everything that makes them great or that they make great by their association with it. And, if something about them finds some harmonic point within us, we want them because of who they can help us to be. And, speaking of dialectical, such relationships can reveal the weakness in "strong" and experienced characters, can show that they still have things to learn and that they need love. THE TEACHER BECOMES THE STUDENT! </cliche>

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Tonight, for some reason, something made me think back to my disenchantment with Star Trek: Enterprise. I didn't hate the show--I watched most of the episodes, and there were things I enjoyed. (Most of them were probably Commander Shran, to be honest.) But I was trying to pinpoint what exactly it was about it that made it pale in comparison to the other series.

And a big part of it was the feeling that I never really knew any of the characters. Even on Voyager, about which my feelings are very mixed to say the least, there were characters that felt alive. Which I think was partly the acting and directing and partly the writing, as it usually is. Even when things were cliched and silly, they were memorable. Which makes it more fun. I remember Torres eating banana pancakes, the Doctor trying to create a holographic family (god that episode was sad), Tom Paris's ridiculous shirts, Harry Kim's clarinet. About the characters in Enterprise? I...erm...Malcolm Reed was allergic to pineapple? The ways they reacted in situations told us about them, but it was hard for me at least to relate to them on a really visceral level. Not that this is the only measure of how good a show is, but I've always found it difficult to connect with characters who don't have a plethora of silly little human details. Hobbies, memories, pet peeves, etc. I'm sure they did have some of them, but I just...keep completely drawing a blank.

I realize the absurdity of an Inception fan (and fanfic writer) saying this. As I've pointed out before, it's interesting that in a movie so concerned with creation and aesthetics, we know so little about what the characters actually like in those areas. We know Arthur and Saito both like Francis Bacon and a certain style of interior decor. And we know that Cobb and Mal like, um, skyscrapers. That's it. But it's like the characters are the ad executives or designers who achieve the perfect erasure of their own desires to fulfill someone else's. And from what I've read about those fields, that isn't even actually what happens--often there's room for the artist's own initiative. And presumably in designing the levels Ariadne as the architect had some room to personalize. But we don't know what her personal touches were, because we don't know her outside of those scenes. And we see some details around the characters, but we don't know what their relationship to them is. Does Yusuf actually like cats? Does Arthur actually like salad?

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