Aug. 27th, 2008

POP QUIZ

Aug. 27th, 2008 09:24 pm
bironic: Neil Perry gazing out a window at night (Default)
Or not. I was going to make this a poll with radio buttons—"Which of the following embarrassing sentences did [livejournal.com profile] bironic not write once upon a time"—but you know what? I had too much fun picking out passages. So: All of the following come from stories I wrote between the ages of about 13 and 18. Hope you enjoy.

Warning for indirect references to noncon. Also bad writing.

ExpandVampire Chronicles, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate movie and original fic. Oh, my darling Mary Sues, angst and artsy run-on sentences. )

(I wish I had my other laptop with me. There's a lot more on there.)


The moral: Although it may happen on what feels like a geologic timescale, our writing does change and improve as the years go by.






Despite the above, I do want to say that I still read my old writing, that most of it is better than these excerpts suggest, and that every single story in those archives on my computer still has something I love—something that's true to me and/or to the characters, something that still moves me after all these years, after all the growing I've done. There's something much more personal in these stories than in a lot of my posted fanfiction, because they were written at a time when I didn't have an audience; they were for me (and very rarely for very close friends, with one big exception), and I wrote about what I wanted to, no matter how angsty or depraved or silly or clichéd or egotistical or anything. It didn't matter if the girl was an idealized stand-in for myself. Most of the time that was the point; or I realized what I'd done halfway through the writing process, or even years later. The situations were exploratory, reflective, deeply personal, sometimes scary, sometimes thrilling, always honest. It didn't matter if the story never got finished, once I'd written the part(s) I wanted to. It didn't matter if the story consisted of multiple disjointed scenes that contradicted one another. It didn't matter if I repeated themes from one story/universe to another.

There's a reason I reread these stories far more than I reread my posted fic, even though it's the latter that I'm more proud of.

Fanfic—or more accurately, posted fanfic, fanfic on LJ—is another sort of creature for me. These are complete stories, with a beginning and middle and end; Mary Sue-free; emotionally subdued or understated; mundane rather than melodramatic; short; written in the third person; very carefully constructed; often gen or slash rather than het (would any of you have guessed that the majority of what I used to write, and still sometimes write when I revive the desire to write something just for myself, is kinky Mary Sue het noncon?). These have to have a point to make about the characters. They have to be good. They're going to be seen by other people, and I'll be judged by them. If they're going to be about me and/or my desires, they have to be constructed in a way that perfectly suits the canon characters. Goes my thinking.

This was what I was getting at the other week when I mentioned that my creativity has been stifled for a few years in part because of audience problems, whether real or imagined. What I meant was this: When I try to write fanfic for posting now, all the LJ fandom people and their stories and comments are in my head with me. This causes two problems: one, when I sit down to write a story, it's hard to tune out the background noise of other people's ideas and characterizations and find my own; and two, I'm thinking about what people's reactions to the writing might be when I finish and post, which makes me nervous about phrasing and originality and maturity and—just about everything, and can shut me down before I've gotten very far, or as I get near the end. It affects the kind of stories I write, too. PWPs tend to die ugly unfinished deaths, if they even reach birth. I've become self-conscious about posting stories whose main point is sex, as if I'll be respected less for it. (Which is stupid; I know this; I read plenty of PWPs and love them and their authors; but there it is.) And it has affected my stories-for-myself writing. People are still with me in my head when I open up those old files or a new document, and when I do manage to clear them away, it's still hard not to think things like, "Well, if I like this when it's done, maybe I can post it," which brings back the audience-reception nerves. I've never gone so long without writing my own stuff as I have since joining the LJ community. Overall, LJ has been an unquestionably positive influence—for one thing, my writing has improved in many ways, and I don't think anyone wants to write snippets of Mary Sue stories for their entire lives—but I've also lost what used to be my greatest outlet. One of the things I want to get back to this year, as school decimates my online time and pushes me back into myself while upping the stress levels that once led to writing, is the for-my-eyes-only stuff. Maybe relearning how to do that will rekindle the fic-to-be-posted "muse"; maybe it won't; but I would like to get back in touch with that part of myself that has lain dormant for so many years.

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