Fanfic meme

[dolorosa_12]

I know it's due to frustrating and for some, upsetting circumstances, but I have to say I'm really pleased to see so much activity on Dreamwidth. People are returning after a long time away, people are trying it out for the first time, comms are active for the first time in years, and, above all, people are interacting with one another! Threaded comments: I love them so much.

I've seen this meme floating around all over my reading page, but I think naye was the first to post it. Ask me any of these questions, and I'll answer it in the comments.

1. What made you start writing fanfic? Asked by naye, answered here.

2. Which of your own fanfics have you reread the most?

3. Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.
Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?

4. You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

5. Name three stories you found easy to write.

6. Name three stories you found difficult to write.

7. What’s your ratio of hits to kudos?

8. What do your fic bookmarks say about you? Asked by geckoholic, answered here.

9. What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing? Asked by merit, answered here.

10. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing? Asked by schneefink, answered here.

11. For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?

12. Name three favorite characters to write.

13. You’re applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?

14. Question of your choice!

My Tumblr import to Wordpress finished yesterday. I had to disable the importing of large media files, or else I would have exceeded the media storage allowance, and, quite frankly, I was not prepared to pay Wordpress in order to back up other people's gif sets. My Tumblr tags imported, but because Wordpress lists them alphabetically, any tag-essays are now completely incoherent. It was a weird exercise in fannish nostalgia; my Tumblr goes back to 2010, and it's bizarre to think there was a time when I was reblogging SPN, Teen Wolf, and MCU content, since I'm so resolutely fandom-of-one-ish these days. I can also see so many disntinct periods of fannish focus: the Pretty Little Liars phase, the Orphan Black phase, the ATLA period, that brief moment I tried to engage with Sleepy Hollow fandom before backing away slowly. It's like peeling back layers of personal history. In any case, now that the import is done, the whole lot is just sitting there on Wordpress. I'm going to put up a message on Tumblr telling people where to find me, possibly fiddle around with the settings on the Wordpress backup, and then draw a line under my time on the blue hellsite for good. I know some people will miss the place, but for me it feels almost like relief to leave it behind.

Comments

[naye]

1. What made you start writing fanfic? & 10. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?

:D

(I am so pleased this is making the rounds! It's so much fun!)

[dolorosa_12]

I think, like a lot of people in fandom, I started writing fanfic without actually knowing that was what I was doing: I spent a large portion of my childhood essentially narrating what was going on in my day-to-day life, but as if I were Sara Crewe from A Little Princess, a dinosaur in this book series I loved where sentient dinosaurs went to US elementary school, or a child convict wrongfully imprisoned and sent to Australia (there were a lot of Australian children's books like that). Throughout most of high school I kept a diary that actually consisted of self-insert wish-fulfillment fanfic where an idealised version of myself married my favourite fictional book character and we became a power couple managing the complicated politics of twelfth-century Ireland through a mixture of diplomacy, political marriage between our relatives and regional rulers, and sheer stubbornness. (I find this hilarious in retrospect because the character, while medieval, never went anywhere near Ireland. He's still my favourite fictional character of all time.) But I never shared any of this with other people, and didn't realise that there were whole communities where people created things of this nature (without all the embarassing teenage self-insertedness).

I was online and in fandom for a really long time before I got interested in fanfic as a shared experience — I didn't read any for a good two or three years, and I didn't write any for quite some time after that. (The first fannish community I was in, a message board forum for His Dark Materials, was uninterested in fanfic, although I think it was thelxiepia, one of my dearest friends who I met through that community, who introduced me to fanfic.) What made me first write fanfic and publish it online for others to read was a burning idea that didn't let me go, of three dead characters in an eerie, disorienting afterlife, who had to work through the things they'd left unresolved in life before they were able to move on. That fic pretty much sank like a stone, but I'd caught the bug and soon began writing more. I generally only write for exchanges these days: I find other people's prompts and the constraints of the exchanges to be a useful source of motivation and the promise of gift fic of my own feels rewarding.

I'll answer question 10 below, as schneefink asked the same question at about the same time as you did.

[schneefink]

10?

[dolorosa_12]

I'm most interested in writing relationships between women: whether these are romantic, familial, or bonds of deep friendship. I like writing fic where characters, through their relationship, help one another understand or come to terms with deep truths about themselves, or make a decision that has been weighing on their mind. I like to write stories where we see the relationship at a turning point in one or both characters' lives, even if they don't realise this themselves.

I like writing relationship dynamics where one or both characters are survivors of trauma, and are migrants or exiles in some way, finding a sense of home in new cities, new lands, and each other. I suspect there is a lot of myself lurking behind this preference, drawing from my own experiences.

I'm generally completely uninterested in writing the interior lives of male characters, and if men figure in my stories they tend to be either antagonists, the source of conflict from which the women are running, or are not point-of-view characters.

[geckoholic]

8. What do your fic bookmarks say about you?

[dolorosa_12]

My public bookmarks probably say that I only read fic at Yuletide! I've got a lot of private bookmarks, and these tend to be of 'comfortable old blanket' types of fic that I go back to and reread again and again. The public ones, while this may not be obvious to anyone but me, are my way of saving things for later to rec, and so that any person assigned to me in fic exchanges has some idea of what I like to read. I doubt anyone uses them in this way, but that's their intention.

[geckoholic]

Oh I don't think you're so alone in that; I too have private bookmarks as well and only put a selection of them on AO3 as well. XD

[dolorosa_12]

Yeah, I imagine most people only have a small subset of their bookmarks publicly viewable.

[monanotlisa]

Hmm, I like that meme...should totally tackle it at some point!

[dolorosa_12]

Yeah, it's fun to talk about writing, and to see how different every else's process, preferences and so on can be.

[author_by_night]

I like seeing all of the activity, but I've been really busy! So I'm kind of hating the timing. :/

[dolorosa_12]

Oh no! Hopefully the current state of affairs will continue, so that you're able to jump in whenever you have more time.

[merit]

Sleepy Hollow had such promise! and then wasted it all. Nevermind some of the antics of the fandom.

and 9 :)

[dolorosa_12]

It really, really did. I've never seen something squander so much potential so quickly — and the less said about the fandom, the better.

A recurring theme in my writing would probably be people drawing power from the landscape, and from the natural world. I tend to gravitate towards fantasy canons anyway, and take any excuse I can to bring the characters outdoors into the wildest, harshest landscape possible. You can see this in my fics Beyond the Ninth Wave, Weaving the Bones, and On the Boundary Walls (which I tend to think of as taking place within the same continuity), and also The Heart's Gold Thread and A Road Made of Stars.

My other recurring theme is exile, dispossession, and characters migrating somewhere unfamiliar, and finding a home in each other. I seem to write it into almost every fic I create, and tend to gravitate towards canons where all the characters are migrants, exiles or refugees — and who don't want to return to places they came from.