Put the pencil to the paper

[dolorosa_12]

Welcome back to today's installment of the January talking meme. Today's questions are brought to you by falena, who asked me how do I know when I want to write fic in certain fandoms, and does it differ for each fandom?


I'm a bit of a strange fic-writer, in that 90 per cent of what I write, I write for exchanges, meaning it's been written to fulfill the request of another person. Very, very occasionally I get the urge to tell stories sparked by my own prompts, but this is extremely rare. This means that the thing that sparks the urge to write fic in certain fandoms is ... someone else's idea for that fandom.

I've never found it particularly difficult to write to a brief — for me, writing fic to fill prompts is a fictional equivalent of what I used to do as a journalist: writing words on a topic at the request of another person. I never found that particularly difficult, and generally I've found it to be the same when it comes to fic.

I generally don't go into fic exchanges blind: if there's a letters post, spreadsheet, or app, I go there and try to see what prompts people are requesting for fandoms with which I am familiar, and make sure there's something I feel I would be capable of writing. If it's an exchange without visible letters, I at least look at the characters (and pairings) in the tagset and ensure that I would feel able to write stories about them in any combination. By the time I'm ready to make offers, I generally have a handful of ideas for fic I could write in each fandom I'm planning to offer, and I generally try to ensure that I'm only going to match on one or two of my offers. I never offer anything that I feel incapable of writing. That goes for characters and potential pairings as well as fandoms.

If you look at my list of works on Ao3, you'll see patterns in terms of the fandoms I write for — I have a handful of about ten that I keep coming back to, so that should tell you something about what fandoms make me want to write fic! They are all book fandoms, most of them are fantasy books, and almost all of them are aimed children or teenage readers. If I had to find another commonality it is that many of them are perceived as having flawed or incomplete endings (such as The Dark Is Rising sequence, or Robin McKinley's Sunshine), or I myself disagree with how they ended (Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows duology, Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series), or how a particular character's story ended up (Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein). I also really like to write fic in which the natural world, and supernatural otherworlds play a huge role, so fandoms in which this is an element (The Dark Is Rising again, Monica Furlong's Wise Child series, Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld) tend to be favourites of mine. (As an aside, if characters stumble into the medieval Irish otherworld, particularly if they fall into the story of Tochmarc Étaíne, that fic is almost certainly written by me. I think I've now written that three times in three different fandoms, plus a fourth time where it was not named as such but incorporated elements of how I write the characters from that medieval Irish tale. I just can't let it go!)

I don't know if that answers your question — in short, I choose to write fics in particular fandoms because people request them and I feel capable of writing them. That's quite a prosaic answer, but that would appear to be my fic-writing impetus!

Comments

[goodbyebird]

writing fic to fill prompts is a fictional equivalent of what I used to do as a journalist: writing words on a topic at the request of another person.

Very interesting!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you! I hadn't realised how alike the two types of writing were until I started thinking about my fic-writing habits for this post, and then realised that I was basically ... being a journalist, except writing fiction instead of nonfiction!

[trepkos]

I have never even tried to write for a request - and I haven't written for ages, so maybe I should give it a try.

[dolorosa_12]

For me it's a good way to ensure that I'll write something, because if left to my own devices, I might have interesting ideas for a fic, but I'll rarely make the effort to turn them into a completed work. If it's for a request, I have a minimum wordcount, a deadline, and the knowledge that at least one other person will want to read my efforts to keep me motivated.