kengr

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

19: Ficcer

On the obverse of the coin that is my essayist self, professional or otherwise, there's the part of me that also enjoys writing fic. The story of the first fics that I remember writing has been told before, in a notebook, with one-page adventures in a spiral-bound notebook that once was threatened with exposure by a sibling if I didn't stop behaving like a younger sibling about things. At least, that's what I remember the threat as. It's the sort of thing that a young child produces, with all of the mixing, mashing, and generally lack of care for things like continuity, acting in character, or good names for the principal actors in the story. It is, therefore, perfect and perfectly fine for a child of the age that produced it.

There is at least one original works-type story from my near-teenage years, or just falling into my teenage years, that I remember basing upon the private-eye narrative style in the Tracer Bullet noir-type stories that Bill Watterson would come back to as a frequent way of showing where Calvin's imagination was at the time. I doubt it even read like a dime-store novel, but the people who were part of the writing workshop seemed pleased with it as a creation of a child of that age, and there were definitely laughs when I read the short story aloud, which was what was intended, since Tracer Bullet is much more a noir pastiche and parody than something that was intended to be taken seriously as a noir work. And I like playing with language when I write. There are phrases that I slip into stories that are allusions and references to other things, whether other stories I've written, or other properties, characters, or artifacts, or just other things in the universe that the fic is stationed in. Nathalie Heartless is a perfect name for a villain of some scope in a Kingdom Hearts/Miraculous Ladybug crossover. Halloween on Centauri Prime where there is the sound of a distant HONK when there are revelers come to do a little mischief on the Imperial Palace (with the Emperor's permission, of course.) The idea that the girl and her fox in Epistory might have been only one of many who came through, including things like a boy and a tiger, or an old man and two birds. That a child of Calvin's might want to change their name into a symbol, like some other famous person who did that. That Lilo watched a movie about whales and a guy who gets into a whale tank to talk to them. Those kinds of things. Little winks and nods that don't detract from the story, but do reward those who have experience with other fandoms with a little Captain America "Ah, I got that reference" moment while they go along.

I set that type of fic aside as I developed other interests and hobbies throughout my high school and university days, but that's with a quasi-asterisk, and I was playing RP forum games, and even tried to play a character or two on some RP games on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. So, it wasn't that I stopped writing fic, it's that I stopped writing a specific kind of fic, and instead participated in creating works that were part of a braoder universe. Subreality, the Boardieverse (BRIIIIICK!), the QFGC, and the like. With the occasional fic effort all the same, set in those spaces. In a largely text-based medium, textual stories flowed out all the same, just as collaborations, rather than as a single author doing a more defined story work. I suspect similar things are happening these days as well, but they're probably happening in Discord servers, hidden from curious and prying eyes, instead of on mailing lists, phpBB forums, or bulletin board systems (BBSes). Or in MUDs.

Mostly, my return to the type of fic that I started with coincides with collecting an AO3 account and then using it to sign up for a pinch hit for an exchange, and then from there, basically doing a lot of exchange signups. Many authors, but I remember hearing this specifically from Seanan McGuire, who may have heard it from elsewhere, say that the imposition of constraints is what gets creativity to flow. This is true for me. Left to my own devices, I often flounder, but if some idea or constraint or exchange prompt comes along and gives me some parameters to work with, then the ideas start happening and eventually I can come up with something that works and I can post. I could say that means I'm not very creative on my own, but that would not be truthful. I'm plenty creative, I just am better as a riffer than as a whole cloth creator.

I didn't come back to the form of fic that I started in until gathering up an AO3 account and doing so to participate, somewhat timidly, as a pinch-hitter, and then a participant, in various exchanges. I'm not usually someone throwing themselves wholeheartedly into new fandomms, nor necessarily following along with the most popular ones at the height of their popularity. I don't engage with media mostly for the possibilities of what fic I could make out of it, but I do find that enough stories leave holes, gaps, and room for interpretation for a lot of the things that fic covers, or there's a reasonably clear path for me to take from where the canonical version of something is to the version that's been requested. Sometimes I write fix-its out of spite. Sometimes people say that it's foolish of me to do so, because it was obvious the way things were going to go from the foreshadowing, which rather misses the point of a lot of fic writing. Sometimes I wriite something because there was a pun sitting there that needed using, and the only way to get it out is to craft a story around it. And sometimes there's got to be a story behind things, and nobody says what it is, or there's more stories to be told than the canon was allowed to tell.

I think fic helps keep my brain moving on things, and having a few different projects in the works at any given time also helps me when my brain doesn't want to work on one thing, but will want to work on another. It's the presence of the neurochemistry that I have that I like to have something to do at all times. Being bored and without something to do is not helpful for me. Meditation is different than boredom, since meditation is about paying attention to now, and trying to pay your entire self's attention to now, rather than being at loose ends about what to do with your time, or thinking about all the other things that you could be doing with your time. Or, worse, being on call for someone who will call at some arbitrary time, but otherwise will make you wait until they call, so you don't have the ability to pick up and put down various things, or do things that will take a short amount of time and then come back to being attentive. That becomes worse when the person who expects you to be on call expects you to be on call now, rather than "will you find a pausing point and attend, please?"

This is not to say that the process of writing fic is easy and all the words flow smoothly from beginning to end. This doesn't happen for essay work, either. Having multiple projects going at once means that if I get stuck on one, I can backburner it for a bit, let my brain work on it in the subconscious, and do something else where the words are coming more easily, and eventually get back to the thing that has the block. Or write some other scene anachronically that needs to be there and come back to the problem once I've figured out what the end point looks like, or what needs to go in between to get from one point to another. It's also nice to draft most of these things in text editors, rather than word processors, because I don't have word processors trying to help me, and because if I do it in a text editor, I can also just drop the semantic HTML in and not have to do any changes to it to get it ready for posting. (Because I'm so used to Dreamwidth and AO3 and other such things, I think in HTML. And a little bit in Markdown, but I kind of like being able to handle everything directly rather than needing to have something get interpreted back to me. I do like that Markdown strives to be readable even if it's not being rendered in HTML, so I should probably be a little kinder to it, but I don't always have a markdown parser or interpreter handy for when I'm doing things, and it's just faster at this point to go directly.

Fic-writing helps me relate to the fandoms and things that I'm in, by giving me a platform to work on, and people who might be appreciative of the work that happens there. It's nice to build a little bit of community with my writing. I tend to approach fic writing and fandom more like a storytelling situation, rather than an opportunity to play with the dolls, if that makes sense? Nothing wrong with fic writers who are up for any excuse at all to make their blorbos do stuff, or kiss people, or more, but I find that I have trouble writing things that don't have at least a minimally cohesive plot. It doesn't always have to be very fleshed out, but I work best in fic when I can see a clear reason why a character is doing this thing that I want, or a clear reason why this character would be interested in this other person. Which sometimes means I write other people's crack pairings, because I look at it and go, "Yep. I know exactly how that would work, regardless of how well it would work in canon." I like being able to make something that I would enjoy reading. That others do as well is important, but not quite as important as me creating something that I would want to go back and re-read. If it doesn't meet my taste, I won't be as happy with it as I could be. It's pleasantly surprising to occasionally get a comment on something that is older, and re-read it, and find that I still like it. And while I like "number go up" as much as everyone else, being on the exchange circuit, and often writing for fandoms that are older or pairings that are rarer, I know that the numbers that are going to be associated with any given work will be much smaller than they might be for catching a megafandom in its height. My most-everything'd work basically did that, and it was something I wrote for the joke at the end, and it struck a chord with the fandom. I doubt I'll write anything else that gets that kind of numbers. If I wanted to base my self-worth on the numbers I was doing, I probably would have left fic writing altogether. And possibly essaying as well, just because I am unlikely to ever become the biggest fish in the pond, regardless of the size of the pond. I'm not the kind of person who wants to tailor my content to the engagement algorithm, so I will never have influencer contracts or sponsored posts, or, for that matter, anyone who would throw money into a Patreon or similar for access to my writing before everyone else gets it. I don't need it, and I think there are better places for the people who would likely become a patron of mine to put their money. If some rich billionaire decided that I should have a million-dollar monthly stipend just to keep turning out what I'm turning out, sure, I'll take that, but most people are passing the same twenty dollar bill around to whomever needs it the most that month, and that's a far better thing to do than spend it on me.

That, and I prefer to keep my own schedule of when I post and to where. Having to do it for money would probably sour me greatly and make me worry when inevitably I didn't have an idea in time for the patron line. (I fall more on the idea that fandom should be a gift economy, for the practical reason of the less money changing hands, the less legal problems that follow that money, and also because I think that everyone should already be given what they need to have a fulfilling life, so they wouldn't need to turn their creative output into something that makes them money.)

You can read my work and judge for yourself as to whether I'm prolific, good, bad, or someone to avoid. All I ask is that if you don't like it, use the back button and pretend you never saw it. If you do like it, please leave at least a kudos, if you have the spoons and desire to. (Comments are lovely, but they're additional work.)