Please warn for violins and explicit sax
Feb. 5th, 2009 01:26 am![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sailorptahI was going to a long rambly navel-gazing post on shifts in fic-writing over time, until I noticed the sad lack of tickyboxes in my life recently. So I made you a poll instead.
(Note that when it says "Has your writing changed?", it doesn't mean "have you improved?" If you used to write bad smut, and now you write good smut, it's still smut. If you used to write lots of smut and now half your writing is comedy, that's a change this poll can believe in.)
[Poll #1343954]
(Feel free to elaborate in comments!)
(Note that when it says "Has your writing changed?", it doesn't mean "have you improved?" If you used to write bad smut, and now you write good smut, it's still smut. If you used to write lots of smut and now half your writing is comedy, that's a change this poll can believe in.)
[Poll #1343954]
(Feel free to elaborate in comments!)
![[identity profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
I think for my very first few fanfic pieces, my default tendency was crack, because I was kind of giggly and embarrassed to be writing fanfic. That's diversified a lot, happily. Also smut - smut is really my "calling"; it comes naturally and I never really get tired of it. That might be because I wrote original erotic fiction long before I ever even really heard of fanfic. I came to fic late in life, relative to most these days--I posted my first fic (Harry Potter) when I was 32! I think I'm drawn to fic genres and themes that echo the kind of stuff I'd been drawn to write in my (unsuccessful) original fic from my teens and 20s.
I can't say how much I've changed. I hope I've improved! I think I have, but I'm not a very good judge of that when it comes to myself.
Me, I used to write mostly in a horror fandom, and wrote a lot of crack; then I got into writing in a comedy fandom, and my writing started shifting into angst. No idea how to analyze that...
I'm also a lot more confident when it comes to writing in new fandoms and new things in general. I suppose that comes with experience. I may also have become a little less fluffy over the years, though I still can't do angst without a little bit of fluff in it.
I'm not sure why, and I don't think I can effectively write gore...but it happens, I suppose.
Also, I define "long" and "epic" differently. Long is, say, over 2,000 words. Epic is probably more like 20,000+ words.
That makes sense. As your fic gets longer, it approaches the category of Real True Epic.
It's really author classification I'm working on here. I don't want to ask people to evaluate whether their own writing was A Success In Its Genre (because the answer would sound either arrogant or self-flagellating), just what genre they were aiming for at the time.
Gee, that came out sounding rather long winded. *lol* Sorry. Your topic is interesting to me so I guess I'm trying to get to the root of what it is you really want to find out (arrogant of self-flagellating or not) ;)
The poll was inspired when I noticed that I used to write a lot of comedy, and now I write a lot of angst. So I wanted to find out whether other people have noticed similar genre shifts in their own writing. Whether or not it's good comedy/angst (whether it succeeds in making people laugh/cry) isn't really relevant to that.
I thought these categories were pretty straightforward. Can you give an example of fandoms with different genre rules?
Icon love, by the way.
It honestly worries me a bit. I think people are more hesitant to read long stories because of the time investment involved. And lately my chapters keep getting longer... I don't know what is going on but it is eroding my confidence.
So maybe you'll top out at some point. (But if not, that's okay too. I know I wish there were more long stories in my fandoms.)
I wish there were more fic period for my fave fandom.
The first significant thing I ever wrote (last year) - though I wrote a bunch of other stuff while it was going on - was a 100,000 word action adventure scifi love story. In hindsight, it was a hellofa first undertaking. I think I've gone a little into retreat from long, plotty things, writing mostly smut and now bleak, sparse ficlets, but now that I've built up four or five plot ideas again, some of them are going to have to break loose soon. But I know my writing style has changed significantly, as well it should have considering when I'd started I was a total newbie. I list towards the dark and difficult, now, where before I preferred happy endings and easy answers. I've improved my technical skills, too, streamlining my prose and polishing up my dialogue. My reading habits have changed not so much because my tastes have changed (although they have - thank Torchwood for introducing me to kink) but because I have less time because I'm writing much more, and have to be more selective. jj
i noticed you left out the concepts of "plot" and also "romance," which are two things that are interesting to me these days.
also the idea of otp versus multiples.
I write a lot of vignettes and character studies, hence some of my scant answers. I am much less likely to write smut now; I still love smut and love writing it, but I also really like to experiment with making things incredibly hot without including all of the sex.
My style has definitely changed from more plot driven pieces to shorter, more introspective work. Some of this, though, might have to do with moving from large fandoms to smaller, more literary ones. Hmm, I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it until now.
And as for readings, i definitely go for anything that seems interesting and experimental now, whereas ten years ago, I would go for fluffy ship fic.
I'm also interested in how you chose the genres/categories you picked and what they all encompass to you. Aaaah, multiple edits! Sorry. This last bit is not trying to incite anything or be mean. I'm just curious. I think it's an interesting poll.
There wasn't a whole lot of analysis put into this poll; I just tossed off a handful of categories that seemed pretty self-explanatory. Smut is smutty, fluff is fluffy, drabbles are very short, epics are very long, etcetera.
(And, yeah, ever since posting it I've been thinking of other things I wish I'd included - gen vs. shippy fic, for instance.)
My style doesn't really depend on fandom or genre, but on what universe I'm writing in (i.e. TUNE!verse has a very different style than STCH!verse, and they're both different from ROSE!verse, even though they're all SGA stories/series I write). It also, sometimes, changes according to whose point of view I'm writing from even within the same series. I think the fandom helps support some styles over others (i.e. LOTR tends to nurture very descriptive flowery prose whereas Supernatural has a lot of introspection and/or very sparse/stark language, IMHO), but I don't think any fandom would entirely exclude a style if an author wanted to try it out. But I'm rather experimental in terms of what and how I write.
In terms of genre, I started out with gen, then went to a lot of...er. porn. Then got kind of squicked on porn and went to mainly non-porntastic romance/drama/angst. My fluff quotient has gone way up in the last couple of years though. As has my crack, but I don't write crack-y crack!fic. I find it close to impossible to write something wacky as...well, wacky.
On reading, I'm a lot less discriminating, both in fandom and in genre. I don't like dark!fic, or death!fic overall, but I read a lot of genres I don't write. Although I do tend to skip the porn and most PWPs unless it's by an author I like in other areas. In that regard, I'm pretty much the same as in writing - I'd rather read character pieces or plot than sex.
Interestingly enough, I think what I'm writing now is closer to what I was writing when I was younger in terms of theme and genre, but I don't think this is necessarily bad. After I re-entered fandom about two years ago, I wrote a lot of things in imitation of authors whose work I admired at the time, but upon reflection I don't think they're quite as indicative of what kind of stories I really like to tell. Also, I'm back to writing a whole lot of gen, or at the very least, fic that uses sex for non-erotic purposes. (I love doing that.) I think I've shifted from angst into dark or dramatic, if only because my fic's a lot less introverted and reflective now, and I can construct plots that amount to more than "this is a portrait of this character at this point in time." And my fic is a hell of a lot longer. Some of it even has chapters.
Oh, and I write porn now. Rather a lot of it. Which is funny, because I used to balk so much at the thought of writing anything above PG-13. And 99% of my fic's in the present tense. I don't think my stylistic/genre choices are so much indicative of the fandom I'm in as they're indicative of the people with whom I've established a rapport within that fandom. If that makes sense.
I'm curious about how you define epic as a genre -- is it based on length alone? I've always thought epic was more of a matter of scope, which encompasses length, but that isn't the whole story.
I have to say that you being the one to make this poll strikes me as really appropriate, since I knew you back when I first started writing fic.
Oh, man, sex-for-non-erotic-purposes. Do you ever get people thinking it's supposed to be erotic, and being freaked out by your strange tastes?
And, yeah, I was defining "epic" as "something very long". Now that you point it out, I guess I have a preconception that long stories will be epic in scope (whether in the physical action or just in the emotional arc), because if they didn't have enough material to pull it off, they would be short. (So maybe there are tons of novel-length plotless fluff pieces out there, and I just skip them because they lose my interest?)
Speaking of back-when-we-first-started-writing, have you seen this (http://sailorhellsing.comicgenesis.com/)?
Yyyyep. (Or the reverse -- comments to the effect of "wow, that was hot!" and me going "...wait. But. What?") I do kind of like screwing with audience preconceptions, though -- there's this idea that anything labeled NC-17 or the equivalent is intended to be titillating, even if it kind of fails in execution. And I like turning that expectation on its head. I guess that's another thing that's changed since I first began to write -- my attempts to engage/challenge readers -- and I think that's probably due to all the pretentious theatrical theory I've been inundated with in college.
*nods* I think that definition has a lot of validity, and I think any long story that's actually good will have enough going on to sustain it, but there are definitely novel-length plotless fluff pieces out there. (Must resist the urge to mention Twilight -- oh wait.) The ones I've encountered aren't very good, and my inclination is to say that most of them aren't and could be much much shorter with a good editor on board, but I guess such things are technically epic in length, if not in content, or could be construed that way. I've also seen the reverse, where people try to cram epic arcs into shorter stories, but those always leave me feeling vaguely dissatisfied, because they haven't really given justice to the story and its implications.
-- holy shit I remember that. And now I feel strangely old. Are you redrawing the whole thing?
That said, challenging readers is all kinds of fun when they're fast enough to challenge back.
Hah! I actually opened a copy of Twilight yesterday, because it was getting awkward to have people say "but you haven't even read it!", and it was so boring. I didn't even get to the bits people generally mock -- I finished before Edward had even appeared. And I think you've pinpointed exactly why =D
Tried, got through ten pages, and ran out of steam. So most of it is just going to be the pages you saw, in all its badly drawn but lulzy glory.
My writing in the Hellsing fandom, however, has improved, but I'm not sure whether that's a maturing/evolving writing style or simply living in England for sixteen months.
I wasn't sure how to answer #4, because I'm not entirely sure about the dividing line between writing style and writing quality. Like, I think I use fewer compound sentences, m-dashes and ellipses than I used to, but I'm not sure how much of that is stylistic shift and how much is increased competence.
Oddly, my tastes in fic as far as reading haven't changed at all. I'm still a sucker for Dramatic Revealing of Main Character's Secrets(TM) plots. I still love romance fics for my favorite pairings.
I still like porn, ahahahaha.So, even though what I write has shifted radically, I still read exactly the same kind of fic as when I was thirteen and just starting to get into fandom. XDI also no longer read every single thing written, even if it's by a favourite author - I just don't have the time.
The only consistent thing has been my interest in specific pairings (Harry/Draco and Snape/Lupin), with only minor wanderings into different pairings or fandoms.
Overall, my writing can no longer be classified as solely romance, which is what I started out with. Now each story tends to be multi-genre, with the romance turning into relationships that are part of the characters' lives.
Actually, the biggest change in what I read/write came when I discovered that slash is awesome - when I was a baby fan and only played in X-Files fandom I stuck solidly to gen and Mulder/Scully. And that was really more of a change in the way I approach fandom and source material than in the content of what I read or write.
I do less drabble-writing now, but that's mostly because I was in a very active drabble comm at the height of my XF obsession. I should probably start back up with drabbling, because it's great for stretching my imagination and writing skills....
'course, I didn't get into the fandom/fic scene until I was 21. It'd be interesting to see how the results of your poll correlate with age!
Also, awesome icon =D
I started out writing adventure-style stories; I didn't know which tickybox that went into. Maybe 'drama'. And they were usually long. I then did sort of introspective character stuff, which tended to be short fics, then went onto a few experiments with romance, which were usually also short. Now the things I write tend to be about either exploring a fictional world in ways it wasn't in canon, character interactions, or both, sometimes with romance as well. And now they're usually crossovers.
Yet until I wrote all that I hadn't thought of myself as someone whose writing had changed. Huh.
I think my writing style, rather than type of writing, has changed a bit, but possibly not very noticeably to anyone but me. Except for my very early 13-year-old self's fanfic, which is noticeably crap.
I still always fall back on action-adventure, that hasn't changed.
What has changed is that this past year I started writing smut. On the other hand, I'm moving back away from that again. It was fun for a try, and I expect I will write it again if it fits, or as gifts for my smut-loving friends, but otherwise I've moved past that now.
I also write a lot more angst and more serious violence now. But that's something I think I've always been heading towards and it's just taken age and maturity and whatnot to get me to that place.
As for what I read, that has definitely changed. I may be trending away from writing smut, but I started reading shortly before I started writing and I doubt I'll stop reading. I also have read darker and darker things as time has gone on. Again, I think I was always sorta headed that way, though.
Honestly, the biggest difference between now and when I started is that I have a much higher appreciation of comedy, fluff, and actual functional relationships. I was a teenager when I started, so it was all FRAUGHT WITH MEANING and melodramatic in a way that it's not now.