#Thinking about writing

[loganlermanstanaccount]

and when I write an angsty fic to hozier lyrics who's gonna stop me

[inkcurlsandknives]

Thinking about what makes a compelling narrative

I've been watching and reading a lot of anime/manga and romance lately. They're one of my comfort genres. Way too many real life terrible things have been happening for me to be able to experience escapism into anything with a hint of grimdark. For example right now I'm watching My Happy Marriage/Watashi no Shiawase na Kekkon, which is an Anime/Manga/light novel romance. It is blatantly a Cinderella story, where all the villain's are cartoonish-ly evil, while the MC is simply a cinnamon roll, too sweet, too soft and good for this world. The whole thing should not hang together as a functional or even strong narrative, much less a show both my partner and I are enjoying wholeheartedly.

I think it's secret is that it is completely and utterly earnest. I think as an audience we're more willing to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride when a story wears it's beating heart on its sleeve. I think a huge weakness of a lot of popular western media and fiction is that it feels like everyone is allergic to sincerity. Everyone's too busy cracking a glib one-liner or being grimdark and gritty to care deeply and honestly.

It's something that a lot of anime/manga and the romance genre at large has completely embraced. Even media that is actually quite dark like Jujitsu Kaisen or Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba feels like a breath of fresh air because of how earnest the protagonists are. Romance books have this in spades, some of my favorites have been, The Sun is Also a Star, Get a Life Chloe Brown, and The Devil Comes Courting.

I think a lot of the time we're too ready to turn up our noses at narratives and characters that care and care deeply. Writers will say it' simplistic, or a character archetype that's overdone. But I think the first step of getting your audience to care is to have characters who care, and to not be shy about it. Let the audience care with your characters, let stories be earnest and sincere and wear their hearts on their sleeves. Not everything has to be a clever twist or a joke or afraid of real feeling, and we do ourselves and the stories we tell a disservice when we tell ourselves that sincerity and earnestness are trite and only serious grim and hopeless things are real and engaging.

One thing I always strive for in my own stories is to have characters who care and care deeply, and often for conflicting things.

[grymalkyn]

Practicing drawing Severus Snap-Crackle-Pop whilst entertaining thoughts of lore about that fanfic I’m never gonna finish writing.

[spnexploration]

When you get an idea for a fic that is very different to your normal style, and have to decide whether to pursue it...

[twospiritstooprideful]

ooohhohooo, the fic juices are ficing

[centaurianthropology]

Writing an original work is simultaneous exhilarating and sort of lonely. It's like being in a fandom of one. I'm so very excited about all my characters and what's happening to them and the terrible decisions they're making, but I have no one to shout at about it, because absolutely no one would have any idea what I was talking about.

[rottingbite]

I have been trying to decide whether I want to write a Mötley Crüe fanfic using one of the scratched-out ideas I had over the past two months: Nikki Sixx running over the wrong person... Or... Maybe rewrite Vampyrnatch and focus on a good ol' Cinderella vampire fic with Eric becoming a vampire slayer.

Or write that possessed Michael Monroe thing.... Idk.

[writingjourney]

I love you ellipsis. I love you sentence fragments. I love you poetic language. I love you long descriptive paragraphs. I love you short snappy dialogue. I love you weird sentence structure. I love you metaphors and symbolism. I love you I love you I love you.

[thesilversun]

Would it be a bad idea to sign up for 2 fic exchanges that run concurrently and only have 1 month of writing time? They are only 1000 words minimum each. So it should be totally do able. (Looks at previous exchanges I've done that were 1k minimum and the resulting fics that range from 5k to 15k) 2k in a month -should be easily do able. 10k or 30k would not (well maybe the 10k, I have managed that before now and not for a challenge.)

[mischievous-barnes]

i have never written before but a fan art i saw recently abt satosugu makes me want to do a fic abt it

[angofwords]

I've been writing a Banana Fish canon-divergence that feels a lot like an AU for a while now. I actually started it a couple years ago, but I've been actively writing it again for about a month. I hoped it'd be done by the new year, but it's becoming clear that it won't. I currently have about 7 or 8 chapters finished, someplace in the vicinity of 29K words, but the story is still only about 1/3 done.

I realized last night that I'm not writing this the way I usually write fanfic. Usually, my fanfiction is a one-shot that gets scrawled out in a frenzy and then edited into submission afterward. Or it's the much rarer multi-chaptered fic that takes longer, and so gets less editing, and the way it comes out is the way it gets posted, more or less.

This one, I seem to be approaching the way I approach my original fiction. I've written huge swaths of it, then decided that wasn't the best way to tell this story, so I rearranged scenes and changed POV to affect character expression. I'm taking my sentences apart as I write them to find the absolute best way to word things, and I'm actively considering when to reveal feelings, etc., rather than simply going with my gut.

This change has made it suddenly very clear to me that, in the past, I've been very haphazard and blasé with my fanfiction. That's surprising, as it tends to be fairly popular and well-received. Hopefully, this new approach will only improve my storytelling, but I guess I'll have to wait and see.

As it won't be done by New Year's Day, as I hoped, I'm really shooting for having the first chapter posted by my birthday, in early March. (I'm counting on the idea that speaking my deadline aloud will make me stick to it, lol.)

[melodytaylorauthor]

Everyone wants to be Batman

I had a thought a while ago about Batman and Gotham.

“Everyone wants to be Batman, no one wants to be Gotham.”

The thought felt interesting, but I wasn’t completely sure where to go with it. The thought by itself isn’t complete, there’s no conclusion or point.

Within the Batman universe, it’s been stated that Batman and The Joker need each other, that a criminal like The Joker can’t be an ultimate super villain without an amazing hero to thwart him, and a super hero can’t be a hero without a super-smart, super-evil villain to defeat. I feel like that’s a cute, superficial analysis, though. It’s trying to be smart, it’s a bit clever, and as far as telling a fictional story, it’s very true. But that statement is missing some sort of larger point as far as relating to real life goes. Real-life villains are just assholes, they don’t need heroes to “offset their story,” and real-life heroes are either regular folks doing something that needs doing or people who go into heroing as a job, like the fire fighting or EMT. They don’t need some ultra-villain to give them purpose.

So I put my own observation away until some sort of point could come of it.

I recently read an article that discussed how people — lots of people, average people — are totally willing to jump into a raging flooded river to save a small child, but lots of those same people are unwilling to contribute to government programs to feed that small child when she doesn’t have enough to eat. There’s something about the immediate danger and saving someone from it that’s just — exciting, dare-doing, heroic. People love heroics. They don’t like civic duty and caring for a faceless populace that needs financial support or offering community programs for public playgrounds or health care. In too many people’s minds, saving a drowning child is a no-brainer, but saving a starving child through a government-funded benefit program is bad somehow, or at least something to be thought about and debated and limited. As though a drowning child is obviously there through sheer bad luck, but a starving child must have brought her situation on herself, or is, at the very least, ignorable in a way that a kid in a river is not.

The article made a good point, but I feel like it was only a little deeper into the hero/villain dynamic.

When I read that article, something popped into place for me at a cross-section of all of that. All of the previous ideas leave out one more aspect of the villain/hero dynamic — a victim. A villain isn’t a villain unless they’re hurting someone, or threatening to.

This is where it all gets uncomfortable and weird for me.

Everyone wants to be Batman, no one wants to be Gotham — everyone wants to play hero, but no one wants to be victimized. But in order to have a hero, you have to have a victim. So Batman fetishes naturally include a victim somewhere in the story. You have to want someone to be victimized in order to save them. But no one wants to play the victim role if they can avoid it. Can you blame them? So why would someone who wants to be a real hero WANT someone to be hurt, just so they can be saved? Why not want to prevent the hurt to start?

This is where I start getting into the idea that the police don’t prevent crime, they respond to it. Something I agree with, to a large extent, especially considering my work with animals and my understanding of punishment/reward responses. People generally don’t commit crimes unless they don’t have access to the food/medical care/mental care/education/shelter that they need to get by. Other countries outside the U.S. have shown that access to medical care, mental health care, food, shelter, and other necessities prevents crime a lot more effectively than punishing people for hurting others after the fact.

I get that The Joker is supposed to be crazy — but again, wouldn’t proper access to mental health care help more than epic battles with Batman? Arkham Asylum isn’t exactly portrayed as “mental health care.”

Now, I live nearby a state hospital for the mentally ill and dangerous — the “criminally insane,” if you will — and have several friends who’ve worked there. A lot of the patients there are not fit to be released, proper mental health care or no. I imagine The Joker is supposed to fit in a place like that.

The people that have been hurt by some of the people in that hospital — it breaks my heart. There’s supposed to be patient confidentiality, but looking some of the stories up in newspapers isn’t exactly hard. They’re awful.

In order to be Batman, you have to have those victims. You have to. Who the hell else are you going to save?

That line of thinking has me really turned off by the whole concept of superheroes and villains. It becomes a false dichotomy that leaves out the pain and suffering of the people stuck in the middle.

This is part of the reason I’ve enjoyed the show The Boys so much. Although that premise paints the superheroes as no better than the villains, which presents another story line that I’ve been enjoying. Batman is generally supposed to be a moral, decent guy. But I digress.

I think this sort of thing matters, and matters to me, because as a storyteller, I’m acutely aware of the purpose that stories serve in human society. We tell each other how life is, how it could be, what to look for and care about, how the world works, in stories. We communicate how people should behave, what’s right, what’s good, what’s true; and what’s wrong, what’s deplorable, what hurts. And when a story — especially a popular type of story — misses an important character or point, I find it a little concerning. We create our society with stories. We support and decry the types of society we want or want to be free of by telling stories to each other about how things could be, or how they might be if things go wrong.

There’s a not a lot I can do about it. I can try to tell better stories and do my best to make them stick and not miss important aspects of communities and people. But I assume Batman and The Joker are probably going to stay really popular for a long time.

Hell, even I enjoyed Heath Ledger’s Joker. Just because I know better doesn’t make it not a fun story. And Batman is supposed to be a moral guy. He’s kind of sort of supposed to be an example of how we want to be. How we want to teach others to be. Still, though, there’s that entire other group of characters that represents all of us collectively a whole lot more accurately. The ones Batman stories don’t talk much about. The people whose names we don’t even know.

The victims.

[yuzanrath]

Seeing all the amazing stories written from people I follow (mainly mdzs fandom) finally motivated me enough to start practicing my own writing again after so many years of creating absolutely nothing...

I only wrote for a private/original story shared with a friend for now BUT I hope to one day get back into the feel of it so I can start writing fan fiction! I have a mighty need to write a mdzs fic etc.

But yeh very very happy I actually wrote something again 😌 that is all.

The fantastic writers mentioned: @sasukimimochi @mdzs-owns-my-ass-i-guess Thank you for your work ❤️

(If you don’t want me to tag you in this lemme know and I’ll remove it. Wasn��t sure if i should/if appropriate)

[definitely-not-an-alb]

Just how I can't vibe with a lot of hurt/comfort, a lot of romantic fic doesn't work for me because I think everyone should be more of a complete asshole to each other. Basically the whole reason the miscommunication trope as played by most current rom-coms (aka 'I thought you did a bad thing/broke up with me/whatever but actually it was a missunderstanding') sucks to me is because I'm a sucker for a good apology. I want the characters to be douches to each other, and then I want them to say sorry. If the whole romance is poised on the point of 'sorry about the thing I didn't actually do because actually I am and always was perfect and you're just mistaken about me', that's .... just not fun? Let these people suck and hurt each other. And then let them suck each other. You know the drill.

[severeblizzardlady]

I want yanderes who aren't totally violent and abusive to their darlings but are still super unhinged and willing to do anything, ANYTHING, for the sake of their happiness.

It is a feral need. The sunny facade that hides the insanity. The absolute violence towards all obstacles behind each kind, loving smile they send their darling's way. And which is better? A darling who's oblivious to it all, a darling who has suspicions, or a darling who knows?

...

All of them. Literally all of them.

[spnexploration]

Being a writer be like...

Having an idea for a scene that you could turn into a Drabble or One Shot and now it's at 5.7k words and oh God you just started another series...

Googling if it snows in Lebanon, Kansas

Googling where Lebanon, Kansas even is

Deciding to google where the other places in the show are while you're at it, like Sioux Falls and Lawrence. Did they just find spots on the middle line of the country?

And that's just my last 24 hours 😆