#but also i love the absolutely shitty less than standard definition quality of the show

[a-a-a-anon]

VYV SKETCH ‼️‼️‼️

[bettsfic]

betts, i'm having trouble with letting myself "write badly" (and with coming up with ideas, but mostly the former). how do you do it, how do you teach yourself?

first of all, major props to you for trying the shitty first draft. this past semester it was the #1 thing i wanted my students to take from the class. for those who do not yet know the power of the SFD, i have made a very helpful visual aid:

let’s say you read anne lamott’s “shitty first drafts” (and you absolutely must read anne lamott’s “shitty first drafts”), and you come out of it believing in the three draft method: 

down draft: get it down

up draft: clean it up

dental draft: check every tooth

but you think, potentially, the better your down draft is, the better your up draft will be, and the easier your dental draft will be. perhaps you think, the shittier your first draft, the shittier your final draft, or maybe, the more you’ll have to revise.

NAY. 

i’d like you to turn your attention to my gorgeous and professional graphic which took me a whole 30 seconds to make. i’ve drawn two spectrums which indicate the quality of writing, from :( (awful) to :) (most excellent) based on your own definitions of good/bad writing.

let’s say the top line represents a writer who has written a very decent first draft. the absolute best they can do. they’ve put their all into it. they revise it once and it’s a little bit better. they revise it again, but at this point it’s mostly fixing a typo here and there. they have checked every tooth. but it’s still not great.

the bottom line represents a writer who projectile vomited onto a piece of paper (metaphorically) and then cried for an hour (literally). their first draft is written partially in wingdings for reasons they don’t know. they forgot the word for “wrist” so they wrote “hand ankle.” objectively speaking in the grand history of the universe, according to god, it is in the top 1% of worst things ever written.

then this writer cleans it up a bit. now, it’s about where it would be if the writer had tried to write a clean first draft. it’s something they might be willing to show an extremely tactful friend, or someone with very low standards.

and now, magic happens. they revise again, and the draft is infinitely better than what they knew they could write. i don’t know why this happens! but it does. it’s happened to me. it’s happened to every student who has had the terrible fortune of stepping into my classroom. i promise you it works. 

writing badly is not just about getting your ideas down in a somewhat messy way. it’s about writing intentionally badly. it’s about aiming for the absolute worst of what you’re capable of. to write badly means to identify and define what you think is good writing, because you’re aiming for the opposite. maybe you hate stories that have run-on sentences, or which seem to lack self-awareness. that means your first draft is going to be FULL of run-ons and have no idea what it’s trying to be. but run-ons can be tidied up to create beautiful prose. and mindless nonsense that relies on tropes and cliches can be organized and added upon to be meaningful. but you need to get it down before you even know what the thing you’re writing is. we write as the process of thought, not the product of it. 

which brings me to my next point: *commentator voice* 

THE UNKNOWN

i’ve written before on the interaction between fear, the unknown, and writer’s block. one day i’ll write a big fancy craft essay on it that i’ll try lamely to publish, but for now i’ll be very blunt: 

all writer’s block is fear. all fear is the unknown. to resolve fear, you must make something known. to make something known, you enact a procedure.

this is true of almost everything in life. everything you hesitate to do, everything you procrastinate or put off. every bad attitude you have. it’s all the unknown. if you open yourself to the process of knowing, everything in life becomes less scary. 

how do surgeons perform life-saving surgeries? how do pilots keep a plane from crashing? how did i go to work as a bank teller in a bad part of town, day after day, knowing i would eventually get robbed? we have procedures. if this happens, you do this, this, and this. 

as mary ruefle puts it in her essay “on fear” -- what is the poet’s procedure?

this is, of course, a rhetorical question, but i’ve taught this essay many times, and read it many more, and i am obsessed with the idea of a writer’s procedure. combined with donald barthleme’s essay “not-knowing” which is also about the making things known, we have a foundation for which to understand the process of knowing.

so what is the process?

i have my own process which might work for you, which i adapt from project to project, but you’ll have to make your own. and when you do, you have to trust it. writing badly is easier when you know, like me, you have at least 8 more drafts to do no matter what. no matter how good i think it is, i will do every step of the procedure, every time. i have faith in my process. there is no point where an element of the story is so unknown to me that i am afraid to continue. i know that by the end of the process, i have done my best work, and there’s not much more i can do without the help of the people who have accepted it to be published.

recently i’ve decided i want to start drawing. it’s a daunting endeavor -- i used to draw a lot when i was a teenager, but like many of us, certain creative interests we had when we were younger get shoved to the side for one reason or another. for me, i never got the hang of shading, and i couldn’t handle ruining my lovely line drawings with my hideous attempts at making things look three-dimensional. 

now, i’ve tasked myself with picking it up again, but i’m afraid. i ask myself why i’m afraid. it’s because i don’t know anything about drawing anymore. i don’t know what to draw. i don’t know where to draw. i don’t know what to use to draw. i don’t know when to draw. 

but now, just by acknowledging what i don’t know, i have a list of things i need to make known, one small thing at a time.

what to draw: i take a picture of a fruit basket. i follow some mandala artists on instagram. i look at art blogs. i make a list in google keep/drive of things i want to draw. i keep my mind open to inspiration as it arrives.

where and what to use to draw: i need tools. i’m interested in watercolors, ink drawings, and calligraphy. i go to amazon and i pick out a couple things -- a watercolor notebook, crayola watercolors, micron and brush pens. it’s about $20. enough to get me started at least.

when to draw: i schedule two hours three nights a week to draw. i download the harry potter audiobooks to encourage me to do it. 

when it comes time to draw, the only unknown thing is where to place the first line. there is no risk in it, no fear -- i do it with pencil. it can be erased. there is no way to be wrong. once the first line is down, i move to the next and the next, making the drawing known one line at a time. 

the first step in the process of knowing is naming what you don’t know.

so my advice to you is this: make a list of questions you have for your narrative. if they’re too broad, break them up. make them tiny. then ask yourself, not what are the answers, but “how do i make these things known to me?” 

the response is usually “i don’t fucking know” followed potentially by “well i’ll have to try doing this thing that i know is wrong.” it might be wrong, but it’s known. and so you have to write it down, then trust that it will eventually be right.

thanks for the great question, anon. more on this at the start of the new year, but soon i’ll be launching a ko-fi gold! if you’re interested in getting one-on-one feedback for your writing or would like to buy me a coffee, feel free to follow me on ko-fi!

and here’s my writing advice tag.

[bigskydreaming]

Do you have actual good dick grayson fanfiction recs? I agree with so much of what you say about his character and the treatment he gets and im desperate

omg anon I know and I feel your pain. Umm, you should be alright going off my bookmarks page here, as a starting point:

https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlashInThePan/bookmarks

I haven’t read all of them recently, but I’m pretty sure I stand by all of them as being ones I’d reread and still enjoy. And there’s definitely definitely NO Batbro incest in any of those, from start to finish.  

There’s only 18 fics on it but as you no doubt know, I’m suuuuuper picky about my Dick Grayson characterizations, like….in particular how Dick and Jason’s dynamic is treated is such a sticking point. 

I know I have one fic on there that’s by audreycritter, who’s a popular writer in the fandom for how she writes a number of different characters, and like, I love her Jason, and I even love how she writes Dick a lot of the time too? But I only have the one fic by her on there, because like….she does stick with the whole “Dick was kinda shitty to Jason as a kid” take on things in general, and its not even that she doesn’t do it WELL, like she doesn’t paint Dick as a terrible person when she writes that particular aspect of things, its more just that I’m sooooo sick of that take overall, that I’m just like gah, I can’t, even if its done well, I still just…its not what I want to read, personally. 

So I just raise that point to be like, if you’re less picky than me in that regard, you could probably still find some quality Dick Grayson fics by going through the various authors on that list and seeing what else they’ve written, cuz some of them have put out a TON of content.

Personally, the Four Horsemen of the Apocafics in Batfamily fandom, like the tropes that I just CAN NOT with, are: 

1) Dick was an asshole to Jason as a kid/blames himself for Jason’s death bc he wasn’t there more AND NO ONE IN THE NARRATIVE CONTESTS THIS LIKE WTF HOW DO YOU PUT THAT ON A NINETEEN YEAR OLD KID WHO DOESN’T EVEN LIVE AT HOME BC HIS DAD IS BEING AN ASSHOLE WTF. 

2) The Batfam being assholes to Dick because of the Forever Evil/Spyral stuff, like just NO. DO NOT.

3) Dick betrayed Tim by giving Robin to Damian and didn’t consider his feelings at all, which…no, not how that happened and ignores the EXTREME clusterfuck that was Dick’s life at the time too, like enough with characters talking about how perfect Dick is and then resenting him the second he makes a less than perfect decision or enacts a decision imperfectly. Same with the Dick throwing Jason in Arkham thing, again, way to erase all context cuz its not remotely how that makes it sound, and also if you’re going to keep Dick’s actions as canon but completely disregard everything Jason did in that run (where HE was written incredibly OOC imo) that LED to Dick making that decision, like….just admit you want a reason to hate Dick and show what a terrible brother he is to Jason and go.

4) Fics that emphasize everything Bruce has ever done wrong to Jason and Tim and Damian but gloss over the extreme wtf-ery he’s done to Dick at various points in canon and just go with the ‘Dick is the golden boy, Bruce loves him the most-est, he would never do this to Dick’ EXCEPT HE WOULD AND HE HAS. Like, its the double standard. If you want to play the Bruce Is A Good Dad to Dick then like….it doesn’t work to play the Bruce Is A Bad Dad with everyone else card. And vice versa. Dick doesn’t get the special treatment the characters and fandom like to pretend he does. In particular I can not staaaaaaaand when fics downplay how utterly FUCKED UP Bruce’s treatment of Dick was, when Dick came to see him after he found out Jason died. Like, how do you downplay Dick’s father in all but name punching him, blaming him for his brother’s death, kicking him out of his own home, all when Dick (who had plenty of reason to be mad at Bruce, given he didn’t even TELL Dick or leave a message about Jason and had the funeral when Dick was still offworld, even though the funeral was only like five people anyway and thus they could have waited) made a POINT when going there, to try and avoid a fight, keep things civil. Like that issue was such a fundamental breaking of Dick’s trust in Bruce on SO MANY LEVELS and people in fic are like ‘oh and Bruce punched him that one time and that was bad too I guess.’

Anyway, those are just my personal big four Avoid, Do Not Enter tropes in Batfics (in addition to no incest/pedophilia/rape fantasy fics of course), when it comes to Dick’s characterization. 

It doesn’t matter how good the fic is or how well in the CONTEXT of those particular tropes that Dick’s characterized, its just a no go from me, because the takes themselves are just ones that hold zero appeal for me and mostly just end up being a large source of frustration. So I’m sure there are absolutely quality fics along those lines that are well written and characterized and I mean, its not like people aren’t ALLOWED to run with those interpretations of canon, lmfao, its just….they’re too opposite my own interpretations for me to enjoy. *Shrugs*