#i can just write different words and idk? skip em.. change the form of the word or whatever

[alligaytorswamp]

i'd certainly benefit from being literate

[c0rpseductor]

struggling to stay awake but i watched the sarah z video about fanfic as an art form (very good) and then in the related videos saw several from a youtube account that gives fanfic writing tips. i was curious so i watched the one that’s like, “tips for writing fanfic that can’t work in original fiction” and have thots

i guess i kind of feel ambivalent about it bc like. on one hand i agree fic as a medium encourages and can sometimes greatly benefit from a lot of stuff that doesn’t fly in original fiction, like cutting out canon events we’ve already seen or descriptions we should already know. a fic doesn’t have to be a totally standalone work given it already depends heavily on the context of the canon it’s derived from.

on the other hand i kind of struggle to see how some of these tips benefit _any_ form of writing? like “the pace can be very choppy or glacial if you want! pacing doesn’t matter!” feels like poor advice to me if you’re trying to make your fic read well. canon can prop up a lack of exposition but cannot change the way your fic reads as its own work. i think pacing very much still matters, and “good pacing” can be somewhat subjective, but the actual wording of the advice was along the lines of like, pacing straight up doesn’t matter, which i don’t agree with at all. i think a featured comment along these lines (bc the video maker showed some other writers’ opinions that they liked) was essentially like, “you can have really incredibly slow pacing and it be fine if the story is just a relationship study and there’s no plot or themes or meaning.” EVERY STORY HAS FUCKING THEMES AND MEANING IT COMES FREE WITH YOUR FUCKING XBOX. don’t fucking encourage people to be uncritical writers oh my god

i also like. i understand that i have different aims when i write fic than other people. with the longfic i’m working on right now, i want it to retell shadowbringers (hopefully on to endwalker) with my wol and highlight things FFXIV made me feel that were meaningful to me, and i’m choosing to have a slow pace so that readers can both have that experience again through my WoL’s eyes and figure out who the fuck he is without it feeling like a hasty exposition dump. i also personally don’t like how a lot of ffxiv fics in a similar vein read, bc they skip big important canon developments and emotional moments, so i chose to like…not do that. i also know i have at least one buddy (hi faiya) if not a couple buddies who are reading it fandom-blind, so i wanna add descriptions of locations and people. (plus, again, having a biased POV character means every description is Free Characterization, Baby!) i also think having descriptions immerses a reader more even if they reiterate canon, and it can be a helpful convention to establish so that describing new locations and so on doesn’t necessarily feel so, like, jarring. with shorter pieces i skip unimportant stuff but still like having the opportunity to set a scene and work in some inventive prose.

which, like, tooting my own horn i guess. obviously i like how i write or i wouldn’t do it like that. i try to have reasons for everything i do and think about my goals for what i want my writing to evoke and the experience i’m trying to create. however i am increasingly beginning to think the experience i’m trying to create is one that just really doesn’t read like fanfiction. on one hand, i don’t always like how fanfiction reads, so to me that’s good. on the other, though, if i don’t always like how fanfiction reads, idk if i’m the best judge of these kinds of intentional stylistic breaks in fanfiction as opposed to original fiction and how well they work. i don’t like choppy pacing, i don’t like fics that dwell or feel circular vis a vis pacing, i don’t like fics that just leave shit out that would potentially strengthen the story they’re trying to tell (100% bitching about emetwol shb retellings that skip and summarize every cutscene even when it would be a big relationship moment for emet and wol. like come on it’s free development they give it to you), and i’m okay with fics that don’t have much sensory description of established stuff bc i can fill in but they’re that much less engaging for it. some of these pieces of advice strike me less as useful shortcuts in a transformative work and more as shortcuts that actually weaken a transformative work. fic has to exist in conversation with canon, but a fic i think also has to have an existence as its “own story,” if that makes sense.

i know to some degree it depends a lot on the individual fic, too. for a short fic or a oneshot i feel way more like i’d agree and say “yes, by all means, skip the exposition and unnecessary description and get to the part we’re meant to care about, we have limited real estate here, devote it to the details of import!”, like i certainly don’t sit describing the layout of the crystarium room every time i write a ficlet about it. but i’m more reticent to say that about longer pieces where you have more time to explore and recontextualize and reiterate shit that might still be relevant to your work as a whole.

definitely a thing where like. i don’t want to get super egotistical or on my high horse about it bc despite feeling more confident as of late i do know i have a lot of room to grow as a writer and even just in terms of utilizing fic as a medium efficiently. but i wouldn’t be giving these out as blanket pieces of advice, which i felt the video was doing. the only blanket advice i would give out is “read and dissect published works to see how they construct prose and do other technical stuff,” because those are transferable skills and i think knowing how a story is constructed on the page is crucial to making informed decisions about how to take one apart and put it back together. but i’m also the guy who is saying this to you while very much aiming to apply it to unmonetizable age gap gay catboy porn a maximum of 15 people will read so you can take my words with a grain of salt approximately the size of your forearm