#secretly a huge literary snob | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

amorremanet · 8 years ago

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Oh boy, you're one of my all-time favorite content creators so I wanna ask a lot of questions. I'm particularly curious about 1-4, 17, and 19, but I understand that that is a significant amount of questions, so don't feel obligated to answer them all if you don't want to - just do whichever ones you please! 🌸

asks for fanfic writers

number 2 is done over here, but!

1. things that inspire you

……Uh. That’s a good question. tbh, it’s hard for me to pin down a specific set of things because… Sure, quotes or pictures usually help a lot, and so does music, but inspiration comes out of pretty much everywhere, for me, and at any time. Which can be super-frustrating when it happens, like. While I’m driving, or when I can’t get to my phone or a notebook to jot the idea down, but… Sighs. This is life, sadly

3. name three favorite writers — idk if this is supposed to be fan-authors or not but i’m really bad at picking fave fan-authors, so I’m going with not

1. Federico García Lorca — don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, crying a lot, because García Lorca was such a beautiful soul who wrote such beautiful poems and plays, and THIS!! BADASS!!!! OH MY GOD. He was killed for being a gay man who gave General Franco the middle finger and didn’t just lie down for fascism but fought to try and keep his country from being taken over by said fascists. I love this man, don’t even go there.

2. Fyodor Dostoevsky — it was a really close call between him and Mikhail Bulgakov, because I’m limiting myself to one prolific Russian even though I love them both. But Dostoevsky won out because I’ve loved him longer, and I’ve read more of his stuff than I have Bulgakov’s (which is really saying a lot because Dostoevsky often makes GRRM look positively succinct by comparison) (though in fairness, that’s a bit on his brain; Dostoevsky lived with a form of temporal lobe epilepsy that resulted in hypergraphia and he lived in an age when novels were originally published as serials and you got paid by the word, so much like Darles Chickens, he went on and on and added subplots left right and center because Dostoevsky had to get paid), and The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite novels ever.

It’s also secretly hilarious, like. Yes, it’s a door-stopper that has a lot of heavy shit going on, too, with familial dysfunction and murder and all kinds of theology — but don’t try to read this book while you’re drinking something because you will probably choke on it at some point.

3. Adrienne Kennedy (I have admittedly only read one of her plays and I haven’t had the opportunity to see any of her work performed live, but Funnyhouse Of A Negro is legit one of the best works of 20th century American literature. It’s a one-act play, I’m not saying that this is a link to a PDF of it but I’m not not-saying that either if u know what I mean, and it will completely blow your mind — like, it’s so out there, doing stuff that nobody else is doing in the same way, and it’s fucking beautiful)

Honorable Mentions: Anne Rice (because no matter what issues I have with her, and we could be here all night, even if I cut out the, “and here is why Anne Rice is Wrong™ about fanfiction” tirade, because I have a LOT of issues with her? I am still trash garbage for self-indulgent gay Catholic vampires, especially when they helped get me through a lot of really bad downswings by being trashy and self-indulgent, the end)

Neil Gaiman (because no matter what issues I have with him — and there are plenty of them, some personal and some ideological — Good Omens, American Gods, and his run on Sandman are some of my favorite stories ever, they’ve helped get me through some shit much like Anne Rice and JKR have done, and I’ll probably never be over That One Quote from The Kindly Ones about, “Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it?”)

and Leonard Cohen (I would talk about him more, I feel bad for not doing it but I’m still not ready to deal with his death, even though it’s been a couple months, just? His poetry is some of the most beautiful shit I’ve ever read, and to be fair, Beautiful Losers isn’t a novel that I’d recommend to everybody but I love it)

4. name three authors that were influential to your work and tell why

1. Augusten Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, and JK Rowling get listed together because they’re in the same post and I’m gonna cheat

2. Kurt Vonnegut — like, I love his stories themselves, of course. The first thing of his that I read was his short story, “Harrison Bergeron”; we read it in seventh grade English and it was so completely unlike literally anything I’d ever seen. The things that were closest to it were Roald Dahl (they had a similar off-kilter sense of humor, though Dahl and Vonnegut are different in how they go about being off-kilter), Fahrenheit 451 (we read it in sixth grade English and it just hit me like a big yellow school bus)

and Animal Farm (which we also read in seventh grade English, and it was on a similar wavelength with “Harrison Bergeron,” as being stuff written by political leftists who weren’t afraid of criticizing the behavior and beliefs of other leftists, but ultimately, Vonnegut and Orwell are two very different kinds of satirists and, for me, Vonnegut always prioritizes the human element of the satire over the ideological element that’s so central to Orwell’s everything ever. Like, neither of them is completely without any grounding in the other’s Big Deal thing, but they still have their preferences, and Orwell’s more about the ideas, to me)

—but “Harrison Bergeron” was still so far out there from anything else I’d ever read before it, and everything else I’ve ever read from Vonnegut continued rocking my world by just going off in his own weird little Kurt Vonnegut direction where he was gonna do his thing and you were just along for the ride. It was so much fun, and completely engaging even if I didn’t always feel like I got it, and I love this about him.

That said, though? The biggest impact that Vonnegut’s had on me is that he showed me that you can write satire without losing all of your compassion or your respect for the human element, which is so fucking important to me, because so many people conflate, “satire” with, “being an asshole”

—like, so many people take, “satire” as carte blanche to be a dickbag to people because they think they’re in the right about whatever’s on their mind, even if they’re trying to satirize people who are in positions of power like Jane Austen allegedly did

(granted, I don’t buy that version of the story with her, but in fairness, that’s because based on what I’ve read of her work, I think Jane Austen was a bitter, self-righteous snob who had no friends and that her so-called, “satire” was really just her being all, “Ugh, these loser preps are so jealous of me but I can’t help it that I’m better than they are” and having literary temper tantrums over the fact that no one wanted to spend more than a few minutes with her because she was a complete asshole who looked down her nose at fucking EVERYBODY)

(I mean, I already stanned for all of the Brontës before I learned that Charlotte had an EPIC hate-on for Jane Austen, but I started stanning for her harder when I first learned the story about how she refused to take on some collaborative project with Jane Austen that someone suggested she do, because based on reading some of Austen’s work, she felt that Austen didn’t have a single ounce of human compassion in her entire withered soul and thought that Jane Austen had more in common with the people who abused Charlotte, her sisters, and their brother Branwell, than with Charlotte herself — but that being said)

Anyway, my point is that Vonnegut is a satirist with a soul, and that’s what I want to be, too. More fabulous and gayer than he was, but still.

3. Terry Pratchett — on a personal note about why I love him, no other writer can make me smile as reliably as the late Sir Terry. Like, if it’s true that Gaiman did most of the heavy-lifting with the plot for Good Omens while Sir Terry did most of the joke-writing, then…… I’m okay with that, really? And it makes sense? Like, Good Omens was the first thing that I ever read by either of them, and its voice has much more in common with Sir Terry’s usual writing than with Neil’s

—but regardless of which of them did what more than whom, Good Omens had a huge effect on my developing sense of humor when I found it at an airport bookstore in middle school, and it was my first real, serious introduction to the idea that you could write a story with all kinds of angels and demons and magic and weird supernatural hijinks that didn’t have to be relegated to the Children’s Lit shelf like HP and Narnia (though Narnia was at least taken seriously when I was a kid, and HP was only taken seriously insofar as people could call it a literally Satanic corrupting influence blah blah whatever bogus arguments they pulled out of their asses), or unrelentingly Serious About All The Things Ever (like Narnia and LOTR)

or such nauseating Christian propaganda that it makes you want to stab CS Lewis’s corpse with a rusty fucking spork (like…… well. Narnia. Which is hilarious because Good Omens literally incorporates elements from the Book of Revelation, and a smattering of stuff from everywhere else in the Bible, while Narnia has a White Witch and a talking Jesus lion and a satyr, and yet, the one whose main characters are an angel, his demonic boyfriend, and the Antichrist is NOT the Christian propaganda here)

Moreover, Sir Terry is such a good example of a writer who grew in quality and also realized when he’d done Less Than Cool things that didn’t actually live up to his philosophical ideals, so he constantly tried to do better with his work. I respect the shit out of that, and I want to be like that as a writer, too.

Also:

That’s the shirt that he wore to conventions: “Tolkien’s Dead. / JK Rowling said no. / Philip Pullman couldn’t make it. / Hi, I’m Terry Pratchett.”

Great shirt, or GREATEST shirt.

Honorable Mentions: Sylvia Plath (because I was a completely cliché white theatre kid goth chick in high school and Sylvia Plath gave me hope that I, too, could write angry, angsty stuff that didn’t have to be all HOOM BAM MACHO like Jack Kerouac and have an audience)

August Strindberg (completely rocked my shit when we read The Ghost Sonata in the Theatre History and Histrionics class I took in my first year of undergrad, because, like Vonnegut, it was totally out-there and so unlike anything else that I’d ever read before. He’s just such a little weirdo and I love it)

John Waters (honorable mention because he’s not an author in the traditional sense exactly, but he’s a content creator and he does write the screenplays for his movies, and he’s gay and weird and a proud freak who’s all about that camp trash #aesthetic and about being gay and weird and freaky, and damn everyone who wants to make you fit in with their arbitrary standards when you’re not hurting anybody, and that’s all Very Important to me, on a personal level and on an Artistic Integrity Feels level)

and Jeffrey Eugenides (I don’t love him quite as much as I used to, back in high school — a lot of the cooling on him started when I learned that he’s straight, when I’d spent most of my adolescence thinking he had to be LGBTIQ, but that then led to an appreciation of some of the other glaring Issues in his books

like how he sort of plays at calling out southeast Michigan’s history of racism and especially of antiblackness in Middlesex, but ultimately ends up replicating it more than he actually calls it out, not to mention how the whole book is really Not Good about it deals with intersex conditions and how it represents intersex people, and it’s really heteronormative in a few ways that are now incredibly frustrating for me because I see them in clearer ways than I did in high school

—but I can’t deny two things: 1. Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides had huge effects on the process of me finding my own voice as a writer, and they both kept me alive in high school, more than once; and 2. Jeff was an inspiration because he’s from the Metro Detroit area, too, and I was totally sure for so long that nobody from ‘round here could really Make It as an author or accomplish anything for ourselves as writers.

Like, I wholeheartedly believed that I was probably doomed because I wasn’t from Somewhere Cool, like JKR, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, or [insert any of the authors I ever had heart-eyes for entirely because They Were From New York!!! That Means They Are A Serious Writer!!!!] — but then along came Jeffrey Eugenides.

I discovered him completely by accident, because the Sofia Coppola movie version of TVS was on TV, and then I found out it was a book and had to read it… and then I found out that he was actually from the Metro Detroit area, and it was just? Whatever issues I have with him or his work, finding out that he was from ‘round here too was A Big Deal to me because !!!!! it meant that I wasn’t totally doomed to never have a future as an actual facts writer because I’m from Michigan instead of from Somewhere Cool)

17. favorite AU to write

ohhhhh man, hard question, because I like most of them.

Well, I mean. I like “correcting canon,” to borrow a term from @addictsitter — but tbh, I get so married to some of those ideas that I easily forget, until I’m called upon to explain it to someone else, that: Scott McCall isn’t canonically autistic and bisexual; Barty Crouch Jr.’s mother is not called, “Demeter” by anyone but me (but much like Braeden’s last name being Tandy because…… Meaghan’s last name flowed really nicely with Braeden’s, and Chris’s boyfriend being named Thierry Kensinger because I googled, “most popular baby names switzerland 1985” and, “most common surnames switzerland” and put together a name that I liked for him, I intend to just treat, “Demeter Lysistrata Gamp Crouch” as if it’s actual canon until everyone agrees with me); and all of my feels about [pick a character]’s gender identity, sexuality, neurodivergence, etc.…… are not necessarily shared by other people until I share them, oops

I like taking the, “non-magical/supernatural/ridiculously traumatic in ways that exceed average human capacity” AU setup for all of my fantasy, sci-fi, horror, Gothic, super-powered, or otherwise speculative fandoms…… and then finding ways to translate the supernatural parts into non-supernatural terms. Like, way back in the SPN fandom, my go-to was that Castiel isn’t so out-of-touch with people because he’s an angel; it’s because he’s autistic.

In Teen Wolf land: well, the Hales are generally not all dead, for one thing, because they’re not werewolves so the Argents had no reason to kill them, and Peter deciding to stalk and abuse Scott and Lydia has no magical components to it, he’s just a fucking creeper who preys on and probably assaults teenagers, possibly while he’s dating their mothers (since he’s canonically hit on both Melissa and Natalie, and went out with Melissa that one time in s1).

Then, Jackson’s kanima plot from s2 can be translated into non-magic terms as, for an example, Matt murdering the swim team on his own and dragging Jackson into it after Jackson witnesses one of the murders (I usually move Tucker the Mechanic to earlier and have Jackson be the accidental witness to his murder instead of Stiles), and instead of there being magical mind control murder lizard hijinks, Matt abuses and manipulates Jackson non-magically, Jackson falls harder into his fledgling drinking problem that came up a couple times back in s1 but was never mentioned again, and it’s Bad before Matt eventually gets caught and sent to prison. Even helping send him to prison with a promise of immunity in exchange for his testimony, Jackson doesn’t tell the whole story — not even to Danny — because there’s a lot of it that he’s trying to block out, or that he isn’t really ready or able to fully understand himself.

Or like in the Marvel theatre kids AU that I play around in sometimes, uh. Frankly, trying to make Thor and Loki into humans is kind of an enormous dumpster fire (a dumpster fire that I’ve enjoyed working on, personally, but still: dumpster fire) — also, for the link: cw for death, murder, kidnapping, emotional and psychological abuse, manipulation, (mostly inexplicit) references to torture and ethnically-motivated hate crimes, discussion of war crimes (more inexplicit than not but still), and hardcore douchebag!Odin (as in, he is the one perpetuating most of these war crimes, that is what I mean when I say, “douchebag Odin”)

But, uh. The characters who are not Norse gods are easier to put into non-spandexed terms — like, Bucky’s “winter soldier” plot involves emotional and psychiatric abuse; Sam hasn’t been in the military yet because he is in high school but his wing-man Riley died in a freak accident at Jr. ROTC summer camp; Pietro and Wanda are Erik’s cousins instead of his kids because otherwise I couldn’t have all three of them, and anyway, he’s ridiculously overprotective of them and will probably hurt you if you touch them; Nick Fury is the much beleaguered director of the theatre club, who is trying to (more or less) single-handedly save the entire fine arts department;

and Wade Wilson isn’t on drugs, he’s just like that naturally (“like that” here having the meaning of any number of possible ridiculous things but right now, let’s go with, “following Logan Howlett: Professor of Art™ around the mall on Saturday, narrating the entire thing like an episode of Crocodile Hunter, and dragging Peter Parker with him because Peter actually answered his phone when Wade called him at Too Early On A Saturday O’Clock and he has no idea why they’re doing this, but okay”)

And I was going to be sad because it’s 3:15 AM now and I didn’t feel like I had the energy left to talk about one completely ridiculous Star Wars AU in detail — but I remembered that I actually had a post about it a while back!

Short version: It’s seriously Keeping Up With The Skywalkers, just. Not rich and famous or anything. Also, no one is dead. Except Palpatine, probably. Anakin is a late-in-life closet bisexual who is doing his best to ignore this la la la, Padmé figured out that she was a lesbian after being with him for a while and is now married to Ahsoka — his ex-foster sister — instead, Obi-Wan was their friend in college and he and Anakin had A Thing before someone (Anakin) fell in with a really shitty homophobic pastor-local politician-crime lord who manipulated him (Palpatine) and a messy as fuck break-up ensued and Anakin has been trying to jump in Denial River ever since

(not that Obi-Wan can judge: he became Luke’s mentor when Luke was in college, knows that “Skywalker” isn’t a very common name and that Anakin and Padmé named their son, “Luke,” and he still totally glossed over how he, uh. Knew Anakin a few times over by calling him by his weirdo religious-political-mafia nickname, Darth Vader, in all the stories he told Luke, lol um, whoops?)

Luke is a soft gay activist but Leia is a hard bi activist who’s better at activist work that is more easily understood as activisty while Luke is better at stuff like community building and housing LGBTIQ kids who need places to stay in his spare rooms, Han is married to Leia but probably also kinda married to Lando in Canada (they were drunk, it’s complicated, but Lando is accepted as Basically Family by pretty much everyone. Anakin calls him, “the son-in-law I should have had” when he’s in a pissy mood with Han, which happens often), Chewie is Han’s incredibly hirsute old friend who has no sense of volume control (no one knows why his nickname is, “Chewbacca,” but Han insists that the story doesn’t make sense if you weren’t there), and the Falcon is an old van that’s constantly held together by duct tape, chewing gum, and luck

KyBen is constantly getting in trouble for being a bullying little shit to Poe and Finn on the playground (which is coming out of a lot of things, like, “Ben hates them for being more popular than he is,” and, “Ben hates them for being better at school than he is,” and, “Ben hates Finn specifically because wtf no, how dare you be so charming and make Poe Dameron smile like he likes you, this isn’t fair, Ben was like SO CLOSE to figuring out how to make Poe like him [not really], he’s going to go listen to a metal cover of, ‘You Belong With Me’ in his room and throw things, fuck everybody, he hates this town and this school and his family UGH IT’S NOT A PHASE DAD”)

Poe and Finn really just want that annoying Ben kid to leave them alone already like what is his deal, Hux and Phasma don’t like KyBen either (they just got stuck with him on hall monitor rotations and have to keep him from breaking people’s faces or else it will reflect badly on them), and Rey is a plucky, somewhat abrasive new girl who warms up really quickly if you’re genuinely nice to her and one time beat up Phasma to get her off of Finn because Finn was nice to her so Rey decided that they should be friends. Rey just moved to town with her adoptive dad

Obi-Wan is her adoptive dad

Anakin has the face-crack of the century

and Luke doesn’t want to detract from how hard this is for you, Dad, but is SUPER NOT IMPRESSED WITH EITHER OF YOU for totally failing to mention that you knew each other like???? WHAT. Fuck this, he’s gonna go to Tosche Station and then go have dinner at Mom’s with her and Aunt Ahsoka, this is bullshit

(Luke storms out of his own house, leaving Anakin and one of the kids who’s staying in one of the spare rooms standing in the kitchen super-awkwardly)

(update: it is 3:36 AM now, and I’m still doing better than expected, given how far off the point I’ve wandered here)

19. favorite fandom to write

Uh. Good question.

Cop-out answer that has a basis in fact: right now, my favorite fandom to write technically doesn’t entirely exist yet because I’m still making it up and the fandom won’t be A Thing until the novel’s actually done and people can read it. (And it’s not guaranteed to be A Thing but I’d really like it if I ever got to have a fandom based around something I wrote with my OCs. Like, even all of #The Discourse™, while probably incredibly frustrating on several levels, would be so flattering and I’d be beside myself because ksdfgkfgherb????!!!?! people??? liked??? this thing i wrote???!!!?!!?! enough to make a fandom?????!!!!!!!?!!!! *as yet hypothetical pterodactyl screech!!!!*)

Attempt at an actual answer: Right now, I’m sort of between fandoms a bit. HP is always my good go-to, because there’s always something to do there and even if Sailor Moon was technically here first, HP was my first fandom where I was really actively involved, in more ways than just going, “Huh, what does, ‘mpreg’ mean?” and clicking on that one NC-17 Aragorn/Legolas fic that abruptly shoved tiny eleven-year-old Kassie into the deep end of what goes on in fandom.

(Though in all due fairness, the first fanfic I ever posted online was some crack-ass HP/Sailor Moon crossover with a totally overpowered and inexplicably American Mary Sue self-insert OC. I was coming up on twelve, probably lying on my profile on that site and saying I was 13, and bless the person who took the time to leave a review going, “Hey, I know you’re young and this is a first effort on your part, but you show a lot of imagination here and that’s worth nurturing. BUT you’re not going to get much of anywhere if you don’t work on it and here are a few sources where you can start looking for help at developing characters better. I mean this to help you, so please don’t stop writing or having fun with it. But you can learn to do better, too.”

And then I asked for a copy of Nancy Kress’s book, Dynamic Characters, for my birthday, my parents found it at Borders, and the rest was history.)

(nb: this should definitely be read as me reccing that book. It’s not a perfect guide by any means, but it’s still one of my go-to’s for help with writing and inspiration for character development, and it’s a very solid, reliable resource. Like, I love it so much that I taped and glued my first copy back together about three times because it wore out from how much I read it and how I carried it almost everywhere, and then made buying a new copy a priority when I couldn’t put the old one back together anymore. but anyway.)

So, yeah. HP is my good go-to, and idk, I kind of want to try writing more than headcanons in the YOI fandom, buuuuut I’m not entirely sure where to start with that just yet — or where I want to start, aside from, “No matter what the actual main subject is, it will probably involve Chris doing IDEK what, something ridiculous probably” — and……

Well, the cop-out answer has a basis in fact? My original novel’s been getting most of my writing time and attention lately, so there’s that?

#sikenesque #memes for ts #mine: writing #mine: asks #fandom shenanigans #inspo tag: the theatre kids au #mine: marvel #mine: star wars #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #longish post probably//#also? ksjdjsndkvhb oh my godddd i'm blushing over the 'all time favorite' thing and completely flappy handsing and????#i am just also tired and expressing it badly and kansndkzkdnf!!!!! thank u ❤❤❤❤#asks for fanfic writers

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