30 days of fanfic meme, questions 10-12
Jul. 17th, 2011 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit10 – Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?
There are lots of pairings I love but haven't managed to finish a story about. I don't know if that failure is always on account of the pairing, though. A longish "Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr temporarily reunite after Charles is paralyzed" story (X1-3 movieverse, not XMFC compliant) got bogged down by the difficulty of writing telepathic sex; part of me wants to return to it now, but a lot of the story is about Charles's grief and rage over his paralysis, and I'm worried about perpetrating disability!fail. (I've written Charles/Erik drabbles, and a short story with implied Charles/Erik background, but so far I haven't finished and posted what I think of as an actual shippy story.)
Other times, as with Doctor/Master, the difficulty is innate in the pairing for whatever reason: finding the right set of circumstances, making a complicated and tense emotional relationship come across right on the page, or just feeling like I have something to say that's worth the effort of writing.
I've never converted myself to a pairing I disliked before, although on rare occasions (e.g. a ficathon where I got assigned to write Buffyverse Anya/Fred) I've finished the story. And sometimes I'll write something to get myself over a specific difficulty in thinking about the pairing, as when I wrote an explicit Big Guy/Henry (Sanctuary)story to get past the fact that, while I love their emotional relationship, the thought of human/nonhuman sex, especially when the nonhuman in question is hairy/furry, squicked me a bit.
Once, some years ago, I tried writing a Buffyverse AU in which Giles came to Sunnydale a few years earlier and met Oz when Oz was fourteen. I really wanted to explore issues of consent and teenage sexuality, and how it might be possible to genuinely love someone while your relationship is doing them harm. But I never got far, partly because I was squicking myself a bit and partly because I was afraid of other people's reactions if I ever posted it.
11 – Genre – do you prefer certain genres of fic when you're writing? What kind do you tend to write most?
I don't think of myself as an angsty or sad writer, but when I look at what I've written, a lot of my characters spend a lot of time being sad. "Melancholy" might be a better word for a lot of what I do; I don't deliberately pour on the misery, but I'm interested both in pairings/characters who have gone through deep sorrow and in situations (e.g. aging, death) where a certain sense of loss is inevitable. Contingent happiness, built with difficulty in unpromising circumstances, is more my kind of thing than perfect unclouded joy.
I'm definitely a character-focused writer and not a plotty one. There are probably fewer than a handful of my stories that have a plot in the normal sense. But I do think my stories, at least the most successful ones, have structure. It's just thematic rather than narrative.
I have a weakness for hurt/comfort, but that's more as a reader than a writer. And while I've written my share of explicit sex, I've never much cared for PWPs, and on the whole my writing has a lot fewer sex scenes than it used to. It's not that I'm against explicit scenes in any kind of moral sense, nor do think writing about sex is "cheap" or unimportant, it's just that I want a sex scene to have a purpose besides being sexy or, worse, being the obligatory sex scene. I want it to say something about the characters and their relationship; if it doesn't, I'll gladly dispense with the hard work of trying to write sex interestingly.
12 – Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" fic of a favorite book or movie but set in a different fandom?
No, that's not my kind of thing. The closest I've come is probably a Giles/Ethan fic, set at Oxford, that riffs off Brideshead Revisited. But even that was a matter of borrowing tone and emotion, not adapting the plot.
There are lots of pairings I love but haven't managed to finish a story about. I don't know if that failure is always on account of the pairing, though. A longish "Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr temporarily reunite after Charles is paralyzed" story (X1-3 movieverse, not XMFC compliant) got bogged down by the difficulty of writing telepathic sex; part of me wants to return to it now, but a lot of the story is about Charles's grief and rage over his paralysis, and I'm worried about perpetrating disability!fail. (I've written Charles/Erik drabbles, and a short story with implied Charles/Erik background, but so far I haven't finished and posted what I think of as an actual shippy story.)
Other times, as with Doctor/Master, the difficulty is innate in the pairing for whatever reason: finding the right set of circumstances, making a complicated and tense emotional relationship come across right on the page, or just feeling like I have something to say that's worth the effort of writing.
I've never converted myself to a pairing I disliked before, although on rare occasions (e.g. a ficathon where I got assigned to write Buffyverse Anya/Fred) I've finished the story. And sometimes I'll write something to get myself over a specific difficulty in thinking about the pairing, as when I wrote an explicit Big Guy/Henry (Sanctuary)story to get past the fact that, while I love their emotional relationship, the thought of human/nonhuman sex, especially when the nonhuman in question is hairy/furry, squicked me a bit.
Once, some years ago, I tried writing a Buffyverse AU in which Giles came to Sunnydale a few years earlier and met Oz when Oz was fourteen. I really wanted to explore issues of consent and teenage sexuality, and how it might be possible to genuinely love someone while your relationship is doing them harm. But I never got far, partly because I was squicking myself a bit and partly because I was afraid of other people's reactions if I ever posted it.
11 – Genre – do you prefer certain genres of fic when you're writing? What kind do you tend to write most?
I don't think of myself as an angsty or sad writer, but when I look at what I've written, a lot of my characters spend a lot of time being sad. "Melancholy" might be a better word for a lot of what I do; I don't deliberately pour on the misery, but I'm interested both in pairings/characters who have gone through deep sorrow and in situations (e.g. aging, death) where a certain sense of loss is inevitable. Contingent happiness, built with difficulty in unpromising circumstances, is more my kind of thing than perfect unclouded joy.
I'm definitely a character-focused writer and not a plotty one. There are probably fewer than a handful of my stories that have a plot in the normal sense. But I do think my stories, at least the most successful ones, have structure. It's just thematic rather than narrative.
I have a weakness for hurt/comfort, but that's more as a reader than a writer. And while I've written my share of explicit sex, I've never much cared for PWPs, and on the whole my writing has a lot fewer sex scenes than it used to. It's not that I'm against explicit scenes in any kind of moral sense, nor do think writing about sex is "cheap" or unimportant, it's just that I want a sex scene to have a purpose besides being sexy or, worse, being the obligatory sex scene. I want it to say something about the characters and their relationship; if it doesn't, I'll gladly dispense with the hard work of trying to write sex interestingly.
12 – Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" fic of a favorite book or movie but set in a different fandom?
No, that's not my kind of thing. The closest I've come is probably a Giles/Ethan fic, set at Oxford, that riffs off Brideshead Revisited. But even that was a matter of borrowing tone and emotion, not adapting the plot.
