writing meme

[kindkit]

I am, believe it or not, trying to be Cheerful and Positive, fannishly and in other aspects of life. *laughs* Yeah, not one of my natural talents, but it's worth a try occasionally. So, in the spirit of cheerful positivity, a meme.

Ask me any of these questions:

1. Of the fic you’ve written, of which are you most proud?
2. Favorite tense
3. Favorite POV
4. What are some themes you love writing about?
5. What inspires you to write?
6. Thoughts on critique
7. Create a character on the spot... NOW!
8. Is there a character you love writing for the most? The least? Why?
9. A passage from a WIP
10. What are your strengths in writing?
11. What are your weaknesses in writing?
12. Anything else that you want to know... (otherwise known as Fill in the Blank)


ETA: Because this is crossposted, some of my responses are on DW and some are on LJ.

Comments

[kindkit]

This is hard to answer, because in recent years I've been so multifannish that there aren't many characters I've written multiple times. Back in my Buffy the Vampire Slayer days I wrote mostly Giles, and I loved writing him: his intellect and education, his mix of pessimism and dutiful determination to try to save the world, the way he cared deeply for Buffy and the others but was always somewhat distanced from them too, his troubled past that wouldn't go away, his essential loneliness. And, wow, looking at that list, I can see that I like fairly messed-up characters. I knew that already, really. I have a type, and Giles and similar characters are it: some of my other Giles-like favorites include Thomas Nightingale, Remus Lupin, both Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, Ralph Lanyon to an extent, etc.

But it's not entirely predictable, either. When I started watching due South, people who knew me told me I'd love Fraser. And I can see how Fraser is very much my type, but my favorite character in the fandom was Ray Kowalski, the temperamental, aggressive, less-educated, sports-and-pizza loving American. Almost everything I wrote in the fandom was from his POV. Ray does have a few characteristics of my type, it's true, but he's not really as close a match as Fraser. But I loved his use of language, and also he made sense to me as a person in a way Fraser didn't, always.

Characters I don't like to write, or find harder to write, are young people (20s and under), people who seem basically happy or "normal," people who are hip and cool and confident. (Though even here there are exceptions. Oz, from Buffy, was young and hip and cool, but such an oddball that I enjoyed writing him, although I found it harder to get into his POV than into Giles's.) I almost never write POV women characters, for personal reasons that everybody who cares already knows about. And as a white person, I get nervous about writing POV characters of color because I worry that the ideas I'm drawing on are stereotypes; it helps if canon gives me a lot of strong characterization to go on. On the other hand, characters who are too close to my own experience are also hard to write. I've never finished a fic about a trans* character.

Short version: I prefer writing characters who are enough like me that I can extrapolate their feelings and experiences, but enough unlike me that I find them interesting and also they don't have problems that hit too close to home.