Fan fiction questions meme!
Dec. 14th, 2018 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
auroracloudSeen this around in various journals, including navaan and trobadora. Thought it might be fun!
Pick a question and ask me - and copy the questions to your own journal if you feel like it!
1. What made you start writing fanfic?
2. Which of your own fanfics have you reread the most?
3. Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.
4. Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?
5. You've posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you'd written it?
6. Name three stories you found easy to write.
7. Name three stories you found difficult to write.
8. What's your ratio of hits to kudos?
9. What do your fic bookmarks say about you?
10. What's a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?
11. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?
12. For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?
13. Name three favorite characters to write.
14. You're applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?
15. Question of your choice!
navaan and trobadora. Thought it might be fun!Pick a question and ask me - and copy the questions to your own journal if you feel like it!
3. Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.
4. Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?
5. You've posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you'd written it?
6. Name three stories you found easy to write.
8. What's your ratio of hits to kudos?
10. What's a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?
12. For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?
14. You're applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?
15. Question of your choice!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 01:21 pm (UTC)Um, at least that I'm a very unorganized person with good intentions that I don't see through - I keep telling myself I'll organize my bookmarks into proper rec lists by character/relationship etc. but I keep not doing that and they're just one big mess. They also say that read a lot of Whovian fandoms, and that I'm fond of slash, femslash, and gen. They also say that I really like Jamie McCrimmon, that I like Bill Potts and Martha Jones, and that every now and then I remember to seek out fanfic of my rarer book fandoms. And that I went through an intense Jack/Ianto period last year or so. They also say that I'm extremely sporadic in when I remember to bookmark stuff that I love and want to come back to, and that it took me quite a while to remember I could do that. :-P
13. Name three favorite characters to write.
Hmm, Bill Potts is loads of fun to write - I think I've only written maybe three fics with her? But I adore writing her. In Classic Who, though I've only published one small ficlet, I've got a lot more in the first draft/editing stage, and I love to write Jamie, except that I always agonise over how to write his dialogue, in terms of accent. A lot of authors write his Scottish accent to some degree, but I'm rubbish at writing any accents of the English language, not being a native speaker (and heck, even in my own language I dislike trying to mirror regional dialects in writing and never do, but that's a whole other topic). On the other hand writing him with perfect King's English feels wrong, too. But writing his reactions and such is loads of fun. A third... hmm, I've written Jack Harkness a lot and I do rather enjoy it. He's really different from me or from most other characters I write, which makes for a fun change, I suppose!
I seemed to stick to Whovian characters, because I've mostly written in that fandom. I really love writing various 19th century heroines as well, but I haven't written a lot in those fandoms yet, so it's a bit harder to say. If I were to pick one character from a book fandom, though, it'd probably be Eugénie Danglars from The Count of Monte Cristo, or Kizzy from Becky Chambers's The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. Which is not a 19th century classic.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 06:36 pm (UTC)LOL!
And those are good favourites to have, all round!
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Date: 2018-12-14 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 07:02 pm (UTC)7. Name three stories you found difficult to write.
Can I mention the yet unpublished porn fic that I'm trying to edit? I haven't written much explicit fic (and I haven't published any) and I seem to have difficulty doing it, and somehow my characters keep wanting to do completely different things on the page, though in my mind they have no trouble having sex. Maybe I'm just not meant to be writing sex scenes, or maybe I want to be writing gen now. I'm not sure.
Other two: Between, my first Jack/Ten fic. I never got that story together the way I wanted to, the characters' reactions and the narrative always felt off. I find it ironic that it's also my fic with the most hits, because I think it's the least good. That is actually visible in its hits-to-kudos ratio, though. I just wish people started finding different fics to read because the others are better, I swear.
And the third is probably Shades of Fair and Dark, my Mansfield Park femslash for this year's Femslash Exchange. I'm happy with the way it came together in the end, and it's had good feedback, but stars, it was difficult to write. It was partly because my mental beasties were in full rage and I had a lot of focusing problems at the time, but also partly because of the canon and the challenges of the pairing (though I had volunteered them and wanted to write them). The main character of that novel is very black-and-white in her judgements about the world, and the narration finds this less problematic than most modern readers do. Her rival that I was pairing her up with is presented really oddly in the book - basically most of her speeches and actions seem to me to tell a different story than the narration's harsh judgement of her. So trying to find a way to tell their getting-together story that would both be true to the canon and make sense internally was super difficult. I had to constantly gauge how far I could have their opinions and reactions change, how to explain about why they've changed after the canon ending, how to develop the relationship enough but not too much. My muse also insisted in sticking close to Austen's style, which is not the easiest thing in the world to write. But I'm glad I persisted because I'm pretty happy with the end result, and maybe I'll manage to write more in the future. :-)
Of course there are plenty that I've found so difficult to write that they're still not finished.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 11:15 am (UTC)2. Which of your own fanfics have you reread the most?
That's a tough one - because I don't tend to reread them after publishing, since I'm terrified I'll find some embarrassing flaw and feel awful! Therefore, the most accurate answer would be "whichever I spent the most time editing" but of course that means I wasn't reading it in its final form, whichever story it was.
I know, not a very mature attitude, and probably my writing would benefit if I occasionally reread my older stuff, or I'd be pleasantly surprised. Maybe I'll make myself learn to do that!
But I'd say the answer is my recent Jamie & Victoria ficlet, Birds in Gear - for one thing, once I'd done all the other edits I still had to squeeze it down to 550 words to fit the contest limit, so I did a lot of rereading to see which words I could still squeeze out without altering anything. Also, I was gigglingly self-satisfied with many things about it to reread them for my pleasure, and it was so short I could feel reasonably confident I'd managed to edit out the bad stuff. Of course, it is my least read fic (save for the one that was revealed yesterday), but such is life.
Also, I seem to have quite clear memories of both of my Thirteen/Missy fics from about a year ago, Hope and Chocolate and A Lady is Always Ready, so probably some rereading just because happened with those as well after the edits were done. Maybe one day I'll dare go back to them (and see how they measure up now that we've got more Thirteen canon than two words).
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Date: 2018-12-15 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-16 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 11:31 am (UTC)In some ways, I've always written fanfic - I've loved carrying my favorite fictional characters with me and imagining how they'd react to this or that situation, or what happens next, etc. My first creative writing attempt that I clearly remember was essentially fanfic for my favourite Finnish children's book series that quickly veered off course to become more about the OCs (who were magical dogs that could fly. I was six.).
But when it comes to actually publishing fanfic... Hmm, depends on which time scale I'm looking at, because I wrote some fanfic already during my late teens, in a different fandom with different names, and there the reason was basically that I saw lots of people doing it, and I wanted to try, and I got an idea of a character I wanted to write into the fandom and make meet the other characters etc. If we look at my current phase, where I'm publishing under this username, basically because Doctor Who gave me interesting characters and hints about what could be going on with them, but didn't follow through with them enough to satisfy me, so I had to start making up my own stories. Of course, first I read hundreds of fics other people had written, but after that I still felt I had something to try to tell. And also, I signed up for an exchange and so I was compelled to finish something. :-D
11. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?
As broad categories, f/f, m/m, and gen fic focusing on friendships, found family feels, shared adventuring etc. More specifically, I can identify a few types:
- people who've got considerable issues to work out, trust problems, difficulties sussing out each other's motivations and feelings, but who still somehow try to make it work, find some common ground to work on, some way to take care of each other or trust each other even if everything hasn't been worked out.
- Friendship and found family vibes, deep connection and caring between people, whether it's platonic or romantic/sexual; and somehow exploring those, making a deeper connection or finding new aspects to their relationship; also, discovering friendship.
- People who connect over hurting and comforting each other, especially if the hurt is shared. And characters who can help each other admit to some pain or weakness and open up about it.
- And any characters who have delightfully different ways of looking at things and bounce off of each other in entertaining ways that are satisfying to write.
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Date: 2018-12-15 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 10:55 pm (UTC)