Why can I suddenly write fiction
Crossposted in muck_a_luck and brainofck. Don't bother to read it in both places. :)
This week has easily been my biggest (well, OK, one of my biggest) writing production weeks ever. And I could easily write more, either in Arena, or down a new Dark Muse story line. Or that throw-away SB/EW piece. Or wyldestarr's birthday thing. RL requires that I work for a living...
So, as I said to cocoajava last night, I have been thinking about my new-found writing ability.
I have always made up little snippets of ideas in my head. But until a year ago this April, I had always thougth that I would never, ever, in 5,000,000 years write any fiction.
Then suddenly I did.
But I sorta thought Dark Muse was a fluke. Because that story has at least 8 very distinct iterations, and it started coming to me very soon after I started to read RPS...
Damn.
There's an FPS version of it, too. Nope. *Two* FPS versions of it.
So, anyway, as I was saying, there are at least 10 distinct versions of Dark Muse, so I figured, OK, it's been writing itself in my head, and the clearest, least complicated version came out in Parts I and II, just as I was in the very first grips of my SB/VM obsession.
But then I wrote more. And the I wrote Lotus. And then I started having ideas for Sharpe and Aragorn. And then this whole Arena thing (which also has multiple iterations of various story sections)...
So why is it that at the age of 33 I was suddenly able to write. Ignoring that it was the year I came of age?
This is what I think.
I read a massive amount of fan fiction starting in about May of 2002. Huge quantitites. 16 hours a week, easy.
Fan fiction usually comes in the form of short stories or longer, but still very episodic pieces.
And I had never really read fiction that way before. I always read novels.
But here was this new format that my brain was absorbing and suddenly there was a place for my brain to put all it's little ficlets and short stories and now, it seems, possibly a novel length thing after all.
Anybody got a word count on Arena?
*goes and does a text backup*
34,426. 87 single-spaced pages, Times New Roman 12 pt, no page breaks, no internet disclaimer header. Pure text. With probably that much more to come. Wasn't the word count for NaNoWriMo 50,000? Is that the magic number for the first draft of a novel? If so, we'll get there, with or without the bad!fic, I think.
The second key, I think, is being handed the characters on a plate. We all write them differently. But there's a canon and a history for these characters that fan fiction offers us. It's like being given toys to play with. A crutch, if you will, for a beginner.
Anyway, that's what I think. I think that I read enough of this format to absorb it and process it and two years later use it as a way to access a writing tool and come up with fiction.
All that said, I think I might turn Dark Muse into something of a smut-writing field day. It seems a shame to not get all that non-con porn down into electrons. So here's what I think.
I think I might just write every version of this that doesn't directly conflict with another version. Well, possibly not the FPS one(s). And since the RPS ones are, of course, all LOTRIPS, I might even be able to pull off some synergy between the different stories. Something to think about when I get burned out on Arena again...
This week has easily been my biggest (well, OK, one of my biggest) writing production weeks ever. And I could easily write more, either in Arena, or down a new Dark Muse story line. Or that throw-away SB/EW piece. Or wyldestarr's birthday thing. RL requires that I work for a living...
So, as I said to cocoajava last night, I have been thinking about my new-found writing ability.
I have always made up little snippets of ideas in my head. But until a year ago this April, I had always thougth that I would never, ever, in 5,000,000 years write any fiction.
Then suddenly I did.
But I sorta thought Dark Muse was a fluke. Because that story has at least 8 very distinct iterations, and it started coming to me very soon after I started to read RPS...
Damn.
There's an FPS version of it, too. Nope. *Two* FPS versions of it.
So, anyway, as I was saying, there are at least 10 distinct versions of Dark Muse, so I figured, OK, it's been writing itself in my head, and the clearest, least complicated version came out in Parts I and II, just as I was in the very first grips of my SB/VM obsession.
But then I wrote more. And the I wrote Lotus. And then I started having ideas for Sharpe and Aragorn. And then this whole Arena thing (which also has multiple iterations of various story sections)...
So why is it that at the age of 33 I was suddenly able to write. Ignoring that it was the year I came of age?
This is what I think.
I read a massive amount of fan fiction starting in about May of 2002. Huge quantitites. 16 hours a week, easy.
Fan fiction usually comes in the form of short stories or longer, but still very episodic pieces.
And I had never really read fiction that way before. I always read novels.
But here was this new format that my brain was absorbing and suddenly there was a place for my brain to put all it's little ficlets and short stories and now, it seems, possibly a novel length thing after all.
Anybody got a word count on Arena?
*goes and does a text backup*
34,426. 87 single-spaced pages, Times New Roman 12 pt, no page breaks, no internet disclaimer header. Pure text. With probably that much more to come. Wasn't the word count for NaNoWriMo 50,000? Is that the magic number for the first draft of a novel? If so, we'll get there, with or without the bad!fic, I think.
The second key, I think, is being handed the characters on a plate. We all write them differently. But there's a canon and a history for these characters that fan fiction offers us. It's like being given toys to play with. A crutch, if you will, for a beginner.
Anyway, that's what I think. I think that I read enough of this format to absorb it and process it and two years later use it as a way to access a writing tool and come up with fiction.
All that said, I think I might turn Dark Muse into something of a smut-writing field day. It seems a shame to not get all that non-con porn down into electrons. So here's what I think.
I think I might just write every version of this that doesn't directly conflict with another version. Well, possibly not the FPS one(s). And since the RPS ones are, of course, all LOTRIPS, I might even be able to pull off some synergy between the different stories. Something to think about when I get burned out on Arena again...