Meep! Help!
Happy birthday, spiffymissv! Hope you have a great day, mah special Nutfruit. ;)
All right. I'm sitting here, trying to write, and I keep getting stuck for the same reason every time. So I figured I'd ask around for some advice.
Writing a guy when you're a girl can be pretty tricky. Writing two guys in love when you're a girl - it seems totally impossible to me sometimes.
More often than not, the biggest challenge for me when writing is figuring out how far I can take the emotional side of the story. When I write a boy/girl love story, I can pretty much do anything I want. I can make the boy cry, make him babble love declarations left and right, make him hold hands and write love songs and all that jazz. No one would think twice about it, except for the fact that it might be Sap Overload. But when I write a boy/boy story, I have warning signs coming at me from all angles. I can't do any of that stuff then, because readers are gonna think, "damn, is this dude PMS'ing or something? That's so girly!"
Boys obviously don't act like girls do, especially when they're with other boys. But how far do you, if you're a writer, feel you can push the characters? I'm really asking you. Can your characters say "I love you" to each other if they're guys? Can they stuff like "I need you" or "you make me feel safe" or "you're beautiful"? Stuff that's said a lot in boy/girl fics?
Because, yeah, sometimes I really want my characters to be dead cheesy and actually tell each other that they're in love. If I'm writing romance I know how much my characters feel for each other, but actually having it right there on the page has always made my stomach flutter a little. I'm a sap at heart, so sue me. But I've rarely had the L word in the slash fics I've written, because I feel there's this line you can't cross if you want the guys to be In Character. Capital letters, people. Do you agree that there's lovey-dovey stuff in slash fics you just can't write?
If so, how do you go about conveying that, say, Nick is crushing madly on Howie? Inner monologue? (That's personally where I tell most of the story, I think.) Body language? Those are pretty much the only options I can think of, but if you have anything else, please comment.
I don't know if this is making any sense at all, but I'm getting frustrated with myself here so I better stop. *headdesk*
All right. I'm sitting here, trying to write, and I keep getting stuck for the same reason every time. So I figured I'd ask around for some advice.
Writing a guy when you're a girl can be pretty tricky. Writing two guys in love when you're a girl - it seems totally impossible to me sometimes.
More often than not, the biggest challenge for me when writing is figuring out how far I can take the emotional side of the story. When I write a boy/girl love story, I can pretty much do anything I want. I can make the boy cry, make him babble love declarations left and right, make him hold hands and write love songs and all that jazz. No one would think twice about it, except for the fact that it might be Sap Overload. But when I write a boy/boy story, I have warning signs coming at me from all angles. I can't do any of that stuff then, because readers are gonna think, "damn, is this dude PMS'ing or something? That's so girly!"
Boys obviously don't act like girls do, especially when they're with other boys. But how far do you, if you're a writer, feel you can push the characters? I'm really asking you. Can your characters say "I love you" to each other if they're guys? Can they stuff like "I need you" or "you make me feel safe" or "you're beautiful"? Stuff that's said a lot in boy/girl fics?
Because, yeah, sometimes I really want my characters to be dead cheesy and actually tell each other that they're in love. If I'm writing romance I know how much my characters feel for each other, but actually having it right there on the page has always made my stomach flutter a little. I'm a sap at heart, so sue me. But I've rarely had the L word in the slash fics I've written, because I feel there's this line you can't cross if you want the guys to be In Character. Capital letters, people. Do you agree that there's lovey-dovey stuff in slash fics you just can't write?
If so, how do you go about conveying that, say, Nick is crushing madly on Howie? Inner monologue? (That's personally where I tell most of the story, I think.) Body language? Those are pretty much the only options I can think of, but if you have anything else, please comment.
I don't know if this is making any sense at all, but I'm getting frustrated with myself here so I better stop. *headdesk*