Day 6 ~ Whatever Tickles Your Fancy
Day 6 - Whatever tickles your fancy
Basically, today is pot-luck about me. So, I’ll explain why I like to write. I know I’m not the best writer but it is something I enjoy doing for my own sake. I may never finish my novel (six years and counting of re-writes, lost files and lack of muse for the bloody story) and I may only ever write fanfiction till I die but this is the reason why I do it…
When my ex and I separated I was very depressed. I had been reading the Harry Potter books to the kids at night and I had accidentally stumbled onto a website called Fiction Alley Park. This site is a Harry Potter-centric fanfic site. On a lark, I read some fic. Some were shit but some were brilliant. (Underwater Light by Maya a.k.a. Sarah Rees Brennan of the Demon Lexicon fame and, grudgingly, The Draco Trilogy by Cassandra Clair of the Mortal Instruments and Clockwork Angel books and EVERYTHING written by Telanu.) I tried my hand at it and my first piece was shit. Though, my friend Karen might have been my biggest fan regarding that story.
I played around there for a long time because I began to realize that writing made me happy again. It made me not worry about my real life while I thought about the lives of the characters I wrote about. I took inspiration from JK Rowlings real life as a single mother living on welfare and writing the story of a small boy and his amazing life. I met Kelly through fandom. We wrote on the same boards and the same games and she became my sounding board and someone I could talk to about my real life issues.
The more I wrote the more I discovered in my different fandoms. I NEVER would have written in Doctor Who because the history of the show went deeper than my knowledge of it but Torchwood was new and easier to grasp. I don’t write HP anymore, I strictly write TW but I try to touch on original work once in a while.
Now, why fanfic? Because it is easy and keeps me in practice. Just because you know how to ride a bike doesn’t mean that after ignoring it for a few months you can still jump on and pedal up that hill like you could months earlier. I write fanfic to keep my writing current. If you walk away from writing for a long time, it is very similar to that hill and your words become stale. As a writer, I try not to write the same thing I’ve already written. Also, it is so much easier to tromp around in someone else’s sandbox than to build your own. The characters are already developed, the locations are already in place and all you need to do is add a plot and stir.
Someday I would love to finish my book. I don’t promise it to be a best-seller or anything that will be remembered in history but it will be something I did, my little accomplishment. Now if I could only get my mind to focus on it for more than a second and fine tune the middle and that bit at the end and change the name of that one character and there was that one scene that should probably be deleted but it’s TOO DAMN FUNNY!
Basically, today is pot-luck about me. So, I’ll explain why I like to write. I know I’m not the best writer but it is something I enjoy doing for my own sake. I may never finish my novel (six years and counting of re-writes, lost files and lack of muse for the bloody story) and I may only ever write fanfiction till I die but this is the reason why I do it…
When my ex and I separated I was very depressed. I had been reading the Harry Potter books to the kids at night and I had accidentally stumbled onto a website called Fiction Alley Park. This site is a Harry Potter-centric fanfic site. On a lark, I read some fic. Some were shit but some were brilliant. (Underwater Light by Maya a.k.a. Sarah Rees Brennan of the Demon Lexicon fame and, grudgingly, The Draco Trilogy by Cassandra Clair of the Mortal Instruments and Clockwork Angel books and EVERYTHING written by Telanu.) I tried my hand at it and my first piece was shit. Though, my friend Karen might have been my biggest fan regarding that story.
I played around there for a long time because I began to realize that writing made me happy again. It made me not worry about my real life while I thought about the lives of the characters I wrote about. I took inspiration from JK Rowlings real life as a single mother living on welfare and writing the story of a small boy and his amazing life. I met Kelly through fandom. We wrote on the same boards and the same games and she became my sounding board and someone I could talk to about my real life issues.
The more I wrote the more I discovered in my different fandoms. I NEVER would have written in Doctor Who because the history of the show went deeper than my knowledge of it but Torchwood was new and easier to grasp. I don’t write HP anymore, I strictly write TW but I try to touch on original work once in a while.
Now, why fanfic? Because it is easy and keeps me in practice. Just because you know how to ride a bike doesn’t mean that after ignoring it for a few months you can still jump on and pedal up that hill like you could months earlier. I write fanfic to keep my writing current. If you walk away from writing for a long time, it is very similar to that hill and your words become stale. As a writer, I try not to write the same thing I’ve already written. Also, it is so much easier to tromp around in someone else’s sandbox than to build your own. The characters are already developed, the locations are already in place and all you need to do is add a plot and stir.
Someday I would love to finish my book. I don’t promise it to be a best-seller or anything that will be remembered in history but it will be something I did, my little accomplishment. Now if I could only get my mind to focus on it for more than a second and fine tune the middle and that bit at the end and change the name of that one character and there was that one scene that should probably be deleted but it’s TOO DAMN FUNNY!