Write What You Know and Underneath the Underneath
First of all, and this has nothing to do with the title of this entry, but I feel like it needs to be said anyway, THANKS EVERYONE AT WU FOR THE POST CARD IT MADE MY DAY I LOVE YOU FOREVER AND AAAAAGGGHHHH I MISS YOU SO MUCH.
Okay. ^^; Now that that's done with. I feel bad, because I totally meant to be cool and reliable and to actually post regularly on LiveJournal while I was here, and stuff, and it totally hasn't happened and it's been a month already. So, to try to remedy that maybe a little, I have a new plan. I'm going to try to post at least four times a week--once random thoughts about writing, once stuff about life here and everything, once on random fandom musing, and once for actual fic, because I'm planning to write those HERO fics one per week. So this would be my "on writing" post for this week. (We'll see if I actually manage to do this at all. Based on my track record, I tend to doubt it. BUT I will GANBARE ANYWAY, and we'll see how that works out. Sometimes I do better at things if I give myself specific goals and requirements.)
Also, I need to chose new icons for this journal.
Cut for the random writing stuff that actually has to do with the title of this entry. :P
It seems like every creative writing teacher in the history of ever has said it--"Write what you know." And people tend to interpret that in different ways. If it were taken literally, writing fantasy at all would be completely impossible, because I for one have certainly never experienced a) piloting a giant robot, b) casting a spell, c) using the mystic powers of my eyes to follow my enemies' movements and copy them, d) getting blasted in the face with fire created in mid-air, or anything like that. Also, we could never write about characters who differ significantly from us, which would make writing fic significantly more boring than it really is. I mean, that's half the fun of writing, isn't it? At least, for me. As much as I like writing people such as Daniel Jackson (striking similarities to yours truly, despite there also being major differences), I also like writing about people such as Uchiha Sasuke (let's count the differences, boys and girls . . . . ), and exploring the differences in various characters' psyches. Even the ones with similarities to myself are differ significantly in other ways, after all.
The answer to this is that the "what you know" of the expression isn't actually what you know. I mean, (I'll pick c above) I may not have the Sharingan eye and no way of finding out exactly what that would feel like. And I'm not one for using my chakra in every day situations, either. But I am hypoglycemic, and when I haven't eaten in a while, I get this really floaty weird detached feeling that tells me IF YOU DON'T EAT RIGHT NOW YOU'RE GOING TO FAINT YOU MORON. And I have gotten soap in my eyes (as I think most people have), and when I do (as I did in the shower tonight) and when that happens my eye waters and blinks and does all kinds of weird painful shit on its own and doesn't feel like it'll do what I want it to anymore. If I remember what those feelings feel like, not just what they are like but what they really feel like, than I have a half-decent chance of putting together what it might feel like to be Hatake Kakashi. For example, but not really, because he's an elite ninja who has an extremely painful life story and all kinds of experiences I'm quite happy to have not had. But I can imagine what that feeling would be like, even if his reaction to it would be completely and utterly different than mine. To use another example, I have a scene in my head where one of my characters takes another to the public bath because of strained aching muscles (these boys are Japanese), and while they are male, and Japanese, and devoted martial artists, and I am not any of these things, I have been taken to the public bath because I said my shoulder was aching, and I have studied martial arts for a bit.
But it's not just what you can extrapolate from your experiences, either. Of course, logic is important in that--the logic that says, just because I react to Stimulus A in a certain way doesn't mean that Character B will as well. The important thing is what you can feel, even if you haven't felt it. In other words, you have to realize how Character B will react, and not just realize, but, on some level, feel, maybe not as strongly as your own emotions, but on some level. The writer has to feel it, somehow, or the reader won't. And it doesn't have to be the reaction you would have. For example, I doubt I would sacrifice the security of my livelihood just because I believed with every fiber of my being, that I was correct about an academic theory, like Daniel Jackson (though you could argue that he's enough of a wide-eyed idealist about academia that he didn't know that he was doing that quite as dramatically as he was, but there's another difference right there). I don't have that kind of intellectual determination/devotion, that he has--if I know I'm right, that's enough for me. But I can understand that feeling, that frustration, what would drive someone to do something like that, even if I would never do it. But at the same time, even though Uchiha Sasuke is incredibly different from me, I can understand the feelings having my family murdered before my eyes by my elder brother (even though I don't have one) might produce, even if that family was very different from my own. And even though that would probably not induce me to go off the deep end and need revenge the way he does . . . I can understand where he would be coming from. I don't know what that would feel like. And I can't extrapolate from my own experiences, or even my own feelings. But there is a part of me that can understand it, and that's the part of me that's important in writing, that has to come out on the page, or else the reader won't feel it, and there's no point in my writing it at all.
I'm one for realism in writing, and I realize that not everyone is, and that's okay, too. But it's the little details that get me, and when I read a fic or a novel or whatever and it has the extra level of reality to it--that's when I fall in love with it. When I can feel it somewhere in my chest, even if it has nothing to do with me, or if for a moment I'm there, wherever or whoever there may be, whether it's 1868, Kyoto, Japan, or the Fire Nation palace, Avatar-land, or a galaxy far far away, or what, and that connection is there, because fundamentally, we're all just people, even if we're not technically human . . . and for me, writing is about feeling that.
That got more and more incoherent. But whatever. The thing is, that's what I want fiction to do for me, and why I get rather frustrated with writing in general at times, because it seems like so many writers just aren't willing to go that last step, I guess. And that's what I want from fanfic, my own included, and why I am so often frustrated with my own writing, because I know when I'm slacking off and not really feeling it, or when my words just aren't adequate to what I want them to convey, which is a gap I've been noticing more and more lately, probably because my perceptions are expanding but my writing ability isn't at the same rate. Or something.
Okay. ^^; Now that that's done with. I feel bad, because I totally meant to be cool and reliable and to actually post regularly on LiveJournal while I was here, and stuff, and it totally hasn't happened and it's been a month already. So, to try to remedy that maybe a little, I have a new plan. I'm going to try to post at least four times a week--once random thoughts about writing, once stuff about life here and everything, once on random fandom musing, and once for actual fic, because I'm planning to write those HERO fics one per week. So this would be my "on writing" post for this week. (We'll see if I actually manage to do this at all. Based on my track record, I tend to doubt it. BUT I will GANBARE ANYWAY, and we'll see how that works out. Sometimes I do better at things if I give myself specific goals and requirements.)
Also, I need to chose new icons for this journal.
Cut for the random writing stuff that actually has to do with the title of this entry. :P
It seems like every creative writing teacher in the history of ever has said it--"Write what you know." And people tend to interpret that in different ways. If it were taken literally, writing fantasy at all would be completely impossible, because I for one have certainly never experienced a) piloting a giant robot, b) casting a spell, c) using the mystic powers of my eyes to follow my enemies' movements and copy them, d) getting blasted in the face with fire created in mid-air, or anything like that. Also, we could never write about characters who differ significantly from us, which would make writing fic significantly more boring than it really is. I mean, that's half the fun of writing, isn't it? At least, for me. As much as I like writing people such as Daniel Jackson (striking similarities to yours truly, despite there also being major differences), I also like writing about people such as Uchiha Sasuke (let's count the differences, boys and girls . . . . ), and exploring the differences in various characters' psyches. Even the ones with similarities to myself are differ significantly in other ways, after all.
The answer to this is that the "what you know" of the expression isn't actually what you know. I mean, (I'll pick c above) I may not have the Sharingan eye and no way of finding out exactly what that would feel like. And I'm not one for using my chakra in every day situations, either. But I am hypoglycemic, and when I haven't eaten in a while, I get this really floaty weird detached feeling that tells me IF YOU DON'T EAT RIGHT NOW YOU'RE GOING TO FAINT YOU MORON. And I have gotten soap in my eyes (as I think most people have), and when I do (as I did in the shower tonight) and when that happens my eye waters and blinks and does all kinds of weird painful shit on its own and doesn't feel like it'll do what I want it to anymore. If I remember what those feelings feel like, not just what they are like but what they really feel like, than I have a half-decent chance of putting together what it might feel like to be Hatake Kakashi. For example, but not really, because he's an elite ninja who has an extremely painful life story and all kinds of experiences I'm quite happy to have not had. But I can imagine what that feeling would be like, even if his reaction to it would be completely and utterly different than mine. To use another example, I have a scene in my head where one of my characters takes another to the public bath because of strained aching muscles (these boys are Japanese), and while they are male, and Japanese, and devoted martial artists, and I am not any of these things, I have been taken to the public bath because I said my shoulder was aching, and I have studied martial arts for a bit.
But it's not just what you can extrapolate from your experiences, either. Of course, logic is important in that--the logic that says, just because I react to Stimulus A in a certain way doesn't mean that Character B will as well. The important thing is what you can feel, even if you haven't felt it. In other words, you have to realize how Character B will react, and not just realize, but, on some level, feel, maybe not as strongly as your own emotions, but on some level. The writer has to feel it, somehow, or the reader won't. And it doesn't have to be the reaction you would have. For example, I doubt I would sacrifice the security of my livelihood just because I believed with every fiber of my being, that I was correct about an academic theory, like Daniel Jackson (though you could argue that he's enough of a wide-eyed idealist about academia that he didn't know that he was doing that quite as dramatically as he was, but there's another difference right there). I don't have that kind of intellectual determination/devotion, that he has--if I know I'm right, that's enough for me. But I can understand that feeling, that frustration, what would drive someone to do something like that, even if I would never do it. But at the same time, even though Uchiha Sasuke is incredibly different from me, I can understand the feelings having my family murdered before my eyes by my elder brother (even though I don't have one) might produce, even if that family was very different from my own. And even though that would probably not induce me to go off the deep end and need revenge the way he does . . . I can understand where he would be coming from. I don't know what that would feel like. And I can't extrapolate from my own experiences, or even my own feelings. But there is a part of me that can understand it, and that's the part of me that's important in writing, that has to come out on the page, or else the reader won't feel it, and there's no point in my writing it at all.
I'm one for realism in writing, and I realize that not everyone is, and that's okay, too. But it's the little details that get me, and when I read a fic or a novel or whatever and it has the extra level of reality to it--that's when I fall in love with it. When I can feel it somewhere in my chest, even if it has nothing to do with me, or if for a moment I'm there, wherever or whoever there may be, whether it's 1868, Kyoto, Japan, or the Fire Nation palace, Avatar-land, or a galaxy far far away, or what, and that connection is there, because fundamentally, we're all just people, even if we're not technically human . . . and for me, writing is about feeling that.
That got more and more incoherent. But whatever. The thing is, that's what I want fiction to do for me, and why I get rather frustrated with writing in general at times, because it seems like so many writers just aren't willing to go that last step, I guess. And that's what I want from fanfic, my own included, and why I am so often frustrated with my own writing, because I know when I'm slacking off and not really feeling it, or when my words just aren't adequate to what I want them to convey, which is a gap I've been noticing more and more lately, probably because my perceptions are expanding but my writing ability isn't at the same rate. Or something.