As some of you may know I’ve been studying Professional and Creative Writing for three years now, and I’m heading into a fourth year of study for Honours, and one thing that has really stuck out for me over the past few years is how much pressure people put on you to write a story with some kind of important meaning.
This needs to stop.
There’s nothing wrong with writing a story with purpose and meaning, but when you limit yourself to writing a story around those morals, then you restrict what you can write.
Write what you want to write.
Write stories for fun.
Write stories with no moral messages and see what meaning other people read into it.
Write a story by focusing on the characters, the plot, the narrative, whatever; just write the story you want to tell, becasue if you limit yourself to writing around that moral message then you lose the possibility to open your text up and create depth to it by having multiple meanings and moral messages, contradictions and ideologies that your readers will hold onto and literature students will gush over.
If you make fanart, you can treat it like real art. Learn to talk about it. Learn how to talk about your work and the choices you make. Respect what you make and what others are making. So much of fanart is tangled up in the internalized misogyny within fandom communities—it’s hard to see yourself or others as the artist you actually are if you can’t respect the art and why it matters. Fandom communities are very strong and very passionate, and we are lucky to have them. Other art communities don’t even come close to that.
And with art, you either have to be what they want or change their minds about what they want.
So. I think we do both. We can treat the act of fan creation with the respect it deserves because of what it is: a powerful, subversive reclaiming of your right to see yourself in stories and to belong to a mythology that has been taken from you.
And we can use that to change minds. Fandom can and has been a great force for change in how stories get told, and social media is the best vehicle there is, and I think raising ourselves up to a level where we treat our art and others’ art with the respect we’d treat more accepted art is the most powerful thing we can do (or continue to do, for the many who are) to push through barriers.
Does any one else think of the vampire chronicles characters, or any of their favorite characters, perhaps their own, when they are facing something daunting or extremely stressful? Kind of like a fantasy or a daydream, it just keeps you calm so you can get through the moment. If so, can you share some of those instances? I’m just curious if I’m the only one. Sometimes it feels like I am.
Definitely for me! There are times when I imagine certain characters just walking beside me on my way home from a rough day, offering advice or being quietly supportive, maybe giving reassurance telepathically or just by being present, like any close friend can give.
They let me set the pace, and their presence wards off anyone from messing with me, bc they can intimidate with a glare, or just by having that essence of danger they all carry 😉
(I also like to imagine Lestat promising me a night of retail therapy the next time he’s in town!)
I’ll 👏 ship 👏 whatever 👏 the 👏 fuck 👏 I 👏 want 👏 thanks
Actually 👏 many 👏 postal 👏 services👏 have 👏 rules 👏 and 👏 regulations 👏 on 👏 what 👏 you 👏 can 👏 and 👏 cannot 👏 ship 👏 many 👏 regulations 👏 depend 👏 on 👏 the 👏 destination 👏 weight 👏 and 👏 content 👏
You can ship characters for happily ever afters, sure, you can ship them for tragically-then-happily, you can ship two or three or four or more, you can ship endless combinations of personality types and relationship dynamics
but you can also ship characters under very specific circumstances, or for a certain period of their life but not for all of it, or only in a certain universe. You might say “I ship these characters” and what you mean is you think they are fascinating together and could have a story together. That story could be any kind of story.
Sometimes it means you want them together for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it means something different than that.
I don’t know about you, but for me, “I ship it” means “There is a story in this ship and I am interested in that story.”
for me, “I ship it” means “There is a story in this ship and I am interested in that story.”
Also for those of us who write or consume fanfiction, shipping can mean “I need to fix this thing that bothered me in canon, let me tell you my version of it where it’s not so gross and where I criticize it in a way that the creator did not.” I don’t understand people who can’t grasp this. Black & white thinking is not a good look.
Or I mean. Maybe it’s still gross lol. We wouldn’t have a horror genre if dark and awful shit didn’t intrigue people on a base level. Just because it’s not for you doesn’t mean there’s no value in it for people who like to look hard at things that frighten them.
I made a comic about every comment thread under any content involving a fat person existing. Ever. This counts as my inktober #1 because I spent way more time on it than I should have.
“writers always know exactly where they are going with their work!”
r u sure
“no writer does anything by mistake, it’s all very strategic”
r u sure
“they use symbolism in everything. for example, a simple sentence symbolises directness and-”
R U SURE
The best moments in writing is when you discover you did something absolutely genius by complete accident.
A miscellaneous world-building detail from ten chapters earlier accidentally saved a character’s life once
“Omg this line is genius and the best reference!” “Thank you I did that entirely on purpose!!” *sweats*
READER: “(points out symbolism and foreshadowing and depth)”
AUTHOR:
I once literally flipped a coin to decide which character was going to die in a multi-award-nominated novel.
I was once rereading a manuscript before editing it and discovered that in an early chapter I’d put in a line without any forethought that ended up aligning perfectly the plot and is now my favorite line in the entire book even though when I wrote that sentence I hadn’t even come up with that plot point yet.
In my book series, I have done various things on accident and then, looking back, yelled BRILLIANT and went with it. And, often times, my characters just DECIDE things, like one character was in love with another and I was “WHAT?” but went with it because it was actually a VERY good story and made some of the plot stuff that much more interesting.
If you ever wanted to know my creative process for writing, congratulations, this is it.
Writing a story like
There’s an author’s note in an Isaac Asimov short story collection – Isaac Asimov, mind you – and I can’t for the life of me remember which it was because my mom has a billion of them, but basically he went to a lecture on his books where the teaccher was lecturing on all the symbolism and themes and such and Asimovewent up to him and was just like “Uhhhh…. I didn’t put any of that in? It just…. no? Not really?”
And the lecturer legit looked ISAAC FUCKING ASIMOV straight in the eye and said, “What do you know, sir? You’re just the author.”
And Asimov described it as being a fairly profound moment in his career.
I love ideas, and story tropes, and headcanons. But what I really love is the fanworks that explore these things. The idea, the trope, the headcanon…those alone don’t give the work value, for me. What I love is your unique perspective.
I would never tell the story the way you would. We all have completely different lives and experiences and values. You’ll think of things I’d never think of, and beyond that, you have skills I don’t have. Your craft has developed differently. The way you structure your story or render your art…it’s unique to you. No one else can do it your way.
I love seeing creators leverage their individual skills, the culmination of their lives up to the point of creation, to bring forth a wholly unique work.
It doesn’t matter to me if there are 500 bedsharing fics. I’ll read yours because it’s yours. It doesn’t matter if a thousand people have drawn a bridal carry. Yours will delight me because it will show me you.
You don’t need to have a completely unique idea. That’s impossible. What you need to do is put the effort into developing it and creating a finished work. That work will be yours, a work only you could have made, regardless of the original idea.
“There’s already a fic about…” Doesn’t matter. There isn’t already your fic about it.
Show me your art. Show me your craft. Create something.
I-want-my-IWTV 