sarasa_cat

[Originally posted on tumblr.]

Within the past few days I've seen a few different reblogged quotes about writing fanfic as uncomfortable self-discovery of your kinks and, more dragon age specific, about how writing your Hawkes (or Wardens) is a window into your soul (which can be potentially uncomfortable, exposing, and akin to walking about naked in public).

And after writing fanfic for seven years and, during the years before that, co-writing a few screenplays and short stories, I see how fanfic writers might feel this way except I do not. Although I know where that exposed feeling comes from.

I started writing fanfic to remove that exposed feeling -- a feeling I had while writing original fiction and screenplays back in my pre-fanfic days.

That feeling of being naked and exposed went away while writing fanfic by:

1. Purposefully writing other people's characters with a documentarian's eye, and purposefully selecting characters who I felt that I had less in common with while avoiding characters who would be "easy" for me to write because of our similarities.

2. Purposefully writing situations that squick me, ick me, or feel deeply removed from my life. This included writing kink fic for kinks that didn't interest me by emulating styles of other writers.

3. Purposefully compositing/pastiching plots, characters, conflicts, scenarios, and writerly styles such that what I write as fanfic is often a very conscious mash-up of many other things. This often resulted in AUs and alt-canons that took on lives of their own.

After doing this for a whole bunch of years and many, many, many hundreds of thousands of words ~~of crap~~, when I write something purely from my own imagination, I don't feel exposed in the same way that I used to.

By the time I got into Dragon Age fandom, many of my concerns about nakedness and exposure were long gone so I decided to do something different: I decided to purposefully write only the characters who I liked and spend at least some of my fanfic writing time telling the story I wish DA:O and DA2 told (the rest of my fanfic writing consists of prompt fills and alt-canon). When telling the story I wish DA:O and DA2 told, I've made a point of consciously own which parts of my kinks and so-called soul are put into a Hawke and a Warden while making sure that I simultaneously have enough distance from those two characters to let them be their own people with traits that are truly their own.

...

I'm not writing any of this to say that this is the right way of doing things. All I know is that my experiences in writing fanfic have made me a more confident writer and also a far more creative writer.

Although I spend more of my time on original fiction now, I know that my approach to original fiction has changed a great deal because of my very purposeful experiences while writing fanfic.