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I'm worried that I can't write anymore.
Sep. 9th, 2019 07:20 pmWait, that's not quite right. I'm afraid I could never write in the first place.
I've always been jealous of people who can crank out decent fanworks within days or hours of new content, or the resurgence of a dormant fandom of any particular franchise. I have only ever done this once or twice, and both times it has arguably been my best work. In both cases, they practically wrote themselves.
All my best work is like this. All of my best work has consisted of one page character studies, or drabbles. Any multichapter fanwork I have ever attempted has petered out after chapter four or so. It's hard. Any kudos or good comments I get make me feel self conscious. I had one popular fic for like three minutes in 2009 in the Watchman fandom, and I had anxiety attacks over it. I kept getting "OMG PLZ CONTINUE" and I was like "I can't, the first chapter of this fic was a response to another fic, it wrote itself in one night, and all my attempts to build from it feel false and hollow, like I'm writing badfic of that first chapter."
I feel like I was never a writer in the first place. I have never been a writer. I have a ton of notebooks and an entire google drive full of notes but no finished stories from any of those notes. My last serious attempt at a fic was for Jupiter Ascending, and that was four whole years ago.
Just thinking about starting to write again fills me with anxiety. I can see full, whole, finished stories in my head, but am completely at a loss as to how that translates into a finished work.
I need to examine why, and it all comes back to this - I feel like maybe I have internalized a lot of the stuff I was told about fanworks when I was younger, by people I trusted - that it's literary masturbation. It's misappropriative. It's a waste of skills and time. It's shameful, and only flaky, sad little unfulfilled nerds writing self insertion stories do it.
People who have come up since the aughties may not be able to relate to what things were like before LOTR and Harry Potter caused the fanfiction phenomenon to be mainstreamed, much less what has happened since with the SuperWhoLock and MCU fandoms. Before that, fic writers were pigeonholed as pathetic late bloomers and horny spinsters and housewives cranking out Kirk/Spock smut, or Duncan MacLeod/Methos porn, or speculating on what a married Mulder and Scully or Benton Fraser and Ray K/Ray V would be like, etc.
What is the unofficial name for works like Twilight, and its even more maligned offspring, 50 Shades Of Grey, which began as a Twilight AU fic with the names searched and replaced? Housewife Porn.
There are fans who still remember what things were like before the internet, when fic only came in home-produced zines sold under the table at conventions. There are folks on Tumblr who have commiserated about these dark times, and who even talk about the aughties/1990s fanfic like it was a billion years ago, which feels crazy because I still remember it all like it was yesterday, and it makes me feel weird to be considered an Old Timer.
There are people who talk about My Immortal like it was whole decades ago, guys. That's weird. It just feels weird.
And because the Mary Sue phenomenon was so reviled, people went to extreme lengths to avoid writing Sues of their own, or to be accused of doing so. They lambasted the Sues among them. People were policed and harassed and ostracized because they broke a social convention in their fanfic - because everyone else was afraid it would reflect badly on us all, and bring our whole side down.
It wasn't until 2008 when controversial LJer Paperclipchains wrote an entry in the LJ comm fanficrants (which has been long since deleted) which, when summarized, boiled down to "I think writing Sues is maybe not a capital offense, but instead might be a phase people go through. Maybe people have to write a bunch of badfic before they get to the point where they are writing goodfic, and we shouldn't flame them for that. Maybe not all self inserts or OCs are necessarily Sues, and maybe we should all just chill out and rethink this whole thing. Maybe we should all take several seats and just let people create and have fun," that it really crystallized for me that perhaps here was something awfully toxic going on with how the fic writing community policed itself, and maybe that I had internalized it a lot. But I think it may be too late, that the damage is done.
How do I undo it? Every time I try to start a new fic, The Little Hater in my head says "Why can't you just *enjoy* consuming media? Why do you have to appropriate it? That's lame. You don't want to be lame, do you?" And I'm not even lying, my blood pressure shoots up a little, though maybe that's happening because I'm in my 40s now.
A new Matrix sequel was announced a week ago and I feel like I should already be cranking out reams of fic, but I can't. And I wasn't able to even back when the Matrix fandom was active - which is fifteen whole fucking years ago, what the fuck.
How do I work around this?
I've always been jealous of people who can crank out decent fanworks within days or hours of new content, or the resurgence of a dormant fandom of any particular franchise. I have only ever done this once or twice, and both times it has arguably been my best work. In both cases, they practically wrote themselves.
All my best work is like this. All of my best work has consisted of one page character studies, or drabbles. Any multichapter fanwork I have ever attempted has petered out after chapter four or so. It's hard. Any kudos or good comments I get make me feel self conscious. I had one popular fic for like three minutes in 2009 in the Watchman fandom, and I had anxiety attacks over it. I kept getting "OMG PLZ CONTINUE" and I was like "I can't, the first chapter of this fic was a response to another fic, it wrote itself in one night, and all my attempts to build from it feel false and hollow, like I'm writing badfic of that first chapter."
I feel like I was never a writer in the first place. I have never been a writer. I have a ton of notebooks and an entire google drive full of notes but no finished stories from any of those notes. My last serious attempt at a fic was for Jupiter Ascending, and that was four whole years ago.
Just thinking about starting to write again fills me with anxiety. I can see full, whole, finished stories in my head, but am completely at a loss as to how that translates into a finished work.
I need to examine why, and it all comes back to this - I feel like maybe I have internalized a lot of the stuff I was told about fanworks when I was younger, by people I trusted - that it's literary masturbation. It's misappropriative. It's a waste of skills and time. It's shameful, and only flaky, sad little unfulfilled nerds writing self insertion stories do it.
People who have come up since the aughties may not be able to relate to what things were like before LOTR and Harry Potter caused the fanfiction phenomenon to be mainstreamed, much less what has happened since with the SuperWhoLock and MCU fandoms. Before that, fic writers were pigeonholed as pathetic late bloomers and horny spinsters and housewives cranking out Kirk/Spock smut, or Duncan MacLeod/Methos porn, or speculating on what a married Mulder and Scully or Benton Fraser and Ray K/Ray V would be like, etc.
What is the unofficial name for works like Twilight, and its even more maligned offspring, 50 Shades Of Grey, which began as a Twilight AU fic with the names searched and replaced? Housewife Porn.
There are fans who still remember what things were like before the internet, when fic only came in home-produced zines sold under the table at conventions. There are folks on Tumblr who have commiserated about these dark times, and who even talk about the aughties/1990s fanfic like it was a billion years ago, which feels crazy because I still remember it all like it was yesterday, and it makes me feel weird to be considered an Old Timer.
There are people who talk about My Immortal like it was whole decades ago, guys. That's weird. It just feels weird.
And because the Mary Sue phenomenon was so reviled, people went to extreme lengths to avoid writing Sues of their own, or to be accused of doing so. They lambasted the Sues among them. People were policed and harassed and ostracized because they broke a social convention in their fanfic - because everyone else was afraid it would reflect badly on us all, and bring our whole side down.
It wasn't until 2008 when controversial LJer Paperclipchains wrote an entry in the LJ comm fanficrants (which has been long since deleted) which, when summarized, boiled down to "I think writing Sues is maybe not a capital offense, but instead might be a phase people go through. Maybe people have to write a bunch of badfic before they get to the point where they are writing goodfic, and we shouldn't flame them for that. Maybe not all self inserts or OCs are necessarily Sues, and maybe we should all just chill out and rethink this whole thing. Maybe we should all take several seats and just let people create and have fun," that it really crystallized for me that perhaps here was something awfully toxic going on with how the fic writing community policed itself, and maybe that I had internalized it a lot. But I think it may be too late, that the damage is done.
How do I undo it? Every time I try to start a new fic, The Little Hater in my head says "Why can't you just *enjoy* consuming media? Why do you have to appropriate it? That's lame. You don't want to be lame, do you?" And I'm not even lying, my blood pressure shoots up a little, though maybe that's happening because I'm in my 40s now.
A new Matrix sequel was announced a week ago and I feel like I should already be cranking out reams of fic, but I can't. And I wasn't able to even back when the Matrix fandom was active - which is fifteen whole fucking years ago, what the fuck.
How do I work around this?
