Writing

[azziria]

It’s strange to be writing again after such a long gap - strange but good – but I’m finding the need to write so very strong at the moment that I’m wondering what was going on over these past few years.

The thing is, I’ve always written, ever since I started with pony stories as a child. I have a collection of notebooks from my teenage years that make for painful reading, not because they’re badly written (they’re not), but because they’re complete Mary Sues. I was a fish out of water, a girl who wanted to be a boy but who was stuck in an all-girls school where she just didn’t know how to be a girl and play female social games (still don’t!); a straight-A student who was crap at sport, who thought she was fat and ugly, and who was being bullied (and who as a result developed never-show-weakness coping strategies that still have damaging effects on my life even now). When I read the teenage stories I wrote, all those Mary Sues, I can see so clearly that I was desperately trying to write a better life than the one I was experiencing. Living in a fantasy world was a much-needed escape, but it hurts to see it so clearly now, and also to acknowledge that I still go there in times of extreme stress.

So, the stress of what was happening in my life during January and February of this year undoubtedly fuelled a lot of fiction writing as an escape into a fantasy world (hot men this time instead of Mary Sues, but the principle is the same, I was escaping to a better place). What’s interesting is that now that the stress has dialled down, I’m still needing to write. Maybe the whole sorry business unlocked some sort of creative floodgate, I just don’t know.

It’s also interesting to me to reflect on what I’m writing. Given my subject matter and my main protagonists it may seem odd to say that I’m writing from personal experience, but I’m more aware than possibly ever before of how I’m drawing on things that I’ve experienced in my past. The selkie fic draws on leaving someone, not forever but for a year, and how that last night together felt, how I never wanted it to end and how it felt to know that time was moving on and the end was inevitable. And the latest fic... well, that’s really moving into personal issues territory, and if I do write a sequel piece it will be even more so. Which could be cathartic, or could be revisiting things best left buried, I’m not sure.

Whatever, I’m enjoying writing, being creative again. I’ll focus on that :)

Comments

[imkalena.livejournal.com]

I came at writing ass backwards from everybody else I've ever heard of, so it's always interesting to see how people got here. [I was afraid to read Selkie #2 because my heart couldn't take it.] But yeah, personal experience is all we have to work with; the emotions make it real. You can do everything else incredibly well, but without any juice, it doesn't matter.

Or at least that's why Tom Clancy bores me. :) Seriously, there's only so much technoporn I can read.

[azziria.livejournal.com]

How did you come to writing? I'd be interested to know if you'd care to share :)

I think with me it's about being creative - I take photographs when I'm not writing. Making beautiful images or crafting words to make something both make me happy :)

[imkalena.livejournal.com]

Pretty boring -- I discovered fandom about 13 years ago. When my friends suggested I write something, I told them, "Not just no, but HELL, NO." :)

Then I got obsessed, and decided that I needed to make my BSOs happy, and since the only way they could possibly be happy was with each other, then I started writing slash. I got into fandom through slash, anyway.

The problem was, even though I wanted to make them happy, writing didn't come naturally or easily. It wasn't much fun, even though once in a while I felt compelled to do it. Weird, eh?

I take pictures, too, and THAT came naturally, which is why it's still TONS more enjoyable than writing . . . which, at last count, sucks less than ever before right now.

This is thirteen years later, mind you, and a couple weeks ago I told the woman I'm writing with, "Well, that was fun!" . . . and I actually meant it. A first.

I think it's because this is the first time I ever did the "writing from the Id" thing. We were just paddling around with no goal in mind, especially not the idea of ever posting it, and I was just putting down all the crazy ass things I'd love to see in a story. All the other times, I had a specific goal that I was writing toward, and if I got to a point in the story where I couldn't get from here to there, I just had to wait until something resolved itself in my mind so I could continue on.

This led to taking a really, really long time to write a story. :)

You know how some people say they don't bother to write something if they already know what's going to happen?

I have been the polar opposite.

I finally got my writing partner to understand how painful and unpleasant writing was when I realized it myself. "I don't write from the Id, I write straight from the Internal Editor." Not so much fun, overall. Maybe I've broken that habit at last after all these years.

[azziria.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to hear other people's journeys to this point!

I've always been fannish, ever since my teens (Starsky and Hutch being a very early influence, as I remember) but my writing was never fanfiction. Then in 2002 I started frequenting a LOTR message board, and discovered fanfiction. Shortly after that a friend on the board introduced me to slash - it amuses me now to remember how I felt about it at first, part squicked and part fascinated in a sort of guilty 'this must be wrong but I'm finding it really hot' way. The rest is history, you know where I'm at with it now... :)

When I write I always know where I'm going. Often the last paragraph or line is what sparks the whole story for me. Then I get the first line, and the rest is a journey to get from one to the other. I have to be inspired, though, which is why I rarely enter fic challenges, because writing to order pretty much doesn't work for me.

[kare.livejournal.com]

Interesting post. I think a lot more folks write from personal experience (even in a fandom where they have little to do with the character they're writing) and even Mary Sue more than they'd ever admit.

I know I once upon a time got through a very brief but painful period of depression by starting and writing a massive story where I was clearly one of the main characters. The good thing is, I was open about that, I was open about why I was doing it, and I spared her (me) nothing in the telling. Because of that, I received a lot of support, and is probably why my depression was - at least in part - so brief.

I'm thinking you're right in that "needing" to write got your creativity flowing and now you're just continuing on even though you don't really need the release any longer.

And we're all fortunate for it!

[azziria.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that one of the things that goes when I slip into depression is my creative urge, and if I can force myself to hang onto that I come through it better (my photo-a-day project a few years back helped me hang on through a bad bout of depression - if I achieved nothing else in a day I managed to take that photo!).

This time round the problem was extreme stress rather than depression, and the creative urge remained even when pretty much everything else had shut down. And I have to say that I'm glad of it, I hope that now that I'm back in the groove of writing it carries on :)

[kare.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, if you start slacking off on writing, I'll poke you! =D

[azziria.livejournal.com]

I'll hold you to that :)

[jendeana.livejournal.com]

Very interesting to learn that you and I have quite a bit in common.