What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: Since you're talking about fanfic: how do you balance writing original and fic? I am prouder of my original stuff, but fic feels so much /easier/ to get into, and I never get a rejection from AO3, and it's hard to keep going with original work.

This is an excellent question.

Speaking personally, I use fanfic as a way to boost my confidence: to try out new ideas, to improve my writing, and - yes - to reassure myself that, at a base level, I’m capable of writing things that other people want to read. I also use it to remind myself that I’m capable of finishing things, which is often the scariest part of writing original stuff: the knowledge that you could just give up, put aside a difficult WIP in favour of a new story without anybody being the wiser, and repeat that cycle so often that you never, in fact, finish anything. 

Original fic is harder because, of necessity, it demands more from us. Particularly if your original stuff is SFF or any sort of genre work, you have to worldbuild the setting in a way that makes sense to new readers, instead of being able to trust, as you can with fanfic, that the audience already knows what you’re talking about. The same goes for describing characters and setting up relationships and backstory: particularly when it comes to secondary or antagonist characters, you can get away with doing precious little work in fanfic, because all you have to do is drop the character’s name, and the audience already has a preexisting set of assumptions about who they are, why they matter and what they mean to the protagonists. In original stories, you have to set all that up yourself.

But the joy of writing original stories is that you get to set the canon. You get to say, “Everyone Is Queer, Not Because I Headcanoned It Or Because I’m Addressing Ten Years Of Unconfirmed Subtext, But Because I Am The Queer God Of This Tiny Queer Universe And As I Make It, So Shall It Be.” You get to say, “Let There Be Dragons,” and then you get to decide what type of dragon without people wondering why you’re taking so much time away from characters and romance to describe them. You don’t have to say, “I love this, but I wish there were more ladies, and especially ladies who don’t suffer or die or pine for undeserving assholes,” because you can, instead, say, “Let There Be Awesome Ladies.” You get to say, “White People Are Not The Default.” You get to say whatever the hell you want.

And while you can certainly do some of that stuff in fanfic, too, playing in your own sandbox - creating your own story - means that, potentially, you’re making a brand new sandbox for other people to play in, too. If there were no original works, we’d have nothing to fanfic about, which would be a tragedy. So yes, it’s hard, but it’s also worthwhile. Fanfic is awesome for its own sake, but original stuff is, too - the trick is to find a way to balance them, so that each type of writing refreshes and supports you for producing the other.

Hope that helps!

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