What a fascinating topic - and one that I keep coming back to, myself, and wonder.
I wrote stories as a child - not often, but when we had to write something in class, I'd find my imagination soaring and that I could come up with wonderful, imaginative, absurd, fantastical tales, be it an epic poem about an olympic hero who gets torn to pieces by the adoring crowds, or a story about an alien melting away in a hot tram, or a poem dedicated to the awesomeness of mathematics (that one won me things, books and prizes and stuff). I even had my first poem published in the national children's magazine when I was seven.
But that was then, and then I grew up, and life happened. And I didn't write a single word of fiction for a very long time - 15 years, I think, between my last bit of creative writing (which was an angsty and very personal short story about unrequited love, which I never showed anyone), and my first drabble in the SSHG fandom.
Why do I do it? It's a good question. In the SSHG fandom, I think it was a mixture of wanting to write again (wanting, not necessarily being driven to) and wanting to belong, wanting to be a bigger part of this community, and I didn't feel like "just" reading was enough. I'd read so much awesome stuff - I wanted to try my hand at it, too. But it was scary, and hard, and ... well, scary. I think it's why I stuck strictly to drabbles for a long time - it gave me boundaries, restrictions; having the 100 word limit to stick to (even in drabble series) gave me a safety net of sorts. Which I don't think I've ever really put to words before now, and I'm not even sure it makes sense...
I suppose a lot of my SSHG writing still has to do with wanting to be a part of the community - apart from a handful of drabbles and a couple of shorter things, everything SSHG that I've written has been written to prompts (gifts or otherwise) or challenges. I wonder sometimes if it's because I've read hundreds if not thousands of fics in this fandom and therefore find it difficult to come up with anything remotely original myself, or if it's just that I write SSHG to share, to an audience, not just because I need to.
And that - not being able to write other than to other people's prompts - has bothered me. Could I only come up with words, but not the ideas? It's something I've spent quite a bit of time wondering about.
So in that sense, after all those years in SSHG, falling head first into another fandom (sort of; not much fandom in a community sense to speak of with Skulduggery Pleasant), was eye-opening. Liberating. I realised I wanted to write. I had to write. There was little out there to draw upon, and there's not nearly the audience that there is with SSHG (not that I've ever had a huge audience outside my LJ circle of friends and the exchange, but that's huge compared to all of the SP fandom), but I've needed to write. Without prompts. Without challenges. All my SP fic has been written because I've not been able to not write it. Because there are stories I've wanted to see happen, and no one else has written them, or not in such a way, and so I've had no choice but to write them myself.
So ... er, long comment is long enough already, isn't it?
I still don't know why I really write. It's excruciatingly difficult at times. I hate my writing. I can't read it after I've written something. I wibble (oh god do I wibble). I want acceptance, but I'm afraid of it, too. I need to get it out there, away from me, as soon as I can, and then I wibble some more. I want comments, and I don't want them, because I'm scared of what they'll say.
Although I have to say that this need for acceptance has decreased a bit over the years ... and it seems to be fandom-dependant, too - I don't need it nearly the same way with my SP fic, which I write largely for myself, as I do with SSHG. It's odd, really, now that I think about it.
And yeah, there is a post-story crash, especially after the longer ones, such as the SSHG exchange fics. I've found it very hard to get back into writing something else after finishing each of my exchange fics, so I've tried to at least write a few random drabbles at some point just to avoid getting another six month block.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-08-29 06:44 am (UTC)I wrote stories as a child - not often, but when we had to write something in class, I'd find my imagination soaring and that I could come up with wonderful, imaginative, absurd, fantastical tales, be it an epic poem about an olympic hero who gets torn to pieces by the adoring crowds, or a story about an alien melting away in a hot tram, or a poem dedicated to the awesomeness of mathematics (that one won me things, books and prizes and stuff). I even had my first poem published in the national children's magazine when I was seven.
But that was then, and then I grew up, and life happened. And I didn't write a single word of fiction for a very long time - 15 years, I think, between my last bit of creative writing (which was an angsty and very personal short story about unrequited love, which I never showed anyone), and my first drabble in the SSHG fandom.
Why do I do it? It's a good question. In the SSHG fandom, I think it was a mixture of wanting to write again (wanting, not necessarily being driven to) and wanting to belong, wanting to be a bigger part of this community, and I didn't feel like "just" reading was enough. I'd read so much awesome stuff - I wanted to try my hand at it, too. But it was scary, and hard, and ... well, scary. I think it's why I stuck strictly to drabbles for a long time - it gave me boundaries, restrictions; having the 100 word limit to stick to (even in drabble series) gave me a safety net of sorts. Which I don't think I've ever really put to words before now, and I'm not even sure it makes sense...
I suppose a lot of my SSHG writing still has to do with wanting to be a part of the community - apart from a handful of drabbles and a couple of shorter things, everything SSHG that I've written has been written to prompts (gifts or otherwise) or challenges. I wonder sometimes if it's because I've read hundreds if not thousands of fics in this fandom and therefore find it difficult to come up with anything remotely original myself, or if it's just that I write SSHG to share, to an audience, not just because I need to.
And that - not being able to write other than to other people's prompts - has bothered me. Could I only come up with words, but not the ideas? It's something I've spent quite a bit of time wondering about.
So in that sense, after all those years in SSHG, falling head first into another fandom (sort of; not much fandom in a community sense to speak of with Skulduggery Pleasant), was eye-opening. Liberating. I realised I wanted to write. I had to write. There was little out there to draw upon, and there's not nearly the audience that there is with SSHG (not that I've ever had a huge audience outside my LJ circle of friends and the exchange, but that's huge compared to all of the SP fandom), but I've needed to write. Without prompts. Without challenges. All my SP fic has been written because I've not been able to not write it. Because there are stories I've wanted to see happen, and no one else has written them, or not in such a way, and so I've had no choice but to write them myself.
So ... er, long comment is long enough already, isn't it?
I still don't know why I really write. It's excruciatingly difficult at times. I hate my writing. I can't read it after I've written something. I wibble (oh god do I wibble). I want acceptance, but I'm afraid of it, too. I need to get it out there, away from me, as soon as I can, and then I wibble some more. I want comments, and I don't want them, because I'm scared of what they'll say.
Although I have to say that this need for acceptance has decreased a bit over the years ... and it seems to be fandom-dependant, too - I don't need it nearly the same way with my SP fic, which I write largely for myself, as I do with SSHG. It's odd, really, now that I think about it.
And yeah, there is a post-story crash, especially after the longer ones, such as the SSHG exchange fics. I've found it very hard to get back into writing something else after finishing each of my exchange fics, so I've tried to at least write a few random drabbles at some point just to avoid getting another six month block.