phantomtomato

So far in 2023, I have published fic for 11 unique fandoms (9 of them new-to-me), out of 18 total published fics. That hadn't been my writing goal—I think I originally intended something about learning to write plottier stories—but here we are, "picking up and writing for new fandoms" is my mode of existence for this year.

It's difficult to pick up a new fandom. For me, being "comfortable" writing in a fandom means something like being able to write a 5k fic without requiring a reference to the fandom's lore, setting, characters, etc. I wrote my second gift for 2023 Fandom Trumps Hate this month, for which my recipient requested Harry Potter, the one fandom I'd claim to feel comfortable with writing. Despite writing the requested ship for the first time in this fic, I felt perfectly fluent with the characters' feelings towards one another, where they were at various points in their timelines, and how the larger events of the series impacted each of them. In other words, nothing blocked me from being able to sit down and put words on the page—I didn't have to look up whether there were feasibility challenges to my chosen plot, or double-check in-universe rules for magic, or anything like that. No going back to canon! Canon is all efficiently indexed in my head.

To pick on some examples of canons less stuck in my mind: this year, I've checked how "My Mysterious Mademoiselle" handled French in descriptive prose (italicized), how many damned l's and t's are in Rickie Elliot (got it wrong on my first try for this post), the domains of the Greek/Roman god Bacchus, and where the fictional Welton Academy was supposed to have existed. I've spent hours rereading Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus narration, even though I consciously decided that I didn't want to write my Bartimaeus fic as a pastiche. I hunted down a text copy of "The Attic" through extracurricular means because the free audio version was too difficult to process as a reference source (also for character name spelling!). I had less choice for Another Country, and rewatched the movie-only scenes (with subtitles on) a number of times to figure out where Bennett's mother intended to honeymoon and when.

I'm typing this out in order to process how different the flow is between writing fic in a comfortable fandom and writing fic in a fandom that requires canon review. I enjoy both! But canon review is so exhausting, and by choosing writing projects this year which nearly all required canon review, I've written a lot less—both in raw word count and in the number of individual stories. I've been frustrated with what felt like my slowness, and I'm trying to contextualize that for myself. It's fine. I did a lot of new writing, if not in the ways I've previously defined new writing. I'm glad to have those fics.

But I also really miss being comfortable in a fandom. I don't think, as I did at the start of the year, that I'll be returning to HP as a primary interest. This sucks for a lot of emotional reasons, but after eight or nine months, I think I need to accept that reality. Which means I need to develop a new primary fandom (or set of) and write them, multiple times, until I get comfortable.

It's such a nice feeling to sit down on an empty weekend day and knock out a 3k fic that I enjoy. It's so fun to brainstorm a bunch of different plots within the same universe. I love having an OTP and re-imagining their love dozens of different ways. I'm really ready to settle for a while and stop jumping between so many fandoms.

Let's hope I stay strong and don't get too distracted by Trick-or-Treat and Yuletide.

Thinking about the element of stakes within a story: high, low, no. I'm not a plot-driven writer and have no interest in becoming one at this point. I've been reactionary in the past and, as a result, described myself as writing no-stakes stories—but I don't think that's quite accurate anymore. Er, in the sense that I don't think it was ever accurate, and I now wouldn't apply the term to my writing, past or present.

What I am interested in doing is learning to define a set of low-stakes issues which are driving a story. It might just be my perspective as an outsider, but it usually feels like the stakes in a plotty story are laid out clearly at the start: Gideon the Ninth opens on the idea that for the Ninth House to survive, Harrrowhark must succeed in becoming a Lyctor, whatever that means; if the White Witch isn't defeated in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, then Narnia will remain in eternal winter and all the Pevensie children will probably die. High stakes: there's probably a chance of death involved. Easy! Obvious. Evil wins, or the nation ends, the bomb goes off, and so forth.

Low-stakes stories are harder to see from the outset, I think—even though this is what I tend to write, I don't usually start by defining the meaning of failure. Maybe it would help as part of the planning process for stories? On the one hand, being primarily driven by character arcs, I'm not as interested in the concept of failure. I don't typically think of their emotional endpoints as failing, no matter what they are, because the progression to get there was fun for me to write about. On the other, though, I wonder if it would help articulate motivations in the middle, as we've moved past the initial spark of the story premise and haven't yet entered the final slide towards the end.