December Meme: Fannish reading and writing overlap

[krait]

Today's prompt comes from edenfalling, and is technically Tuesday's prompt: Do your fannish reading and writing interests always overlap? If not, is there any pattern to their intersection or lack thereof?


This was tricky, because I find it hard to think of myself in the context of "writer" - on the one hand, yes, I write! And I think about writing, and I want to write well, and I certainly have a lot of roughly drafted story fragments lurking around my hard drive. On the other hand, I have a total of four fics to my name, I'm lucky if I publish one thing a year (this year, for instance, I've posted about three-tenths of a thing), and all of those story fragments are very incomplete; I can't think of myself as a writer in the same way that I do the fic writers I admire.

Ahem. Digression aside: the answer here is both yes and no. There are certainly things that do always overlap (or 99% of the time, anyway); certain characters, fand sometimes certain tropes, do seem to be perpetually on my subconscious whether I'm scribbling into an OpenOffice document or scouring the AO3 for something to read.

In just about any fandom there will be certain characters I latch onto - or that latch on to me - and about whom most of my reading and writing centre around! In Harry Potter fandom it was Severus Snape and to a lesser degree Remus Lupin; in Homestuck the focus is broader (Karkat, Dave, Terezi, Tavros, Sollux, Rose) but still relatively constant. Way back in the mists of time, it was Duo Maxwell and Chang Wufei; and then Qui-Gon Jinn. If fic doesn't involve them in some way, I'm much less likely to want to read or write it. Though there's no guarantee: I have two thousand words of Loveless fic about Nisei to prove that sometimes my brain takes odd detours off the beaten path!

Tropes are harder to sum up, because to really sum up my favourite tropes would take a month's worth of posts all to itself, but I'll try. In general, fic that I adore or write will feature, on the PG-rated end of the scale, personal grief/emotional turmoil and the ways in which it can be amelioriated, or not, through other people. On the R-rated end of the scale, expect lots of power differences/exchanges/negotiations, relationships that manipulate the reader's perceptions of healthy vs unhealthy attachments, and/or exploration of attraction/pleasure, or relationships, which doesn't conform to the social norms of the characters. (Perhaps oddly, given some of this list, BDSM doesn't do much for me as a kink; neither does the Alpha/Beta/Omega trope.) One day I ought to go through my bookmarks and put ticky marks under each of those three headings for every fic in there... I suspect the results would startle even me by their sheer numbers. :D

This is a HUGE topic, and I'm trying to keep this entry from becoming so large it collapses under its own weight, so jump in and ask for clarifications if I've muddled something. Or tell me what your own reading and/or writing hot-buttons are, and whether they share certain features and how they diverge!

Comments

[edenfalling]

Interesting! I was thinking more in terms of fandoms-as-a-whole than characters and tropes -- sort of, in Fandom A you read fic and write down some stuff of your own, in Fandom B you only read fic, and in Fandom C you're still writing but aren't looking for new fic to read anymore. But characters and tropes are interesting as well.

I think my reading leans more toward plotty action/adventure stories (or 'case' fic, depending on the genre of the fandom), whereas my writing tends more toward character studies and internally-focused stuff. At any rate, I write a LOT fewer explosions and fight scenes than I read. And I have much more pronounced character preferences for reading than for writing. I think that's because I often write characters as a challenge to myself -- a 'can I figure out what makes Person X tick?' sort of thing -- whereas with reading, I would rather spend time with people I already like and understand.

[krait]

Ahhh!

Well, I've talked before about my "read-only fandoms", so in sum, yep. Some fandoms I read in, some fandoms I read and write in. I don't think there are any that I only write in? (But there are one or two where I've written without having done all the canon!)

My reading varies a lot, really; some days I want plot, some days I want character studies. I tend to write the latter, because I can't write the former (though sometimes I'd like to!) I'm a bit opposite of you, though; I tend to prefer writing characters I like, because that's an awful lot of time to spend with someone whom I'm not sure about! :D Though there's one fic that's the exception to that, and I'm still not sure how it happened; it was definitely a "figuring out what makes X tick" feeling.

Maybe because I'm a fast reader, and even if I end up not bonding with the character at the end of a fic I haven't wasted nearly as much time as if I were writing them - when I write, I carry those characters around in my head for weeks, niggling at scenes and replaying them, whereas I can read 10K of fanfic in two hours or so.

[edenfalling]

I am a pretty fast reader too, but... I guess I consider reading a pure pleasure activity even when it's painful or difficult, whereas writing is more of a love-to-hate activity. (They're both compulsions, though.) There's also a nagging sense of "you are Doing It Wrong" when a writer has a noticeably different take on a character from my own impressions, and it's harder for me to ignore that mismatch if I am already iffy or negative toward the character in question.

I also don't really have the experience of characters "living in my head" which I've heard some writers talk about. I mean, if I'm writing any characters on a regular basis, I do the mental equivalent of constructing little individualized AI programs to consult and poke at to see what might happen in various scenarios, but the programs don't keep running in the background when I'm not paying active attention.