Dude! I just wrote 396 words of totally spontaneous fic!

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In less than an hour and a half!

It's kinda crap, but hey, writing is writing, and writing is good. Even if it's crap. And spontaneous outbreaks of fic are particularly good.

It's LoM (unsurprisingly), and it doesn't look like fic. It looks kind of like a poem. Partly. Again. WTF is it with me and LoM and spontaneous eruptions of poetry!fic?

It also contains some standing around on roofs. That seems to be a staple of all my LoM fic lately.

Oh, and also, it's Sam/Annie-shippy, something I haven't really done before. Yay for new challenges!

It was initially meant for space_oddity_75, who's recently had a rough time, but as per usual, it turned depressing pretty soon, so I'm not sure it's the right thing to give away to someone who isn't feeling good in the first place. Also, as I already stated, at the moment it's still kind of crap. And kind of abstract. And kind of just-plain-weird. And possibly somewhat AU in its interpretation of the relationship, I dunno. And possibly really, really, really bad.

But I'm still thrilled.

Oh hell, here's an excerpt. I may hate this tomorrow, but who cares.

***


Watching

his face, knotted with concentration,

suspicion,

obsession,

as he figures out riddles

that exist only for him,

figures out the world

that exists

only as a riddle to him. Your world,

and you just a piece of the puzzle.

What is your meaning?


***

Gah. I can already see bits that are crap. See? This is why I don't do fast fic.

Comments

Damn. I just wrote a reply to this, and then I had to sneeze while my hand was on the mouse!

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And of course I clicked something, apparently, and the entire reply disappeared into data nirvana. Arrgh. Okay. Again:

>Whenever I re-read something I've written in the past, I always wish I could change every other word

Common feeling among writers. I feel like that about several of my older stories. Used to feel like that about everything I'd written, but I reached a point, a few years ago, where I could actually live with the level of quality I produce. (Around 2003, I think - after four years of writing fanfic.) I still see imperfections, but they're not so horribly embarrassing ones anymore.

>you look for perfection, which is admirable.

It's also dangerous, and possibly more of a hindrance than a blessing. Seriously: you'll probably get farther, in a shorter time than I, if you just keep writing a lot and don't worry too much about the finished stuff. I just can't switch off my inner perfectionist; it's not so much choice as compulsion, and it's seriously slowing me down as a writer, in every way (i.e. both re: projects and in terms of my development in general).

>especially from writers I look up to (like you or Loz)

Don't look up to me (it's okay to look up to Loz, she's in a different league entirely). I'm maybe half a step or so above you, skills-wise - *if* that much - and only because I started this whole writing-fanfic-in-English deal a few years earlier than you. The way I see it, you and I are pretty much in the same league; just not quite at the same stage of development.

>I chose to narrate it using the second person, which I've been told is quite difficult to pull off.

I think you pulled it off just fine. No complaints there from me!

>find alternative words that wouldn't affect the feelings I wanted to convey

My main problems with the text were on that level, I think - occasional less-than-perfect word choices, some slightly clashing metaphors/images etc. None of them particularly serious by itself, but a few too many, all told, for me to be able to squee wholeheartedly.

>One of my biggest faults (and this applies to all my fics, unfortunately) is the fact that I have almost perfect mental images of how the story should go, but they rarely translate into equally meaningful words on the page. I hate it when it happens, because whenever it comes down to writing actual scenes and dialogues, everything I write seems to be silly and meaningless.

We've talked about this before, I think... This happens to me, too. Seriously. This is what rewriting and revising and, occasionally (often), editing is for. The silly and meaningless clichés and phrases are perfectly fine for the first draft, but you then need to spend some time replacing them with something better. That takes time - but it works. You just need to give yourself the time to think about what you want to say; maybe put the story in the drawer for a week or two and return to it later. Eventually, an idea will come. I found this extremely difficult, in the first few years of writing - thought I would never learn how to do it - but it got easier with time. A bit. It's still difficult; I usually don't manage to replace more than one or two things in one sitting.

I'm sure there are writers who don't need to do this, who can think of a striking phrase or image on the very first try, and who therefore don't need to use trite placeholders. Well, I'm not one of them. All my first drafts contain a lot that is trite and silly and cliché.

ctd.

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>I tend to use too many adjectives

Me too. That, too, is something that you tend to get better at with time, though.

>I wish I could learn how to be a better writer just by practising a lot, but maybe the fact is just that I lack the right amount of talent to be one, and therefore I'll always drift in the sea of mediocrity.

I'm pretty sure that if I dug through my few, neurotic conversations with HL fanfic writer Amand-r, one of my greatest idols in fanfic in my early years in fandom, I could find a quote of mine saying exactly that! See, we *are* twins. Twins in kink as in neurosis. *g*

You have talent. And in a couple of years, if you keep writing, you will look back at your beginnings and be amazed by how much you have improved.

Do either you or I have as much talent as, say, Loz - or for that matter, the great idol of my past, Amand-r? I'll be quite honest: no, we probably don't. Not me, and not you. But we *do* have talent, and with practice, we can get pretty good - certainly well above average. Both of us. (Also, keep in mind that although we're both at near-native speaker level in English, we're still writing in our second language, and it's only natural that some things will be a bit more difficult for us - using the language in really unconventional, creative ways being one of these, unfortunately. Fortunately, though, you never stop learning, so this, too, gets easier.)

[Speaking of neurosis and insecurity: at some point of my fannish 'carreer', Amand-r friended me. You can imagine how thrilled I was. Eventually she defriended me again. I wasn't good/interesting/talented/... enough. (Or rather, she probably got overwhelmed by the length of her flist and pruned it to make it more manageable, and I was just someone she'd talked to a couple of times, not a close friend. Yes, I can be rational about this. *g*) This just as an aside, to underline how I'm really not all that great and impressive. ;-)]

Another thing...

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I don't know, maybe you will find this helpful - I know it's helping *me*: Somehow, I seem to have different standards for fanfic and pro writing. In fanfic, I tend to be most impressed by people who are capable of really striking turns of phrase. In pro writing, I like that, too, but I also honestly and deeply love a lot of writers who write in a much less 'visible', less striking way, whose style is a lot more 'normal'. When I realised that I became a lot more at peace with my own writing skills - because I think I'm perfectly capable of being a good writer of that second sort, even if I may never be one of the first sort.

So, basically - maybe we shouldn't try to compare ourselves to a type of writer we can't be, and try instead to be a good writer of the kind we *can* be. Because there are many different kinds of good writing.