Essay: On the Motivation and Addiction of Writing Fan Fiction

[triedunture]

Caveat: I have been meaning to write an essay like this for some time. It may or may not be manifesting itself tonight because of my need to check a box off my Don't Break The Chain writing calendar. (This counts as writing, right?) Plus, I think now is a good time in my fanfic...career? experience? lifetime?...to seriously think of both Why and How I do whatever it is that I do.

And not just me: all of you as well. We're all doing this phenomena, whether we write or draw or read or lurk. It's the weird conjoining of hundreds of people across vast geographical differences by a common aesthetic taste. Tons of essays and things have been written on the Why and How of slash, and I'm not going to add this piddly piece of drivel to all that research and philosophy. Call me self-absorbed, but I'm just going to riff on this need to write fanfic as I personally see it.

Let's be frank about it. I'm not very talented. I'm not musical; I can't sing, play an instrument, or dance with any sort of discipline. I'm not particularly athletic and I'm too poor to have any interesting and expensive hobbies like sailboating, deep-sea fishing, mountain climbing, or exotic racecar driving. Anything I've ever done passably well has had to do with language: jokes, jabs, and just plain silly stories. And I'm not being self-deprecating when I say I'm really not that good. I make plenty of mistakes, usually ones of hubris, when writing fics, and it does me no favors to tell me otherwise, you lovely, lovely petals. But for example, I'll be looking over a fic I've written and posted when suddenly I'll see a plot hole so gaping, an unexplained thing so crazy, that I'll wonder why no one has said, "Get thee to another fandom, charlatan!" Luckily, no one notices most times. This is either because you're all too nice to me or that I'm borrowing trouble.

None of this is here nor there. I'm supposed to be talking about Why.

Why do I write fanfic? Not to share with my loved ones, that's for damn sure. This pastime of mine is without a doubt my biggest embarrassment. My boss is this close to Googling me within an inch of my life, and if he ever finds out about what I do here in the comfort of LJ, that's it. I must commit seppaku. I cannot even imagine living with that sort of shame, of having to explain to a normal person, "I like to play pretend with characters that I didn't even bother creating and, to make things even more creepy, I like to make them kiss in a gay way."

It's the sexual component that does it, really. Even though a great deal of the fic I've been writing, notably my earlier tries at Jooster, have been nothing more than sweet little interludes, the question of sexuality is there, and it's the way I'm focused on it that's what embarrasses me. If I were just writing non-sexual fics, maybe it would be different, but even then those that heard I wrote fanfic would probably assume that it would be sexual. The truth is, I think I'm a pretty normal sexual being and I don't know how that meshes with a hobby that revolves almost entirely on homosexual relations.

So I hide it from people in my First Life. But I think it goes without saying that I am all too eager to share it with y'all here in non-RL.

Let's talk about comments for a minute. I'm going to be totally honest here: It is all about the comments. Comments are like drinking a really good bottle of wine. Comments are an extraordinary drug. They make me giddy and high and anxious and greedy. Even the ones that just say "lol" or "Awesome." I watch the number of comments I accrue like a hawk. I play games with myself; before signing in to Gmail the morning after posting a fic, I say to myself, "I'll be happy if I get five comments" or ten or two or whatever. But I always aim low, so that when I say "I'll be happy if I get five comments" and I get eleven, I have a sort of comment orgasm. I bask for a long time, just enjoying the number 11. What a great number, I think. And then I devour every single comment. Doesn't matter how short or incoherent they might be. I read them, then re-read them, then bask some more, then turn them to examine every angle.

Oh, don't get me started on the meaty comments. The comments that are a paragraph or more. I see those and I just...flutter. I sometimes can't even see straight to read it at first. I just take in the sheer massive SIZE and that's enough for me. For about .03 seconds. Then I tear into it like a starving man with a steak dinner. If I get one of those per fic, I am so pleased I could walk on air.

For instance, let's compare two different fics. When I wrote Jeeves and the Uncomfortable Morning about a month ago, I knew that 1) it would probably get a lot of comments because it had some steamy stuff in it and 2) it wasn't the best thing I'd ever written, pacing-wise. I had really just wanted to dash something out quickly to get over a funk that had settled on me from writing an angsty story. But even I didn't think it would garner the *checks e-mail alerts to confirm* 54 separate comments I received. That's not counting my flabbergasted responses and consequential chatting. 54 people reading a story with recycled characters doing dirty things and saying, Yes. I will comment on this.

That's freaking amazing. The fact that there are 54 people in the world who sit at their desks during the day thinking once in awhile, "You know what would be hot? Valet slash" blows my mind. Praise Yahweh for the internet.

But then there's the flip side. I will sometimes write something with blinders on, without thinking whether or not there's anyone else who would be interested in reading it. For example (and this is not a ploy to guilt you into commenting on this! Srsly, don't. Please.) I tossed myself headlong into Kingdom fic recently, wherein I wrote this. Now, 6 or 7 lovely people commented, and that's frankly more than I deserved. I wrote that too fast without thinking creatively enough. I could have done something weirder and more revealing about the characters, but instead I wrote some (maybe not so much) funny dialog and slapped a Rosebud in the Snowglobe ending on it. God, why did I write that Snowglobe ending!? What absolute bollocks. If anything, I should have started the story with that secret picture in the wallet and built the narrative around that. Jesus, it's so obvious now.

And then, sometimes I'll write something so bizarre in such an obscure fandom(s) that really, I shouldn't expect any sort of response at all. (And I didn't; I said to myself, "I'll be happy if three people comment" and I got 7. That's fair. I will admit, though, after being pampered by my Jooster and House cheerleaders, I was nervous when hours passed without a comment alert pinging my inbox. I actually signed out of Google which I NEVER do so I would stop checking my mail obsessively. Anyway, it's a sweet little piece but I'm sure in time I'll see big problems with it like that last Kingdom fic. Oh, and please don't comment on it! This is a scientific inquiry, not a guilt trip.)

I guess it appears that the Why has a lot to do with collecting feedback from you guys. Is it validation? Is it because I didn't get hugged enough as a kid? Do I need to connect with near-strangers so badly that I use this as an excuse? And if so, why do I sometimes make things harder on myself by doing weird or obscure stories? If my end game is lots of comments, why isn't every fic a rollercoaster of angst and fluff ending in a tender yet sexy scene in bed? I dunno! But I think it's intrinsically wrapped up in the How of writing fanfic.

It's a strange process because it is by turns letting loose with incredible fun and extremely serious crafting. While working on a fic, one minute I'll be saying to myself, "LOLZ this is gonna be so freakin' ghey, it's awesome" and then the next minute, I'm saying, "Wait, do I have that landmark correct? I need to pull up Wikipedia and a G-map and get the dictionary off the shelf and find another word for 'softly.'" I suppose, as crazy as it sounds, I get a lot of pleasure from applying myself so thoroughly to this rather ridiculous task.

I won't lie: language-wise, I do work pretty hard. I'm very lucky to have a great beta, and that helps. I also have, for bigger projects, an understanding best friend who is not into slash. That, for me, is an essential part of passing muster. If a person who doesn't get pulled in by the hawt ghey sex can still say, "Yeah, this is an okay story" then that's me doing my job. Sometimes I don't do that job; for example, while writing Bertie and the Ruse to Save Jeeves, my first reader T said, "I don't want them to kiss at the end." I pointed out to him that, you know, they had to. Because it was slash. And I like slash.

And T said, "But it's dumb. The bed-sharing is cute, but this kiss comes out of nowhere. Bertie just acknowledged a vague feeling. You need to figure it out more smoothly."

To which I said, "F you! I'm gonna post the fucking thing." (Because I get impatient waiting for my next Comment Fix.)

"Fine!"

"Fine."

And now I regret it, of course. I look back on it with T's words ringing in my ears and I wonder how I could have made it better (besides the obvious, embarrassing plot hole of not knowing where the servants' quarters are in a country house).

That's another thing! I re-read constantly. Yes, I am so conceited that I ask YOU to read my stuff and then I read it over and over looking for problems after the fact. Sometimes it's just tiny grammar mistakes I'm pruning out. Sometimes I'm looking for a better line of dialog or a better way to describe something. I look for cracks and leaks and holes. It's kind of like being a plumber for fanfic. Except instead of fixing the house, I just make a note and try to remember it when I build the next house. To be fair to myself, I also do this with my favorite fics from other people. If a story is really good, I'll read it a dozen or more times over the course of a few weeks and study it to see what was strongest, where improvements could have been made, and how I can learn from it.

This makes me sound like some sort of Fanfic Rainman (488 adverbs, yeah, 488), but I'm really not! In the end, it's still just a game I like to play. The rules are simple: if I do a good job, then people will tell me so in the form of smiley faces. And I just try to do a better job each time. It's interesting that I choose the word "job," because I really do believe I'm providing some sort of service. After all, I know the glow of satisfaction I get as a reader when an exciting new fanfic is posted.

I think that's plenty of self-serving hogwash talk. I'll stop babbling and let you have a go if you like. Am I the only one shooting up with black-tar Comment Cocaine? Does anyone else goes insane when working on a story? Do you lose sleep over how to fill plot holes? Like they say in the big leagues, let us know in the comments! :D