FAM #12

[aadler]

The Fanfiction Ask Meme (from cornerofmadness through trobadora through naye through something from Tumblr).

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What made you start writing fanfic?
Which of your own fanfics have you re-read the most?
Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.
Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?
You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?
Name three stories you found easy to write.
Name three stories you found difficult to write.
What’s your ratio of hits to kudos?
What do your fic bookmarks say about you?
What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?
What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?

For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?

I knew this one would be a problem for me, because — as I noted in trading posts with cornerofmadness when this meme first came up — there’s no provided definition of what “E-rated” actually means. Since then, other questions have given me cause to assume an AO3-centric focus for the meme, and in Archive of Our Own the highest rating level is “Explicit”, so I still suspect that’s what was meant. Which at least gives me an idea as to what kind of questions is being asked, but … well, I don’t DO explicit.

More to the point, I don’t engage in any of what other people mean when they call something explicit. As I noted in the fifth installment of this meme, the most explicit sex I’ve ever written was in “Beg to Differ” and “Otherwise a Perfect Sky”, and even those were pretty bare-bones by modern standards, barely beyond saying and then sex happened.

It’s just not my thing, never has been. There has never been a time when I didn’t regard explicit description of sex acts as being in bad taste. In reading, I skip over such descriptions, not just in fanfic but in popular fiction, because it’s boring. Written descriptions of sex are boring, and when someone tries to spice up the boring with exotica and kink, it may (may) stop being boring but almost instantly becomes truly bad writing.

I’m aware that I have something of a double standard in my reasoning here. I’ve been in combat zones, with people trying to kill me and me looking earnestly for an opportunity to kill them, and I know that written descriptions of fights/battle are never an adequate depiction of the real thing, but I still love a good fight scene even when someone else wrote it. Yet I condemn the inadequacy in sex-depictions while forgiving it in fight-depictions. Maybe that’s inconsistent, or maybe it’s perfectly reasonable and realistic: I’d rather engage in sex than read about it, but (having tried both) would rather read about battle than engage in it.

So, in E-rated fics, what are the things my characters keep doing? They keep closing the door, pulling the blinds, and doing what they do in private. (And then spending the rest of their time trying to work out just what it means and where it’s going.)

Still to come:

Name three favorite characters to write.
You’re applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?