Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

Every person is a storyteller. As small children, we do it all the time, reading stories aloud, engaging in imaginative play, recounting the narrative of our day to the grownups in our lives. We create characters and put them in scenarios and then have them act out what happens, based upon the world we've created and the rules we've set forth. Sometimes those rules don't make a lick of sense to the grownups, but that's also valuable information, too, and it fits alongside ideas about telling truths, making fictions, and which audiences which stories are meant for. Grownups encourage this behavior in young children, because there's a truckload of research now that says imaginative play, dramatic play, taking on roles and examining them, and learning how to tell stories collaboratively are all essential skills for developing a healthy human.

But then, at some point, storytelling and creating starts to get value judgments associated with it. "Lying to your caretakers comes with consequences," as a benign example, but there are several less benign ones.

"You can only read books at your level."

"Romance and friendship stories are for sissies and girls. War and fighting stories are for boys."

"Only people who write original fiction count."

"Men's stories are always more important than women's. Talking about feelings is unmanly."

"Only people who make money from their work are authors."

"Cis stories are more important than trans stories. Het stories are more important than queer ones. White stories are more important than any other color's."

"Don't waste your time with stories unless you plan to make a career out of them."

"Knowing the minutiae of the canon is far more important to being a fan than writing transformative stories. All slash is icky, because it has queer people in it."

"You aren't good enough for this. Stop trying."

But remember: You Are Already Good Enough.

Stories are important. When we talk about children's literature, we talk about mirrors and windows and sliding glass doors, after Rudine Simms Bishop coined the terms in her 1990 article "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." When someone shoots about why representation matters in media, this is what they're talking about. Mirrors show a person themselves in stories, putting them in roles they would otherwise not dream for themselves. Windows give someone a view into another person's experience, a way to see something they have not experienced. The sliding glass door then allows someone to step into an experience that isn't theirs and live it, imaginatively.

The funny thing about imagination, investigation into our brains shows, is that humans are actually really good at imagining other people's lives and scenarios. To the point where we start having physiological responses to things we rationally know aren't real. They're actors, they're characters, they're words on a page. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe!" shouts Magritte. We know. And yet, our brains react all the same. Some stories are more important than the lives of the people telling them. Or being cast in them.

At a certain point, we still tell stories, but we do it on a much smaller scale. Trying to do bigger stories invokes the representation of all those stories told to us about how storytelling is solely the province of the multimillions-of-copies-and-the-movie-deal authors. Our material just can't measure up, so it's not worth trying. And why shouldn't we believe it when we're not producing the finely-crafted material everyone says is good stuff on our first try? Or our seventh. Or seventeenth. Or seventieth.

Ira Glass can help give you some perspective. The truth is that you just. keep. going. [Video of moving text of accompanying audio.] Which means in that gap where the work and the taste aren't with each other, many of us have to find a way to get that inner critic to can it long enough to get the work out to completion. (And even after you've closed the gap, sometimes that critic comes out to play anyway.)

A simple possibility for success at this is to declare this work something that you're not going to show anyone else. It's allowed to be as flawed and not to taste as it's going to be, because it's not going to go out anywhere. It might not even have to satisfy you all that much, and it can shove it in your junk drawer when you're done and never have to think about it again. Maybe you're writing it as id-fic, solely to satisfy your brain, without care or concern about anyone else, and there's no need to do any of those things that would clean it up and polish it, because it's just for you, and that already makes it perfect.

Similarly, calling it a draft can sometimes evade the critic long enough to get something done. NaNoWriMo explicitly invokes this idea, setting the goal at writing the words. It doesn't say the novel has to go up for sale, or teach a certain amount of sales, before it wins the game. It's solely wordcount. 50k or bust. Once the draft is done, then if you want to go back and revise, edit, and clean up your work for publication, great -- edit to your satisfaction. Or, if it didn't work, toss it in your junk drawer and start another.

I started writing fiction for myself a long time ago, and it didn't matter whether or not it was any good, because it was for me and I kind the idea. And then I started writing fiction with others in the guise of some role-playing and comics fandom boards. Since it was shared storytelling, and for fun, it didn't trip any sort of inner critic because, well, it wasn't, y'know, writing. (The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention...) After that, it was this strange thing called LiveJournal, then Dreamwidth, where I wasn't writing fiction, necessarily, but I was still writing stuff and learning about how writing works and reading other people's writing and seeing where it held up and where it didn't, in my opinion. Lots of practice at writing.

And even with all that, I still was nervous that the person I wrote my first story on AO3 for would think I was a terrible writer, I had gotten the characters all wrong, and it would expose the lie that no, really, I wasn't any good at this writing thing. Because I still have an inner critic that occasionally rears their head and disgorges something that's rooted in the anxiety that it's not going to be good enough. Because even if all the other ones have, that just means I'm due for a terrible one, right? Except I might have already had some of those mediocre ones, and even then, people found something they liked about them. I, too, am Good Enough, even when my own brain says otherwise.

While I haven't been able to get the inner critic to completely go away, and I doubt I ever will, I have been able to get it down to an occasional, small, roar. That's progress.

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

In the last post, I talked about seeing characters as collections of tropes put together. This can seem a bit reductive, as characters are more than their tropes, and the interactions between tropes and other characters is often equally as important to building a character that the audience knows, loves, and is unique enough to be distinguished among the cast.

Here's the thing, though. A large amount of fanwork, as we pointed out earlier, is based in speculative questions. "What if the hero did fall to the forces of evil?" "What would it have been like if i was the Hero's female best friend were the real hero?" "What would happen if [x] and [y] [fought/banged/seduced/allied/teamed up?" (That last one has a lot of canon answers if you're looking at the shared universes of comics and graphic novel productions, depending on the needs of the overarching mythological arc.) Several works will stay within their source's universe, but engage in a few small changes to the story as we know it to produce the desired characters they want to work with. Or rearrange the tropes and identities of the characters and work from there. "What if" stories are a lot of fun to write and read, and one of the things that ties them together is someone taking the time to think through what the ramifications of those changes would be. If the setting and the author are interested in that, anyway -- there's plenty of perfectly good "Plot? What Plot?" material out there and others that take either the MST3K Mantra or Bellisario's Maxim as their guiding principles (along with several of the various Rules of [Z] tropes, where things are handwaved away as to whether or not they work because it looks cool/it's funny/etc.). There's no need to have to plot out justifications for everything being the way it is and writing a voluminous backstory for your work if you don't want to (and sometimes that can be a trap to avoid actually writing the thing). You certainly can, if that helps, and the longer a work goes on, the more likely it is to accumulate a certain amount of this just to make sure that it holds together against itself, but it's not necessary. As I told that small who had done all of that work, it's lovely, it's wonderful, and now it needs to be put to service in writing the actual story/ies that are going to come from all of that research.

Some of the "what if" stories, though, are the ones that bring together characters from different universes together, through any sort of manner, and have them interact. Comics properties are rife with these crossovers, which are fairly easy to do when all of the characters are housed under one company's aegis. (Which, incidentally, has been why the Marvel Cinematic Universe has operated the way it has - Spider-Man was sold to Sony some time ago, so Peter Parker's appearance in an MCU film had to be negotiated. Similarly, a certain amount of the X-Men were owned by 20th Century Fox, and so they weren't around, either (and Deadpool makes fun of this in his own fourth-wall-breaking sort of way) without extensive negotiations between the two studios about appearances, compensation, and the like.) Crossover issues and series are pretty easy to do, and work as a way of cross-promotion of the titles involved, in an attempt to get people interested in one character's books to start reading another character's books and spend more money that way. It doesn't always work, and crossovers and their respective multiveresal events sometimes provoke a backlash from the fans who want their stories to stay self-contained in one book so they don't have to go buy a run of six other titles just to get everything that happens in this plot arc. (The trade paperback compilations, if a story makes it to them, help mitigate this issue, but that also means having to wait to see that arc through.)

Fanworks take it one step further, though, and more than happily run crossovers between completely separate properties that would be pretty nightmarish for rights negotitations if they were even to come into existence as an "official" anything. Steven Universe characters in the RWBY setting? No problem. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder investigating a strange event with the assistance of Olivia Dunham and the Fringe division? Sure. Harry Potter taking a trip to the Disc and meeting DEATH and his granddaughter? Sounds fun. And it's not just two franchises put to work - some settings work equally well for massive multi-franchise crossovers, like the Triwizard Tournament, the Vytal Festival, or any other setting where visitors could be equally from around the block as around the galaxy. (Super Smash Brothers, the video game, is essentially this - "What happens when we get the characters from first-party Nintendo titles, along with selected guests from other studios, together in an all-out fighting game whose plot is essentially 'a small child is playing with their dolls and imagining what this setting would be like.'?" All sorts of characters could drop into and out of the Smash universe, and the characters inside wouldn't bat an eye.)

Crossovers work on the idea of putting an established character(s) into a new setting and seeing how they work with an environment that may be radically different than their own. This is where having your trope characterization can come in handy. Some characters are more likely to charge off into the wilderness, others are going to make assumptions about the new space (that often turn out to be very wrong, and sometimes injuriously so), and some will want to get out of here as soon as possible. Some are talkers, some are fighters, and some are going to seem like they don't understand at all, except it turns out they have the best handle on the new setting out of all of the characters, because they've been patiently observing the whole time and building a model in their own heads about what's going on. Selecting which tropes apply to those characters helps them get integrated into the new setting in believable ways.

There's a special crossover set that deserves its own bit of attention. The fusion crossover idea (usually just mentioned as a fusion) doesn't pluck characters from their original space and drop them in a new one. Instead, it casts the characters from Universe A into the various roles of Universe B, creating an amalgam (fusion!) of character traits that may be applicable to the composite character created. For example, if you wanted to fuse Steven Universe and Harry Potter, you might assign Steven the role of Harry, since they're both kids with magical powers and destinies that haven't had the training on how to use them until much later on in life, as well as (at least one) absent parents and being raised by others. The trick to a fusion crossover, though, is that the characters from Universe A still have to remain recognizably themselves, even as they take on the characters of Universe B. A friend of mine said "Peridot is the Draco Malfoy of Steven Universe," which is to say they share certain characteristics, but Peridot has to remain Peridot -- brash, hotheaded, and usually clueless about the social impact of her words -- while also being Draco, who is much more concerned about class status and who doesn't generally get personally engaged in something if he doesn't have to. The two of them both like to think of themselves as the smartest in the room, or at least the most powerful, despite it not being anywhere close to true at all, so Peridot!Draco might play up that trait and their shared swiftness to resort to insults as the way of expressing distate with someone. There are still some decisions that have to be made, though - does Peridot's hotheaded nature come through as a way of making her recognizable? How does living in Draco's circumstances, where there's power and money and henchmen available, change Peridot, who generally has had to rely on the threat of power from Gems stronger than her, or mechanical advantages, to get what she wants? This is another of those times where figuring out the tropes of your characters can sometimes help in crafting them in a new setting. Making a decision about which tropes are primary and which are secondary (or nonexistent) can help build the framework of a composite character, or give some ideas on how a character might react if dumped into a world where everything they know is wrong and they have to quickly rebuild their view of the world.

One of the things that's been really helpful to me when it comes to thinking about characterization, and especially on how to approach characterization in new settings, is the idea of Three-Point Characterization. Any given character in any given medium has a multitude of mannerisms, tropes, and concepts attached to them. Generally speaking, though, there are some of them that come through more strongly than others to the viewer/reader. The creator may have some in mind, but once a thing gets out into the wild, the viewer/reader contributes as much, if not more, to how they understand the character and what parts of that character are the most important bits. Three-Point Characterization suggests that people have at most three parts of a character that they consider absolutely core to that character, and that if a creator touches on all of the points that the reader considers to be part of a character, then the character reads correctly. If there's a mismatch between the creator and the reader, then something feels off about the character, which can be anything from "this doesn't feel right" to "oh great gods of Fandom, smite this foole who has taken my character and destroyed them."

How does this help when writing new settings for characters, or engaging in crossovers, fusions, and other works of transplantation? Well, if there are really only three points of core characterization, that makes the rest of it mutable in at least one way or another, right? So long as the truly unchangeable bits stay together, it's still that character, yeah?

How do you put Peridot in Draco's role? Figure out what makes Peridot Peridot to you, preserve those elements. Figure out what makes Draco Draco to you, preserve those elements as well, toss them in the blender and sort out any contradictions. It sounds easy, but that's the essence of pulling off the successful fusion. Or crossover, for that matter, because you can keep the core elements of the character intact, and use them to inform how they react to the new setting, while making them capable of growing and learning and changing to the environment around them as needed. And yes, tropes are shorthand, but they're still effective shorthand for when you want to keep an idea in your head without having to keep all of the detailed bits together. You can set your character as "Trope [Z], but not [A] or [K]", or "Trope [J], but really heavy emphasis on the [Q]" and go from there in helping keep them intact when blending them.

At least, that's how I do it. Your mileage may vary, and it'll bet you have some neat ways of doing these things that I haven't even considered. Let's have a conversation about it.

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

Sometimes the way you tell the story is integral to the story itself. Not everything is going to work as a novel-length idea, with multiple chapters of dialogue and exposition and action all neatly arranged. Or disjointed. Or hypertexted, so that you end up with a twisty maze of passages, all alike, such that the way you experience the story has to do with the choices you made on which parts to see first.

Which is to say that structure is an important part of writing. Most of you reading this have probably already been exposed to various writing structures, and maybe you have a few favorites. Structure, as I'm using it here, means both things like limitations on the number and type of words that can be used (sort of like self-imposed challenges) as well as frameworks and templates that a story can be built around that make it recognizably a member of that type of story.

For example, the Choose Your Own Adventure books (now printed from a company called ChooseCo, because we are nothing if on the nose about this) all follow a certain structure that makes them recognizable. CYOA-style books all use second-person narration (because YOU are doing the choosing), a branching plot structure with several different possible endings (only one of which is a complete and good ending in most CYOA-type novels, although there is at least one very famous exception in the canon), and printing the various pieces of the plot on different pages of the book, so that the person reading the book has to go back and forth in the book to get the narrative parts they've chosen (so that someone reading the book isn't spoiled on what they've chosen until they flip to the page and read they've been eaten by a tiger or disintegrated by a laser beam). These books are distinct from other kinds of gamebooks because they usually don't require inventory or statistical management or the use of dice, like, say, the Fighting Fantasy series, which has the same segmented narrative and second-person narration, but also adds various checks that require dice or having obtained various items on the quest to determine the success or the failure of the thing that the reader is trying to do, as well as a combat system where the statistics for the opponents are presented, and the reader is expected to roll combat to see if they are able to defeat the opponent and continue with the adventure. With the advent of digital versions of those gamebooks, the option to press forward in the narrative despite whatever combat the book wants you to complete is sadly taken away, or will be discouraged in some way, shape, or form, which will be frustrating to someone who just wants to get through the narrative without having to stop to roll dice, die, and start over again every time they run into something.

A different example is The Hero's Journey, a specific narrative structure for myths and stories that is widely (mis)applicable to all sorts of works that involve protagonists and antagonists. There are ways to play with the structure, try to skip steps, or omit them entirely, that a book might still be part of the structure even if it doesn't follow all the steps in their exact order. But because there are a lot of stories that follow that structure, there are people who are ready to claim that it's a universal of some sort, and then you get into disagreements.

But structure can also be something as an idea that a work happens in three acts - one to set the stage so everyone is in their place, one to engage the action and reactions, and one to deal with the consequences of what happened. Which might play out over several chapters. Or not.

Fandoms have contributed unique structures to the pool of possibilities, like the Five Times work. A Five Times work can often be boiled down into a sentence: Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME]. "Five Times Darth Vader Almost Renounced The Dark Side." "Five Times Harry Potter Snogged (or Shagged) Draco Malfoy." "Five Dates Cecil used The Weather To Get Out Of". There are endless variations on this idea, and all the structure demands is that you write about five times the character(s) verbed the thematic thing. Long or short, it doesn't matter, so long as there are five of them. Sometimes if you get stuck on an idea, you throw penguins, call it a five times fic, and start the next one of the five.

A common variation of the Five Times fic is a Five Plus One (5+1) fic, where you have Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME], and One Time [they didn't/they did/something completely different that still ties into the theme], which can build some tension into a story just from the structure. "Five Times Batman Almost Caught Catwoman, and One Time He Let Her Go." "Five Times Steven Almost Confessed His Crush On Connie, and The One Time He Actually Managed It." And so on. The possibilities are endless, and this particular structure works well when you have a lot of plots running through your head that all don't want to resolve into full stories on their own, but can be clumped together in their half-finished forms to create a complete work so that they'll just get out of your head for a bit so you can work on the thing you actually are trying to work on. Thematic fragments stitched together with a narrative can create a work.

Structure doesn't have to be big or grandiose, either. Once of the easier-looking but potentially more difficult doing structures is the drabble. 100 words, no more, no less, to create something that will hang on its own. Not quite as restrictive as the six-word story ("For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." is the usual example) or the methods laid down in how one writes specific verse or polysyllabic poems, but it turns out one hundred words isn't all that much space to write a complete story or scene, if that's what you're looking for. The economy of words needed forces the lens of the story either very close up to something or very far away from it to make it all fit.

That said, a drabble is a great way to dip your toes in and see that you can create something. One hundred words isn't all that much to commit to. Some exchanges are specifically drabble (or double/triple drabble) length, others set their exchange requirements pretty low (300 words) so as to make the bar for creation pretty low and get lots of works popped out regularly. One thousand words seems to have stabilized as a "standard" exchange minimum, which can seem daunting at first, but if you keep turning your dice (a d10 does 1000 words), you'll see the progress as it gets made.

There's also the more daunting challenges - 5k (5000 word minimum) 10k (10,000 words), NaNovel (50,000 words in 30 days), and so forth, which can totally be attempted on a first try if that's what you want to do. Some fic will easily breeze past 100,000 words over the course of its lifetime, and several have made it to the million words department. All from some fairly small beginnings.

As for myself, my works tend to run their course in a pocket of somewhere between 1000 and 7000 words, depending on the idea and the goals of the exchange. I've had some shorter ones that turned out fine, but for the most part, that seems to be about where my brain decides it's had enough and told the story it wanted told. Perhaps for some year, I'll start trying to make something bigger, but right now, I don't feel the great need to write epics. Smaller, more numerous things Seem to be the sorts of things that I'm working on right now. There's always the possibility that something will explode, or an idea will reveal itself to have a lot of depth, but for now, I am where I am. Neither good, nor bad, and the recipients I've had have said they enjoyed the works I've produced. As it turns out, not only are you already good enough, I am, too. And I've been writing a lot of things to keep proving that to myself, in addition to the fun that it is to play in someone else's toybox

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

(Stop snickering in the back. If I wanted to be short, I could.)

This might have appeared later in the month, after taking through more process-of-writing things, but instead we have entirely relevant events happening that pushed this idea forward to its current position.

Welcome, if you're seeing this because you've recently migrated away from a place that turned out not to have your interests as its guiding principles. We do hope you'll stay a while and help our community grow with your presence and your comments.

Once you have a completed work in hand, deciding what to do with it is a decision that comes with interesting consequences. Traditional publishing routes for works that are not going to infringe on someone else's copyright is certainly offering the most money, but also has the highest degree of difficulty to achieve. Expect a lot of rejection and a lot of waiting for something that will result in rejection. And then have someone who knows what they're doing looking over any contracts you might receive to see what rights you're giving up and what ones, if any, you get to keep in exchange for getting published.

Past the point of building a portfolio of things you can then show others as a reason why they should take your work, (and frankly, you can do that yourself and host it yourself) anyone telling you to do it for "exposure" and not for cash is telling you to starve so they can profit. If you're in it to get paid for your work, get paid for your work, so that others can demand and get paid for theirs, too. I know for a fact that Seanan McGuire was thrilled to be able to write X-Men for Marvel. (She's not shy about it.) But if Marvel had come to her and said, "Hey, Seanan, you're pretty cool, so we want you to write this Kitty Pride Annual that will be super awesome and the fans will love it, and also, we think you should do it for the exposure, without pay," I would have learned all sorts of new and creative ways to curse someone unto the seventh generation of their seventh generation of descendants. Not just because "O hai, multiple bestselling novels, excuse you," but because Seanan has some of the largest cats you can have without requiring very special permits, and they need food and clothing and veterinary care and that requires money, and Marvel can spare the money to pay their writers. (Everyone else should be ready to pay their creators, or wait until they can before trying to get a thing published. Pay people for their work.)

Fanworks and money has some settled precedent, mostly around visual work, but it's the sort of thing that you want a good army of lawyers to be present for...when somebody else ends up being the test case. So there's some amount of having to file the serial numbers off rather well if you want to make your fanfic into original fic.

Even if you're not in it for the money, they're are still considerations that have to be made about choosing where to post your work. Someone could certainly post it all in their own space, on their own servers, and then be more assured of the survival of their own work, but that requires significant know-how to do and keep patched and running safely and securely.

And while there are ways of engaging socially with other people when everyone has their own space and identity (webrings, for example. Yes, I'm ancient by the standards of the World Wide Web.), it's a lot less of a hassle to interact if everyone has an account in the same space, or is subscribed to the same mailing list, so there's one place to go instead of sixty.

It wasn't necessarily easier, because gatekeepers and technical savvy and issues involved with finding a fannish circle, much less contributing to one, but when you can generally trust the space to be run by fans with fandom in mind, the space can feel safer than throwing your work out for just anyone to see.

The tricky part about mailing lists and BBSes and a lot of those early attempts at interaction, though, is that those spaces have tended to remain small, intimate, and utterly fragile. If the maintainer decides they're done, or disaster befalls, or a payment is late or not made, the whole thing evaporates, and all the works in that space are gone at the touch of a button. (I do not work for the Organization for Transformative Works, but one of their projects is trying to capture and import archives that are blowing up, winding down, or otherwise ceasing to exist so that we can at least preserve what was done, even if the thing itself no longer exists.) The place you find where you can be unabashedly yourself, and it vanishes into the aether.

So, small venues have small appreciative audiences and a tendency to disappear without warning. What if you want a bigger potential audience, or something that's less likely to pop at a cross look? Well, then the social media sites step in. LiveJournal turned out to be a frontrunner among many possibilities of the time, offering each person a space of their own to create and an easy way of finding others whose creations you were interested in, in a single space, with places to leave comments and to control what comments of that set actually were displayed. It worked.

There is, of course, the perennial problem of sites that want to profit from people - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And, unsurprisingly, many advertisers and the companies they represent are somewhat skittish about having their products promoted on a page where a willing Ginny seduces a very unwilling Severus and the detail is quite graphic. Even if the work itself is properly tagged and mentions it all up front. For ad much as advertising claims to be working on ways of serving us products we want to see, they're terrible at it, and there's not Netflix-esque categorization going on to try and sort everything into hyper-fine buckets. This same story could equally well serve up an ad for children's vitamins as an ad for a site claiming to know all of the sexy singles in your area. And that still assumes neither of those ads are multimedia, so that not only do you get an inappropriate advertisement, you might get one with loud panting and sex noises that then have to be explained to anyone within hearing.

Which is to say that ads suck, and the fact that we haven't figured out something better yet says a lot about us. All the same, though, the advertisers still don't want their company associated with your smut, kinks, or anything else that might not only acknowledge the existence of sex, but suggest that people actually enjoy it. They will have to deal with the lost or never-gotten business from their ad running in your story and linking them together. So advertisers, since they can't be sure where on the site their ads will appear, want to make sure there's nowhere on the site that would cause a bad association. Several major payment processors, as Dreamwidth found out, [not actually true: also get very jumpy about the possibility that you might be letting people write sex, whether intended as erotica, people recounting what happened to them, or people having frank discussions of technique and consent for sex, with or without kink, and/or kink, with or without sex.] can get cranky about the potential extra overhead and fee charges they might incur by taking on a "porn site," even if a place like Dreamwidth isn't what people think of when they think about porn sites. Beyond that, there's a persistent idea that people who take the money are, in essence, endorsing and facilitating whatever happens on the site. With advertisers, it makes a bit more sense, because ads are supposed to be put in front of people who will be interested in the product, so they would want to be seen in a more endorsement role if reading the content made others want to buy the product. And there are certain statutes that have to be kept in mind where taking certain types of money is committing a crime or becoming an accessory to one (or more.)

In any case, to preserve their images as companies that make products for the family, and not ruffle the feathers of the Moral Guardians whose followers those companies want to buy their products, advertisers can bring some crushing pressure to bear on those places that depend on them for some significant portion of their revenue. So any platform that depends on ad revenue always has this sword hanging above them that can fall at any time. Which generates a certain amount of tension between the service and the fandom on that service that wants to be able to talk about the things they want to talk about, the survivors looking for others to share in solidarity, the people wanting to be their open and authentic selves (because being queer anywhere openly is seen as an invitation by those Moral Guardians to attack and try to shame someone away from being themselves), and / or the people using the service to make a living.

The thing that makes a place popular is also sometimes the thing that causes it to break apart. Sometimes outside forces intervene, like when the Moral Guardians manage to get legislation passed that disproportionately affects queer folks and sex workers in the name of protecting children from strawpeople. Sometimes a company gets sold to a different country entirely, where the laws are even more punishing than before. More often than not, though, there's enough "adult" content in a space that the corporate overlords, the vulture capitalists, or the advertisers start putting on the pressure, and if there's an inciting incident or a convenient excuse, especially if it can be spun as a way of protecting "innocent children", whatever has been designated as "adult content" or material too "mature" for the site gets sent off, and sometimes that means works and entire communities get erased without the chance to archive their work. (Local backups are good, keep them!)

More often than not, once a space shows that it follows the money rather than the fans, the fans show the service the door. If the service overreacts or otherwise goes about trying to clean its own house in a way that doesn't get the intended targets, or if there is a large amount of damage to persons who aren't targeted, or if the targeting turns out to be about something other than what it was named to be about, those affected are often way more vocal and swift in their departure from the platform.

What is old is new again, and will do the same again in the future, so long as the underlying issues don't change. So when considering where to hang your shingle, do some research on the organization that is behind the service you want to migrate to. Are they beholden to advertising dollars? Do they have policy statements about equity, diversity, inclusion? Do they explicitly spell out, either in the Terms of Service, or in policy documents, what they will and will not allow on their platform? Do they provide plain language versions of things that have to be in legalese? And, if they manage to get off the ground long enough to look like they might fly, do they then stick to those positions they have staked out? If not, do they provide clear explanations about what's changed?

That's just a sample of possible important questions. You may have more, depending on your life's experiences and needs. Evaluate the places, the sources, the contracts and the terms. You don't have to stay away from other places, but if you go in knowing where the likely failure points are going to be, it helps you decide whether you're willing to accept the risk that those failure points will be exactly what you thought they were.

And keep backups. Just in case.

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

At the end of the last post, I popped an idea out of my head about two characters meeting and having a significant amount of things to talk about because they've both experienced having the adults and mentors in their lives not telling them the film truth when they feel like they're ready for it.

Some stories plot themselves, or at least give you a hook to start with that you can start writing on and everything proceeds smoothly from the research and/or canon review (or reading works that you like in the universe, style, or structure you think will be appropriate for the story you want to tell.) Those are great ideas.

Some ideas (like this one) have a hook and a thought, but they don't offer anything on the way of direction or the way that they should be written. "Okay, so Steven and Ruby end up in the same space and have a chat about their mentors. How do they get there? Why are they there? What's going on around them? Where is that space?" These questions might be helpful, or they might all get a shrug and a "dunno."

Sometimes, on an idea, a single picture or a line of possible dialogue might jump out as a good place to start. So, knowing that one of Steven's special abilities is that he and other people that he can connect with can transform from two people into a composite entity, there's a little bit of gemological punnery that might go on by pairing Steven Quartz Universe with Ruby Rose. (Quiet in the back. I'm trying to do this as spoiler-free as possible. Yes, there's another way this could go, but it requires knowledge that can only be gained by watching Steven Universe. That might turn up later on in the story, though, if it goes sufficiently far.) As it turns out, there's a red variety of quartz that would fit the color scheme of Ruby's character and the generally lighter pink shirt that Steven usually wears. Since combined entities tend to be given new names that reflect their combined selves, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to call that new entity Carnelian, after the red quartz. As it turns out, there's already a character with that name that exists, so we might have to go further into the gem ideas until we find a pretty-looking red gem that we can call the thing, or we can call it Sard, since that's also a name for carnelian, and it fits the darker red palette that Ruby uses.

The presence of that entity might only exist for long enough to stave off a threat to them, but it might also be the way that the two separate entities can start the conversation about why they combined so well, or the feelings that each of them had about being together, which could lead to some background sharing and then a conversation about the idea topic. And that's still without necessarily thinking about the background of how things came together or why.

Or maybe there's a shared line of dialogue between them, that they both say and hear at the same time, something like "I'm not a child anymore!" That might also prompt investigation and some shared experience. Or letting the scene play in parallel, with dialogue cuts back and forth between the characters such that the disparate lines we read as up to a singular rant that gets the point across. There are all sorts of ways that this scene might play out.

Sometimes that infinite-ness seems paralyzing, but the nice thing about creative work, so long as you're not slammed up against a deadline, is that if something isn't working out right now, you can shelve that idea in a fragments folder and try a new way of going about it. Maybe it will link back up with that fragment later, or you can grab that fragment and rework it into something else. Writing is rarely ever completely wasted. But there are things that get written that aren't likely to every see publication, or that have anything to do with anything, ever. It's practice at the craft, if it ends up being nothing else that's useful for what you are trying to write right now. And even then, it might turn out useful. When we talk about structures, there are more than a few of them that are very kind to fragmentation.

A couple of things that always help me out when I'm writing is to be open to shifts. A well-outlined story still has room for improvisation or for a character to do something that seems out of place now, because sometimes your brain is working on something and it sees and opportunity and gives you a subconscious kick to include a new bit here so that later on, when you need to reference something and not have it seem like you were pulling something out of thin air, there's groundwork already laid.

The other is this, attributed to the late Jim Henson: "If you can't get out [i.e. you're stuck and you can't see a way of moving forward with the scene], you just either blow something up, or you eat something, or you throw penguins in the air." It doesn't have to be taken literally, but it is sometimes useful to note [SOMETHING COOL HAPPENS HERE!] in your work and go forth from there if you're stuck and go on to the next part that you can write. The brain might pop up with whatever that something cool is later.

Noodling and improvising some on a single idea may be all you need to make wordcount for an exchange or a chapter or progress enough to get the wheels unstuck and turning again. Going back and revising and editing, polishing and tweaking is for after the writing part is done. And is often best done with the help of others, rather than chasing the perfect words right now before you can go forward. (It can be hard, we understand.) As you get practice and familiarity with your writing and the style and structure you're using, there will be less edit work need at the end and more of your words will ring true to start with.

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

Let me say this to start: You are already good enough to write.

You are already good enough to write.

(Or draw, or vid, or podcast, or whatever other creative endeavor you have in mind.)

There is no secret gene or biological superpower or Applied Phlebotinum that means some people are better predisposed to the act of writing in their very core and some people are just never going to be good enough. If that were the truth, the publishing industry would have long since found the link and exploited it appropriately. Instead, much like the movie and television industry, publishing is suffering a major inability to believe that diverse audiences would buy works written by diverse authors containing diverse characters. Even with the statistics staring them in the face.

So, no, there's no magic involved that bars bars some people from doing writing because they will somehow physically be unable to do anything well.

Who am I to make such a claim? Well, one in a very long string of writers who have said much the same thing when asked about their inhuman creativity (or ability to put out material), for the most part.

Also, however, I'm a published author of a few different articles and pieces, a few of which I have been paid for, so yes, that means I've crossed the professional barrier, even if most of the writing I do is for fun and not profit. For Reasons (that will probably be explored as we go). And no, I haven't sold a novel yet, but I'm not actually interested in doing that right now, so it's hard to sell a thing you're not actually trying to write.

If that doesn't sway you, then I can say that, over the course of the last three years, the words that I can easily count have been over one hundred thousand for each year, and about half of that or so is on a single series of works, going bit by bit. That way counting doesn't include anything here, by the way, so fudge whatever additional wordcount seems appropriate for the last couple years of Dreamwidth posts. So at least two NaNovels, spread out over the course of the year, writing-wise, for at least the past three years. That's a fair chunk of wordstuff, although you could grab all of those words and they would be about one third of the million-word fics that exist, and probably a drop in the bucket compared to the wordcount of The Wheel of Time.

So yes, I've been published, and I've written a lot, and you are free to say "Eh, so what?" to all of that, or that you don't like my material, so my opinion in the matter is invalid. Go find someone you do like and respect and ask them about whether there's anything about themselves that makes them special or better disposed to writing good things. You'll hear a lot, but you probably won't hear them say things like "it's in my genes" said seriously as the full answer.

What we often lack is practice, not talent, and it's on that place that many writers point out the advantages they have. And, for that matter, what NaNoWriMo is focusing on. The earliest thing that I can remember writing started before I had an age that ended with "teen", and I'm...at least twice that age now. And, unsurprisingly, it was fanfic. Crossover fanfic, no less. Before, we note, the existence of the Internet and the widespread availability and cachet that fic now has. The sort of thing that if your sibling threatens they know where it is and that they'll either destroy it or expose it to the world, you know they're serious.

By my own practiced hand now, those would be things I would look at as "the things I did when I was smaller and didn't know as much as I do now." But it was practice. So were the fandom roleplaying message boards that happened when schools got wired for the Internet. And the general fandom message boards that had a significant amount of fan-continuity with them. And joining LJ to write about the things I found interesting and linkable in the news. And then Dreamwidth, when it became clear that LJ was engaging in things that offended my principles. And Twitter - try making a complete point (or story) that fits into the 140 characters (then) of a single Tweet.

Which is to say, if you start today on writing, and you don't think anything you've done before counts, and you look at other stuff and go "it's so good, I could never do that!" you're forgetting that those writers have been writing for years. Your favorite author might have three novels out to their name, all within the last three years, but those are only the words you see on paper. What you aren't seeing is all the words that came before that didn't make it or aren't related to that project.

Also, we should talk about what you're not counting, because I'll bet you've done relevant writing before, too. I've been writing fanworks for decades at this point. I posted my first story to AO3 three years ago. When I was starting to get to the point of writing that story, I didn't think I had any relevant experience and wasn't good enough for it. The anxiety clouded my memory of the writing from early life, or the fully-formed (and then read aloud to an appreciative audience) short story-length PI spoof I put together in a one-day writing workshop when I was...somewhere in the early teens, I think. And the message boards, and being fandom-adjacent enough to make friends at university by understanding them when they talked about their Harry/Hermione ship.

I think a lot of people, when they conceive of writing something, they're thinking of the Great American Novel that will be stirring and enduring, or the instant hit that will sell exceedingly well and build a megafandom, and like so very much of what is shown to us through media, news, and entertainment, what we are seeing there is the exception to the asterisk of the footnote of the obscure reference of reality. If the instant hit novel is what you think you have to write before you qualify as a Real Writer, you're buying into a lie. (And all the short fiction, nonfiction, television, audio, comedy, etc. markets are shaking their fists and yelling that yet another person who could write for them is fixated on the novel.)

And that's if, if you want to write professionally at all, which a lot of people don't. They enjoy playing in the sandbox, but they don't necessarily want to make money off it or devote the amount of time and effort (both in writing and in marketing) it would take to make significant money off it. Or the place they enjoy playing the most is in fanfiction, where money always puts things on dicey legal ground. (But sometimes might land someone a professional gig, too, due to the quality of their work. Being a fanwork creator is no longer a death knell to your career.)

So, I'll close with this idea. At a convention not too far in the past, after panel on fanfiction writing and writers, a child not that much older than I was when I started was talking about the universe they had built in their head. They'd done character sheets, plot summaries, background research, all sorts of things, but they hadn't started writing the story yet, because they were afraid that it wouldn't be good enough and nobody would enjoy it. Now, I know that self-deprecation is my go-to method for encouraging someone else, but in this case, it seemed warranted. So I listened and I said that I thought they should go forward with the writing, and I pulled out one of my Internet devices and started scrolling through the legion of kudos notifications that I've been saving since I started posting works to AO3. After all, at that time, I was new to posting, I was writing a scattershot of fandoms, based on exchanges, and I hadn't written anything like the epic that this small child had planned out. And I was still swimming in kudos (and a few comments gathered over the years, too). So, I concluded to the small, if someone such as me can amass plenty of people thinking my work is good, they'll be able to do the same. All I wanted them to do was start writing.

Because they were good enough. And you are, too.