There’s a meme going around on elljay where people pontificate on the 10 favorite fics they’ve written. Since the whole point of my hiatus from livejournal is to get over myself, I think it would be awfully bizarre of me to wait until I return and then immediately post a bragfest. Therefore, I’m posting it here, and I’m determined it won’t be a bragfest. I’ll talk about the process of writing, the seeds of inspiration, varying my style, and the things that make me proud and pleased about each. In the end, it will be about me, and about writing much more than it will be about fandom.
I’ll post a few quotes from fics that are for mature audiences only and talk about that process behind the “More>>.” I won’t be explicit or use explicit quotes, though.
This was gonna be a mother of a post. Huge and long. (Oh, wait, I just said I wouldn’t be explicit…) So I decided to split it up. Nos. 10-7 are in this post and then I will post 6-4 and 3-1 another time. I exhaust myself!
Whittling this down was near-impossible. My original list was 20 fics long, and some very good pieces got voted down. (The honorable mentions included A Hanadan Carol, Imagine That (adult), The Forever Kind, Stairwell Confessional, and Awakened (adult).) In the end, I chose a mixture of stories that meant a lot to me and those that meant a lot to readers. The top four were both. I think that’s a sign something is a successful piece of work; it both expresses the writer’s core sentiment and is something that speaks to others. Lately I’ve been losing the ability to do both, and I’m hoping to try to get it back.
Heroes; Matt/Mohinder; NC-17
The tuxedo is gone now, the costumes are gone and the makeup is gone and the cameras have been rolled away, and they’re in the sawdust after the movie set has been dismantled. There are no lights to illuminate them. No soundtrack welling up behind them. Nothing but two men trying to come to grips with what’s happening between them.
This came from an unlikely source. I had written a previous fic, James Bond Magnetism (adult), which had speculated about Matt and/or Mohinder as James Bond, concluding that they’d both probably be fit to wear the tuxedo, wield the gadgets and make the ladies swoon. This prompted someone to encourage me to write an adult fic that had them both in tuxedoes, and A Little Movie Magic was born.
The interesting thing about this piece for me writing-wise is that I am a style mimic. Ever since I was a kid, I could ape writing styles and media genres. So the numerous fantasies that intersperse themselves with the story are each a small example of that. It was an excuse to write a million alternative universes for this couple at once, and it sort of exhausted my alternative universe muse for a while. I put them in a Sam Spade story, a period drama, Sunset Boulevard, a Cold-Mountain-type frontier story, a superhero story, a vampire flick, a fairy tale, a screwball comedy, and a Troy-style Greek drama. And then real life. It was so much fun.
This fic is also very satisfying to me because not only does it use the fantasies to propel the two of them into a state where they can no longer delay their desire, hence the requested tuxedo sex, but it peels back the curtain at the very end and shows them as they are, without the fancy outfits or the silver-screen surroundings, and they try very hard to relate to each other on a real level. I think that to some extent that’s love — dazzling at first, then fading into a slow and sometimes awkward acceptance of each other, with all their faults, and then the forging of a true connection.
Gravitation; Yuki/Shuichi AU; PG-13 to R
Shuichi’s grip became fiercer. “You’ve held your pride so close for so long, Yuki,” he whispered hotly, meaningfully into the older man’s chest. “Hold me instead.”
Eiri’s eyes widened, and his body tensed. He felt like he’d been speared on a sword of ringing truth. Shuichi went on. “Hold me as tightly as you do your pride,” he said. “Embrace me like you embrace your duty. I’m just like them, Yuki. I’m as real as they are. I’ll satisfy you like they do and I’ll make your life as difficult as they do. But the difference, Yuki, is that when you hold me… I’ll hold you too.”
This fic owes its existence to a great man, the late Professor Zenryu Shirakawa of Boston University. My husband and I both took his Culture of the Samurai class; we both did impressions of him for years after we graduated; we were both saddened to hear of his passing. We hope he’s having great fun in that big izakaya in the sky.
It’s a historical alternative universe set in the era of the samurai. It’s horribly anachronistic in numerous ways. One is that my understanding is, there was no mouth-to-mouth kissing in Japan prior to Western influence. Somehow I doubt this… the sensuality of wet body parts against each other seems to me to be the sort of thing that would develop in any culture… but I will accept that my hypothesis is probably wrong. Two, and more importantly, I begin each chapter with a quote from the HAGAKURE, which I call the”handbook of the samurai.” It is no such thing. It is the ramblings of an old man on what he thought bushido should be; in truth it was far less poetic and far more mercenary. But what historical period ever lives up to the romance that has been created around it?
One of the things I loved about writing this was working in various elements in unexpected ways. Every chapter title is the title of a song from the “Gravitation” TV series or OAV (a direct-to-video miniseries; it stands for “original animation video”). But each title also appears buried in the text of the chapter as well, sometimes in unexpected ways:
And now here was that same face, a glaring dream in the doorway radiating the same anger and loveliness that struck him the first time they’d met.
The rage beat in his heart, pounded in his wrists, his ears.(I love this one because in the title of the song, Beat is a noun, and I converted it to a past-tense verb! Grammar dorkiness for the win!)
Could he really march into that blind game again, like a puppet, going about his business and playing his inadvertent role in a story he didn’t know?
and of course
He knew Shuichi’s other smiles, of course. The I did well in my performance smile, the I just wrote another terrible poem smile, the I got Yuki to kiss me smile, the I know something you don’t know smile, the isn’t it good to be alive smile…
…Eiri had memorized them all, he realized with a tiny gasp. He’d been collecting them, storing them like jewels in a secret locked box in his mind, to be opened only in times of despair. And now, in the moment he needed them most, his storehouse of memories had not only resurfaced, but grown — this last, beautiful smile settling like one great, sparkling jewel to crown a shining collection.
was also able to work in some of the memorable lessons and quotes of Prof. Shirakawa, as well as many of our private jokes. And the story holds water. One of my favorite sequences is the flashback sequence in the penultimate chapter, when we learn just what makes Yuki the way he is, and plays off the themes of loyalty and betrayal in a way that is heartbreaking. The battle scene at the end is almost anticlimactic.
Sailor Moon; dubverse; Darien/Serena, PG
A Crystal Clear Destiny.
That’s what they called it. From that moment in the Starlight Tower, a moment in a year that never happened, I remembered another lifetime and a love– but only for a moment. Then it was all gone again. How can you call that a love story? I may not be Romeo, but it sure doesn’t feel like one to me. I know a better story, though. One that doesn’t depend on fate, and one that happened right here and now.
Everyone knows that I was destined to be with a princess named Serenity. But this is the story of how I fell in love with a girl named Serena.
Many people saw the Alan/Ann arc of Sailor Moon’s second season (Sailor Moon R in the Japanese; the R is for Returns.) as particularly weak plotwise, but I saw in it a subtle romance, never played up but unmistakeably there. In the first season, Darien doesn’t show many signs of liking her (An Artful Attack’s “looker” line notwithstanding) before his memories of his past return. But in this story arc, Darien is his jocular, condescending self without a memory of past lives or loves– and he unmistakeably falls in love with Serena as the story goes on. This was classic “fanwank”– filling in the holes in canon to create a narrative I could live with. And it was lauded as such.
I wrote this when I was 18. My writing style has changed SO much since then, it’s kind of shocking. But there are still moments of decent writing. I’ve always had a knack for quirky one-liners, and getting to base my main character off Toby Proctor’s Darien was occasion for me to let the bizarre wit fly. A paragraph I always felt deserved more attention than it got was the description of Darien’s short-lived attempt to stage “Hamlet” with his college friends:
A few days later, it all began to hit the fan. Gertrude got pneumonia and had to stay in bed for three weeks, so I pulled Jo from the company to take her place. Then Ophelia tore into me for that. “I’m the second lead. I should have seniority!” she raged. I tried to tell her that she’d already learned all of Ophelia’s lines and was doing a great job there. Besides, she was a little 4′9″ slip of a girl! I needed someone taller and more imposing as the Queen. While we were debating that, Laertes sprained his wrist and was suddenly incapable of swordfighting with Hamlet. Rosencrantz broke up with his girlfriend and fell into a deep depression, Claudius decided he couldn’t understand Shakesperean language, and Guildenstern failed a final exam. One by one, the storm of “I quit”s washed over me. Before you could say “to be or not to be,” my play was not to be.
It’s the truth, I think I’m far cleverer than I am. Even me 10 years ago.
“Darien’s View” received a lot of attention and praise, which to a clinically depressed 18-year-old was like manna from heaven. It was probably my first taste of the drug that is BNF status, and I’ve been making myself crazy trying to retain it ever since.
Heroes; Matt/Mohinder; PG
And now Matt noticed that the anger in Mohinder’s eyes had been replaced by sadness, and that he was thinking desperately, Please don’t break my heart. (Kiss #9)
Matt Parkman, he said to himself, you big jackass, you’re a gay man. How could you have taken this long to figure this out? (Kiss #17)
“Ninjas or pirates?” (Kiss #21)
I benefited greatly from this fandom being brand-new and still exciting when I started writing for it. Still, I never expected the huge reception I got from this set of 30 alternative ways Matt and Mohinder could share their first kiss. It has yet to be matched. And while there are individual stories within the 30 (15 and 29 come to mind) that I like, I can’t say I’m happy with the quality of the entire thing.
Process-wise, this was an interesting one: There was a list of 30 prompts on a livejournal writing challenge community, a translation of a japanese list that had appeared somewhere. Your task as a writer was to claim a pairing and write 30 stories, each with a kiss in it. I decided to make it the first kiss in every instance– it is always the best moment when the attraction and the banter and the connection first reaches that first touch of sexuality that is the kiss.It’s a magical thing.
But I digress. When I came to a new prompt, I ruminated on it for about a day, at which point an idea would drop from heaven onto my head like a little present in awhite box. I truly enjoyed playing with points of view (#11, #12, #26) and writing styles (#6, #20) as well as doing my genre mimic thing (#10, #28) and building out kisses from a tight, focused romance (#7, #15) to a whole story arc (#19, #22). Sometimes the kisses were the central focus of the piece (#25) and sometimes they were practically incidental to the story (#14). It was a wonderful, freewheeling exercise and I wish I could recapture that feeling of inspiration and freedom when writing my novel. I wonder how to do that.
Sorry to link so much, but it’s very hard for me to talk about thirty different stories as one and I couldn’t add a million blockquotes.
One of the blessings for me was being able to understand and re-translate the Japanese versions of the prompts. It made my life a little difficult sometimes when I would write a fic that I felt would meet one version rather than the other, and I wanted to explain the discrepancy. Probably unnecessary, but I have a horrible tendency to want to justify my actions whether or not people are asking for a justification.
#6-4 some other time…
Filed under: warning: discussion of writing erotica | Tagged: creativity, fan fiction, fandom meme, fanfic, fanfic meme, meme, the creative process, writing
