2022: writing retrospective

[meikuree]

chocochipbiscuit recently tagged me on Tumblr in a self-rec challenge, and I've queued a post for that there, but it reminded me that now's a good time to look back on my writing too.

To get the elephant in the room out of the way: my main AO3 has seen less activity this year, but that's because I've been posting most of my writing this year to my side (delegation) which is a loose "everything that doesn't fit my main account" and "I'm tired of this WIP, just take it from my hands" dumping spot -- and that has ranged from things like domestic fluff (which is, unusually, a squick of sorts -- more on that later!) to dubcon and noncon.

I don't publicise my side on Tumblr or most fandom socials to avoid harassment*, but I'm still fond of some things I've posted there, so I want an excuse to discuss them too. :p

* My stance on the old fiction v. endorsement debate is more nuanced than something I'm comfortable elaborating on in a casual post, but can be summed up, for effective purposes here, as YKINMKATO.


I wrote less in the first half of this year as my interest waned for Shingeki no Kyojin -- I'm relieved it's happening, tbh. I still hold a lot of love for specific characters (Hange, Pieck, Annie), encouraged by wonderful like-minded friends, but that's it.

I finally posted fic in new fandoms! I was a mono-fannish writer up till then.

I participated in AO3 exchanges for the first time (and wrote treats people enjoyed /)o\ which I'm verklempt about). My biggest barrier before then was feeling too inexperienced as a writer to create anything strangers would enjoy. I've gotten over that fear, a little; I enjoy the culture, "exchange house styles" insofar as those exist, and I can foresee myself doing more if/when I'm free.

I've now experimented enough with my style that I can see the dust settling into distinguishable patterns, and I have a better sense for what the actual heck my style is, my most natural voice.

I want to get back into being open enough to ask for beta readers again. Sometime back I had an experience that wasn't bad, exactly, but bothered me enough to put me off beta readers for a while. I'm reminded of Margaret Atwood's advice, mostly: "[A]sk a reading friend or two to look at [your writing] before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up."

The issue is simply that, in contrast to professional writing, I'm by my own admission sensitive to stylistic criticism -- to level with myself, it's because fic prose is the one free place where I can experiment without any conventional constraints, and I'm anxious to protect that. But beta-reading would probably help me!

My writing output blew up in Sep 2022 after I got into Jujutsu Kaisen and had my heart tethered to new favourites -- more on that later. But the one thing that really helped was finding a femslash Discord server, finding other joyful nerds from there who then became good friends, and creating/joining a friend server where we (all writers) could have a judgement-free space to gas each other up and share deranged headcanons, lol. Picture the YESSS sickos image but ten times the energy.

I have yet to post a Locked Tomb fic despite loving the canon so damn much, but I'm working on it. :p It's just intimidating, seeing the number of talented writers in the fandom!
 
Blathering about my writing style

This will be badly self-aggrandising and indulgent, but this is a personal journal, so... /o\ having written fic for three years (fuck, has the pandemic lasted that long?) I've noticed, over and over, that the first thing anyone says about my writing is that it's 'beautiful' and 'gorgeous' and. I'm still shocked every time because my prose reads prosaically and normal to me.

me: puts in effort to finetune sentence-level rhythm and prosody, come up with unconventional or surprising descriptions in my free time, deploy the occasional rhetorical device, etc.
someone: your writing is poetic!
me: [pikachu face] are you sure?

Nonetheless, one thing that's also stayed constant for me since I started in 2020 -- the spirit of this Tobi Haslett quote:

I write to be read. I’m not an experimentalist. But while I don’t think my writing is unclear, it’s not to everyone’s taste. I think some people prefer a kind of journalistic plainspokenness, even on the question of aesthetics, which is not my impulse.

Very early on in my “career,” an editor said to me, “You do something that we don’t really do here. I noticed that in your sentences, the word that comes next isn’t exactly the word you’d expect to come next.” And I remember thinking: of course it fucking isn’t. Otherwise why would I write it?

By no means am I at a level/skill high enough to be dishing out pronouncements like this, but writing has also always been about invention or rediscovery for me -- extending the hangar of possibility in speech- and word-craft, digging deeper and then digging in places nobody knew the existence of. Nowadays I have wised up to the fact that I'm circling the same treadmills as everyone else instead of, idk, breaking new frontiers or whatever hubris I was on, but I still like reaching for the simplest form of transformation: making sure the word that follows isn't the expected one. (To nobody's surprise, I'm lukewarm on Hemingway's approach to writing.)

Incidentally, a Meghan O'Gieblyn excerpt describes this well, the mystery and mystification of your unexpected word turning out to be the nicer one. The whole essay is an interesting read too:

The word you choose under the gun, it turns out, is rarely the most logical or apt. I once had a writing professor who raged against the thesaurus, which was responsible for the plague of literalism in contemporary fiction. The perfect word was always less interesting, she said, than the one you stumbled on while groping around in the dark.

Anyway! The point of this is that my writing can unintentionally be uh... weird, I guess, without realising it, but I've embraced it. I'm by orientation scared of using cliches; sometimes I have a real resistance to just coming out and saying something, if it seems too duh or prosaic or normal. Or there's nothing unusual language- or concept-wise going on in it. (On the other hand, I've been told sometimes my writing is too on-the-nose, and I believe it.) The upkick, of course, is that sometimes readers just want to read something direct that isn't hidden behind a Cretan labyrinth's worth of mental decoding. I'm working on it. I'm a lot better about this now.

I trust my intuition and subconscious more now. If a word feels right, it's going in, even if I might not understand why until I edit. It's a relief; I had a phase in 2021 where nothing I wrote met my expectations and I toiled at reaching the perfect stage of prose with a mechanic's brute force and arm-cranking. Obviously, I find myself tiresome to live with too.

Perfectionism is an old issue, nothing new here, but a buddy gave some drastically good advice. The gist is: focus less on "is this good?" and more on "does this work?" Does a sentence do what it needs to? Does it get the reader to the meat of the plot? I've found that perfectionism, personally at least, springs forth from getting too caught up in the details and losing sight of the fact that most stories' impacts come from the structure-as-a-whole, not that single word you think would be better if you swapped it for a one-stress-off homonym.

I've also articulated to myself that work and life obligations mean sometimes I post things that are only 30% or 60% of what I think I could be capable of. That's fine! This is a hobby, not an exam.

People occasionally tell me my writing is -- quoting verbatim -- 'surgical', 'precise', or focused on characters with 'pinpoint accuracy'. I was mystified for the longest time about where that comes from, because when I'm writing at least, the cadence of my prose often feels like a dense, all-surrounding fog... not at all a scalpel. Also, I'm prone to over-description? Then some friends suggested that it's because every word I use in my prose feels deliberate, like not a single one is wasted. (The exact analogy they used was that my writing was a steak without the fat.)

Another big quality-of-life improvement on the writing side: creating a side AO3 account, as I mentioned, that none of my friends know, where I can just post imperfect WIPs to my heart's content. My greatest stumbling block is always fretting too much about reception or what other people perceive of my writing, so removing that element solves many problems.
 
Fandom-specific works and commentary

CWs: underage, dub/noncon, incest

It's probably not a secret that I gravitate towards darker bends in femslash; it's not like I define myself by it and I'm still omnivorous (I joke that my real kink is just character depth and aimless introspection, in any tone/form) but those bends have made up most of my writing and fannish interest this year. To be upfront: my current obsession happens to be a sibling incest ship (Zenin Maki/Zenin Mai from JJK).

If that isn't your thing, turn away now! You're under no obligation to read on.

Anyway, the results speak for themselves: I wrote a bunch of slightly darker fic this year! I was going to open this section by saying that I wrote 200% more f/f incest and noncon this year... but technically 200% of 0 is still 0. Nevertheless. Tbh, what really made it happen was the community -- the ship itself is super iddy for me because their backstory is tragic and they have several throughlines about devotion and resentment and inextricable entanglement... but really, the fact is that the Zenin twins have some very enthusiastic readers, and I found some great friends to bounce ideas with. I've always been playing around with f/f rarepairs, but the Maki/Mai community is on a different level: it's small and close-knit, and supportive. People there are also chill about fandom -- always a nice bonus.

The running joke I have with friends is that Maki/Mai has also made me get over my squicks for things like crossgen incest, noncon, and fluff.

Domestic fluff and schmoop induces a mild gagging response from me. I've no idea why; I guess that's the platonic ideal of a squick, an aversion towards something innocuous that defies explanation. Realistically, it's probably because fluff played straight would be OOC for many of my ships. (Fluff with darker or ominous undertones, or tempered by angst? Yes please.) It's very amusing to me that on my """dead dove""" and off-brand AO3 side, there's one fic that's just tagged "domestic fluff" among the ones about undernegotiated kinks, dubcon, and incest. Because, yes, that's weird for me. But to be clear: I'm fully comfortable receiving and commenting on fluff in exchanges. I don't categorically dislike fluff. I'm picky, but once I sit down with the actual text in a fluff piece, I'm able to warm up to it.

Since this post was spurred by a self-rec challenge, I'll go on to list ones from my side!

1. lantern-black, the pitch of light (Zenin Mai/Maki)

This was my first noncon fic -- but it was a mutual noncon situation, and it clued me in for the first time to the potential of "bad guys made them do it" situations. FWIW, I was told the sex was very loving in this. /o\ I guess that's always been my shtick -- I like writing incongruous things, and this definitely falls on the "messed up but tender" spectrum. The twins are put through mental hazing here but they come out with their dignity shaken but not beaten, their relationship still affirmed, etc. I was lucky to get some very nice comments on this -- my friends did the equivalent of spamming the group chat and quoting all my lines back at me, which I wept internally at. 

Looking back now, I'd slide in more details about jujutsu techniques to ground this fic within the canon setting more, but that's it.

2. under the veil (Lara Tybur/Pieck)

This was a major rarepair; my fic's the only fic in the tag still, I believe! But I've been besotted with the idea of Lara and Pieck and knifeplay since I saw fanart of Lara stabbing Pieck in the back (yes, I have weird tastes in shipping fodder). That and the opportunity for exploring power imbalances arising from class differences (both these women are Eldian -- but one's part of the nobility, safe in her ivory tower) made this spring unbidden to life.

3. reckon the remnants (Zenin Mai/Zenin Maki)

My first time writing an exchange treat! And my recip loved it, which was a big relief and made my day. /o\ I was worried, as I always am, that my natural writing style would be too much, but people just told me it was beautifully written.

I liked writing Mai's dialogue, though I suck at dialogue; I love her snark!

4. the fiercest calm (Zenin Mai/the twins' mother)

I'm intrigued by the tumultuous mother-daughter interactions we saw between the twins' mother and Maki and extrapolated that from brainstorming sessions with friends into this. I'm fond of some of my descriptions in this, and I tried hard to ground this story in the tragedy and horror of... what motherhood must be like in the Zenin clan, with its horrible effects obviously passed on to Mai as a daughter. And also that yarn about love still emancipating you even when the person you love isn't around, by the end.

I like this paragraph:

Her arsenal of creativity and imagination is still unparalleled, even though her parents think slightly better of her, have let her train as a sorcerer adept. Maki was resourceful, but Mai was the one who could fashion inroads from thin air, begin from nothingness to come up with a plan or new perspective. Creation personified. Constructing something in place even if you were trapped, had nothing except your lifeblood and half-eroded heart and capped reserves of cursed energy at your disposal. The waters rising, an impossible trade, time running out for you. She was a cynic, years ago. She uses her talent nowadays to please people.

My friend told me that this fic would have been unremittingly bleak without this and certain other segments. It felt very natural to include some traces of hope; X can only be underscored with some presence of its shadow-opposite, Y, is my unconscious writing rule. I rarely write things that are single-note in tone, I think.

5. blood reversed (Zenin Mai/her mother)

This is basically No. 4 but with porn, lmfao. By good timing, I happened to be listening to Björk's newest album while writing this, and Ancestress had the perfect lyrics for a pretentious epigraph. /o\ I will never be able to give up epigraphs.

This is, as usual for me, an ambiguously-toned fic. It's imo obvious that the events here aren't being portrayed as good things; they're meant to unnerve the reader, because Mai has the self-awareness to tell that she's in a sub-optimal, power-asymmetrical situation, but little recourse to action except to go with the flow.

Mai, smart enough to crack the code of twins and bad omens, is smart enough to know what it means when her mother reaches for her, sundial-certain, through the wavering shadows too.

What surprised me: I was able to finish it in a single day! All 3,000 words! I'm usually astoundingly slow at writing. I did it almost definitely because I was focused on just getting this done, and I didn't fight my natural voice like I usually do. Who would've thought?

 

Comments

[sushiflop]

It makes the ending extra sad when I think how easily I look at canon pages and am immediately invested and engaged in these characters once more. We could've had it all!!!!!!

[meikuree]

ikr?

the later half of the series has some sandboxes I've enjoyed playing with but man, that ending... at least we have fic (and especially fic about halcyon moments from earlier arcs) to indulge in!

[sushiflop]

Listen. I am going to reread. And I am going to pay more attention to Pieck when I do. Because she is worth it. But I love early canon I love the claustrophobia of it I dooooooooooo