On kink, kiss, and schmoop
Jun. 2nd, 2011 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhA little less than a year ago, I signed up for three bingo challenges: ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
kink_bingo, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
kissbingo and schmoop_bingo. I knew I wouldn't get any points, because the points-giving period overlapped with the two bigbangs I'd signed up for, but I liked having all those open-ended prompts since I wanted to write some short stories anyway.
I ended up finishing five kiss, four kink (and another to come, honest!), and twenty-five schmoop stories, a lot of which were written in the last month. And along the way, I learned three things.
The more you write, the more you can write. Okay, so I sort of already knew this, but only in the context of writing a long ongoing story, where you get into a groove with the story and end up writing thousands of words at a time. This time, I was writing several short stories, and yet the same thing occurred. I was in the groove not of one story or even one universe, but just of writing in general.
I had been kicking around the idea of writing a schmoop bingo story for every pairing I've written as the featured couple in a story, but the idea of churning out that many fics of at least 500 words was daunting to say the least. Then I did that kiss meme, where so many of you gave me great prompts, and I realized that yes, I could totally do this! And I did! I sat down with my schmoop bingo card and mapped out all the remaining prompts to all of the lovely couples I've ever written, which was really fun, like putting together a puzzle. (I'll post the filled-in grid in a day or so.) Then just wrote in my little notebook, pretty much every night and morning on the train.
Which leads to the next thing:
There really is a trick to writing short stories. I never used to be able to write short, but now I think I'm a little better at knowing what kind of idea will fit into that size (much as I learned in college what kind of idea will fit into a 5-page paper). I started to become a little less precious about the stories, or maybe just more confident. Generally I don't like posting stories that no one has looked at, but these were just little fun stories. Yes, they all had a point to make and a thing to say, but sometimes that thing was just, "I really like beards."
Which leads to the third thing:
Writing happy stories is a worthwhile thing to do. It's funny because I was much more solid in my defense--if that's the right word--of the happy story a couple of days ago, when I'd posted all that schmoop and was thinking about this post. I was going to say something about how sitting down and writing all that schmoop in such a concentrated amount had gotten me past my lingering fannish embarrassment about writing and reading such stories. But that actually proved to not be true!
We've all heard the polemics against "curtain fic"; heard slashers in particular rail against stories that smooth the rough edges off of characters (usually flatly called OOC) or take warriors and give them domestic lives. We've all heard fic recs where the reader said the fic "broke me" and heard those writers called brave. We've all heard people wish for long plotty fics where there are no happy endings. And this isn't just fandom, but also a larger popular culture where comedies and comic actors don't win Oscars, where musicals are considered unrealistic but violent action movies are not (I know a lot more people who walk around singing than walk around armed), where for a story to be considered worthwhile someone has to die.
In fact just the other day--the event that showed me that no, I'm really not over the shame, not me--a story was posted where the author note said in part, "There won't be a baby shower." First, I thought wow, I'm glad that I didn't get "baby shower" as a prompt for schmoop bingo, because that might have been awkward! Then, honestly, I felt sort of embarrassed that I'd just posted twenty-one schmoop fics, particularly as the fandom that I spend most of my time in right now--Star Trek--has taken a decided and seemingly permanent turn for the very dark.
I don't write dark. Hell, I wrote a happy suspension bondage fic. And yeah, people liked it, but I wouldn't call that a popular move--not in a fandom where people are writing tragic, dark, angsty stories for the Christmas challenge. And it's easy to feel like less of a writer because of it.
But you know--and to a certain extent I'm forcing myself to say this because while I do believe it, I'm honestly not feeling it emotionally at the moment--I don't think that's true. I have lots of happy stories bookmarked on my Delicious account. The books on my shelves that I go back to again and again tend to be life-affirming, a light in the darkness. And I've had people say to me, especially about the HP stuff I've written, that it's comfort fic for them, and I'm really flattered to hear that, because I know from experience that comfort stories are really important to have when life just isn't giving you a lot of reasons to feel hopeful.
I wish that we respected fic that was of a happier nature as much as we respect darker fic. I wish that we could call happy fic "realistic" as often as we apply that adjective to darker fic. I wish that I didn't have that twinge of embarrassment about posting twenty-one schmoop stories or just participating in schmoop bingo (and kiss bingo) in the first place. Because the only thing that is wrong with those stories is the actual quality of those stories, not the fact that they're schmoopy. There's nothing inherently unrealistic about a kid's birthday party at which nothing particularly horrible happens, and which leads the father to reflect on his own very different upbringing.
Well, okay, so the father in question is a wizard but, you know, other than that.
I'm sure the embarrassment I'm feeling right now will fade eventually. I'm not particularly good at defiance, but I'll settle back into quietly doing what I do and thinking that it's worth the effort. And hey, maybe if I just keep doing that, the rest of the world will catch up.
kink_bingo, kissbingo and schmoop_bingo. I knew I wouldn't get any points, because the points-giving period overlapped with the two bigbangs I'd signed up for, but I liked having all those open-ended prompts since I wanted to write some short stories anyway. I ended up finishing five kiss, four kink (and another to come, honest!), and twenty-five schmoop stories, a lot of which were written in the last month. And along the way, I learned three things.
The more you write, the more you can write. Okay, so I sort of already knew this, but only in the context of writing a long ongoing story, where you get into a groove with the story and end up writing thousands of words at a time. This time, I was writing several short stories, and yet the same thing occurred. I was in the groove not of one story or even one universe, but just of writing in general.
I had been kicking around the idea of writing a schmoop bingo story for every pairing I've written as the featured couple in a story, but the idea of churning out that many fics of at least 500 words was daunting to say the least. Then I did that kiss meme, where so many of you gave me great prompts, and I realized that yes, I could totally do this! And I did! I sat down with my schmoop bingo card and mapped out all the remaining prompts to all of the lovely couples I've ever written, which was really fun, like putting together a puzzle. (I'll post the filled-in grid in a day or so.) Then just wrote in my little notebook, pretty much every night and morning on the train.
Which leads to the next thing:
There really is a trick to writing short stories. I never used to be able to write short, but now I think I'm a little better at knowing what kind of idea will fit into that size (much as I learned in college what kind of idea will fit into a 5-page paper). I started to become a little less precious about the stories, or maybe just more confident. Generally I don't like posting stories that no one has looked at, but these were just little fun stories. Yes, they all had a point to make and a thing to say, but sometimes that thing was just, "I really like beards."
Which leads to the third thing:
Writing happy stories is a worthwhile thing to do. It's funny because I was much more solid in my defense--if that's the right word--of the happy story a couple of days ago, when I'd posted all that schmoop and was thinking about this post. I was going to say something about how sitting down and writing all that schmoop in such a concentrated amount had gotten me past my lingering fannish embarrassment about writing and reading such stories. But that actually proved to not be true!
We've all heard the polemics against "curtain fic"; heard slashers in particular rail against stories that smooth the rough edges off of characters (usually flatly called OOC) or take warriors and give them domestic lives. We've all heard fic recs where the reader said the fic "broke me" and heard those writers called brave. We've all heard people wish for long plotty fics where there are no happy endings. And this isn't just fandom, but also a larger popular culture where comedies and comic actors don't win Oscars, where musicals are considered unrealistic but violent action movies are not (I know a lot more people who walk around singing than walk around armed), where for a story to be considered worthwhile someone has to die.
In fact just the other day--the event that showed me that no, I'm really not over the shame, not me--a story was posted where the author note said in part, "There won't be a baby shower." First, I thought wow, I'm glad that I didn't get "baby shower" as a prompt for schmoop bingo, because that might have been awkward! Then, honestly, I felt sort of embarrassed that I'd just posted twenty-one schmoop fics, particularly as the fandom that I spend most of my time in right now--Star Trek--has taken a decided and seemingly permanent turn for the very dark.
I don't write dark. Hell, I wrote a happy suspension bondage fic. And yeah, people liked it, but I wouldn't call that a popular move--not in a fandom where people are writing tragic, dark, angsty stories for the Christmas challenge. And it's easy to feel like less of a writer because of it.
But you know--and to a certain extent I'm forcing myself to say this because while I do believe it, I'm honestly not feeling it emotionally at the moment--I don't think that's true. I have lots of happy stories bookmarked on my Delicious account. The books on my shelves that I go back to again and again tend to be life-affirming, a light in the darkness. And I've had people say to me, especially about the HP stuff I've written, that it's comfort fic for them, and I'm really flattered to hear that, because I know from experience that comfort stories are really important to have when life just isn't giving you a lot of reasons to feel hopeful.
I wish that we respected fic that was of a happier nature as much as we respect darker fic. I wish that we could call happy fic "realistic" as often as we apply that adjective to darker fic. I wish that I didn't have that twinge of embarrassment about posting twenty-one schmoop stories or just participating in schmoop bingo (and kiss bingo) in the first place. Because the only thing that is wrong with those stories is the actual quality of those stories, not the fact that they're schmoopy. There's nothing inherently unrealistic about a kid's birthday party at which nothing particularly horrible happens, and which leads the father to reflect on his own very different upbringing.
Well, okay, so the father in question is a wizard but, you know, other than that.
I'm sure the embarrassment I'm feeling right now will fade eventually. I'm not particularly good at defiance, but I'll settle back into quietly doing what I do and thinking that it's worth the effort. And hey, maybe if I just keep doing that, the rest of the world will catch up.
