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kazliin · 4 years

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I'm sure you've answered similar questions so sorry ahead of time if you have answered these questions before.I re-read Until My Feet Bleed and My Heart Aches for like the sixth time. I tend to go back and re-read some of my all time favorite FFs throughout the years and I was once again blown away by your writing so I have some questions! 1. Do you find that it's better to write everyday or just when motivation hits? 2. How many edits/revisions do you usually do? To be cont....

LOL I'm back- continuing with question 2, how do you know when you've edited a chapter or even an entire story enough? 3. How do you know when you've written too much? Everyone knows the rule of 'show not tell' but where is the line between using too much of that flower language and just getting to the point? 4. Have you worked on an original story or have you been published already?! I would love to read an OG work. :)

Last few questions haha- I wish there wasn't a word limit on these things...5. Any tips for how to not compare yourself to other writers? I have this problem in both writing and art. I do a piece and then look or read something that someone else produced and then table flip my desk because their work is significantly better and then I'm that 'this is fine' meme. 6. Have you found that writing FF has helped you? Thank you for taking the time to read these. ^_^

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No worries, I love getting questions about my writing! I’ll answer them all in order so it’s easier to read.

1) Do you find that it's better to write everyday or just when motivation hits?

For me, if I’m in the middle of a multi-chapter fic or series, I find it better to write regularly. Motivation is a fickle thing, so I found having a set writing schedule helped me put out chapters regularly. I didn’t write ever day, but I had set days/times every week that I would devote to writing. I can be pretty lazy at times so if I hadn’t forced myself to sit down and write, I never would have finished anything!

When it comes to oneshots though, I definitely only wrote when inspiration struck. Because they are much shorter and easier to write, it was much more fun for me to frantically write one in a burst of inspiration than to try and force one out when I wasn’t feeling inspired. But those strokes of inspiration aren’t a regular thing for me so I can’t rely on them for longer fics. So, for me, I write differently depending on what kind of fic I’m writing (not a very helpful answer I know!)

2) How many edits/revisions do you usually do? How do you know when you've edited a chapter or even an entire story enough?

I am a horrible little writing gremlin who edits something once and then tosses it out into the world for all my readers to suffer my many writing mistakes. Is it the best way to do things? Absolutely not. But I find the more I edit the more I hate things and delete huge chunks of writing and I’m never fully satisfied. So I limit how much time I spend reworking a chapter or I’d never post it. I should definitely edit my writing more but fanfiction is a hobby, not a job. I’m not going to spend hours agonizing over a fic that I was supposed to enjoy creating for the sake of editing it to perfection. So I’d say, once you get sick of reading your own writing while editing, it’s probably a sign to stop and just put the story out into the world because fic is meant to be fun, not stressful!

3) How do you know when you've written too much? Everyone knows the rule of 'show not tell' but where is the line between using too much of that flower language and just getting to the point?

This is a really tricky one because it depends on what kind of fic you’re writing and your own personal preference. I like writing a lot of introspection and have a bad habit of

making my chapters far too long. Some people like reading that kind of writing but some people absolutely hate it. The majority of the negative comments on my fics are about how there is too much introspection, my chapters should be more concise, and I need to learn how to edit down my work. Which is all fair critique but hey, it’s fanfic. I like to write like that and so I’m going to keep writing like that. And people who like short, punchy fics that get straight to the point are going to keep writing they way they like too. There’s no right or wrong way to write fic, just the way you like it.

When it comes to writing your own fic, whatever is best for you is usually whatever you find most natural to write. If you naturally write shorter chapters there’s no need to make yourself bored and unhappy by trying to drag them out with lots of flowery language. But if you naturally just let your words flow free and write lots of flowery descriptions, there’s no need to frustrate yourself trying to edit it down too much. I’m a firm believer in fanfic being fun. So write in the way that you enjoy. If people don’t like it, they can go read another fic. Different people have different tastes, so you have to write for yourself first and everyone else second. A fantastic chapter could be 1,000 words or it could be 30,000, as long as it’s written from the heart.

4) Have you worked on an original story or have you been published already?! I would love to read an OG work. :)

I unfortunately have not! I may one day but I don’t currently have any plans to

5) Any tips for how to not compare yourself to other writers? I have this problem in both writing and art. I do a piece and then look or read something that someone else produced and then table flip my desk because their work is significantly better and then I'm that 'this is fine' meme.

The best way I’ve ever seen someone address this situation is in this comic.

In fandom, it’s really hard not to compare yourself to other people, especially with so many talented people producing content! But there are a few vital things to remember, the first of which being the two cakes philosophy in the comic I linked. Sure maybe someone produced something that you think is better but I guarantee the audience isn’t thinking “oh this thing isn’t as good as that thing.” They’re thinking “hell yes, more things!!” All content is good content because it’s content that keeps fandom alive.

Also, we are all terrible judges of our own work. I guarantee if you asked the author/artist of your very favourite fanwork about their own work they’d be able to point out 100 tiny flaws you’d never seen. So when you’re looking at your own work, remember that you’re probably being overly critical of yourself and your intended audience are unlikely to notice even a fraction of the problems you see in the things you create.

And finally, don’t be too harsh on yourself because the more you do something, the more you improve! Some writers/artists in fandom also do writing/art professionally. And even if they don’t, some have been producing fanfiction/fanart for many years, so they’ve had huge amounts of practice. So you’re doing yourself a disservice by comparing yourself to someone who might have been drawing/writing for years more than you. I guarantee if you read the first fics I wrote when I was 12/13 (thankfully purged from the internet now because god were they terrible) you would think they were a flaming pile of trash because they were. And I used to look at other writers and think I’d never get as good as them because they just seemed to write amazing things so naturally. But it takes years and years of practice and gradually you get better and better. So if you find yourself comparing yourself to someone else and getting disheartened, try to remember there was probably a time they were doing the exact same thing! And if they kept going then so can you!

6) Have you found that writing FF has helped you?

It definitely has! I started writing the Rivals series when I was at a very low point in my life and it was a very cathartic experience for me. And it was also such a great feeling to know people were liking and reading my work! It helped me through some tough times and even though I haven’t written in a while, I still sometimes get comments on my old fics that absolutely brighten my day! I love fanfic, both reading and writing it, and it’s been a very important part of my life for a long time

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yasuda-yoshiya · 5 years

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Sorry I haven’t been around here much lately! The last few weeks (/months, really) have been rough for me, but I’m feeling a bit better at least for now. For now I’ll just drop some overdue thoughts here on some of the things I’ve been watching since I finished Utena:

Princess Tutu

I found Tutu to be a really sweet and charming show with a ton of heart, but I'm also sad to say that I don't think watching it straight after Utena did it any favours for me. Utena portrayed the same kinds of themes around breaking out of predefined narratives in a way that personally hit home for me a lot harder, so Tutu ended up feeling a bit like a watered down version of the same ideas to me... Which is a shame because I do still think it's a really cool show with a lot to like about it! It's visually and aesthetically gorgeous, I adore its whole cosy meta-fairytale atmosphere and the ballet theme and the whole general feel of the show a lot - it just didn't end up leaving that much of a lasting impression on me in the end. I may well come back and revisit it some day, because I feel like I'd probably get more out of it coming in with a clearer idea of what to expect and without Utena's shadow unfairly hanging over it.

For the characters, I loved Ahiru and Fakir! They were both so endearingly earnest and I really liked the respective directions they ended up taking both of their character arcs and their relationship (Fakir passionately rewriting the story to be about Ahiru's bravery and courage at the end made me cry so hard! That's like, the exact kind of individual heartfelt expression of love that hits straight to my heart when it comes to fictional couples, waaaah...)

Mytho and Rue were a bit harder to connect with for me; I felt like I couldn't really get invested in Rue's feelings for Mytho for the most of the show since the backstory around them wasn't revealed until the very end. (I did like Ahiru and Rue's relationship quite a bit, though! That sort of feeling of the narrative artificially pushing them into being enemies when they really could have helped each other as friends was well done.) On Mytho's end I just never clicked at all with the whole raven blood subplot that seemed to dominate his character in the second season, unfortunately. I couldn't make it meaningfully connect for me, even though I had quite liked him as a character in the first half of the series (even in just my generic "hnng cute boys struggling with the idea of having feelings" way). I'd be interested to see on a rewatch whether those two would work better for me having a better idea of where their trajectory was going from the start, since I felt like I didn't really "get" what they were going for with their relationship or how I was supposed to be reading them until the very end (I'm slow okay).

Steven Universe

What an absolutely lovely series! I've been wanting to check this out for a long time, and I'm glad I finally got the chance because it really is excellent. I totally fell in love with the whole Crystal Gem family, and the balance between them all having their own personal issues to deal with while still being able to draw love and support from each other was done really well. I really loved the handling of Steven's PoV in the first couple of the series especially for how they handled his growth around coming to understand that his parental figures are really flawed people who have a lot of baggage to deal with, but also without framing their personal problems or their relationships with each other as being at all within either his power or responsibility to "fix". Instead, his moments of growth are more about more consciously registering the burdens they're under and making those little gestures to ease them wherever he can, like consciously showing appreciation for their parenting efforts with the test, or giving Amethyst more time to vent things out with her friend when she's stressed out instead of asking her to take him home right away. Likewise, on the gems' end, we really get the sense that e.g. Pearl's love for Steven is real and valuable and "saves" her in a very real sense, but also that it's not going to ever fully erase her depression or her grief over losing the life she had with Rose before and that that's okay.

I would say as the show went on, it felt like it lost some of the grounded and occasionally harsh nature that originally drew me to it - the first couple of seasons felt like they had a sort of constant legitimate tension in the background with the gems trying hard to keep things together in a hard situation in a way that still obviously had its cracks in it, and a sort of acknowledgment that "maybe not everything will be okay, but there's still a lot of good in the world and in our relationships that's worth living for", which I appreciated. Whereas I felt like they moved a bit more towards unambiguously positive resolutions as the show went on, with a bit less of that willingness to leave things "unresolved". (Of course the show still has a lot of those moments, like the reveal of Rose's past in particular, but even then I wished that the fallout from the reveal and its lasting impact on the gems was given more time and weight than it was.) That feeling culminated for me in the finale of series 5 and the way the plot with the diamonds was resolved, where it felt like the show pretty much parted ways with reality entirely and fully embraced a kind of ideal fantasy positivity.

But I don't think that's necessarily a totally bad thing, either - it's still a very genuine and heartfelt kind of positivity that can be hard to find in narratives as unapologetically queer as SU is (especially in media targeted at young kids!) and I'm sure a lot of people really need that gap filled in their lives, so I can't really bring myself to resent it overall. The characters remain as endearing and lovable as ever, the show still made me smile from beginning to end, and all in all I have nothing but great appreciation for all the important ground it's willing to tread as a kids' show touching on a lot of extremely relevant contemporary issues in a positive and responsible way. It honestly makes me feel really happy and hopeful to think of kids getting to grow up with a show like this! So while I might personally have ended up resonating more with the show if they'd taken a different direction, I feel like I still have a lot of respect and understanding for the route they did end up taking, too, and I'm glad to have experienced it.

Mob Psycho 100

I thought this was a very cool and interesting show! As "deconstructing shounen tropes" series go, I feel like this one successfully hits a unique sort of sweetspot for me in the way that, rather than brutally tearing apart shounen conventions out from the roots (which is also something I can enjoy a lot when it's done well!), it's instead focusing on taking a lot of the genuinely positive ideas that draw people to shounen - the ability to overcome adversity through personal growth and "the power of bonds/friendship", positivity in the face of despair, and so on - and re-examining them through a more grounded context that asks "Okay, but what does that actually look like in the real world?" Because, you know, it definitely DOESN'T look like people with magical god-given superpowers blasting through everything that challenges them with the sheer force of their specialness and their pre-assigned role as the "main character", right?

So I was really impressed by Mob as a series for not only being so thorough about deconstructing that (to the point that the voice encouraging Mob to use his powers more and be a super special hero is an outright "devil on the hero's shoulder" kind of character!), but also for going that extra step to examining what real positive growth actually DOES look like. I felt like the series did a remarkably insightful job overall (especially in the second series) of sort of gently but firmly differentiating "real growth" from "shounen growth" in that sense. I really loved those little touches like the Emi episode, where the viewer is effectively led to expect a moral about how "people will like you more if you act more genuine and be yourself!" - but then the show very deliberately switches gears to the idea that trying to be more genuine is already worthwhile in and of itself, just because you're living in the world with a more conscious awareness of what's important to you and standing up for the things you care about, and how that authentic way of living can inspire other people and have a positive impact on them too.

And similarly, I absolutely love Mob and Reigen's weird, messy, problematic relationship being the emotional centrepiece of the series, because it's the exact opposite of the kind of friendship you'd expect to be centred in a "POWER OF BONDS!!" themed show, but that's also why it just... really really works! It's such a humble and near-accidental and flawed and limited connection, and I love that Reigen is also allowed to impact Mob in negative ways and have selfish motivations and be unambiguously portrayed as a genuinely pathetic and terrible person and a bad influence on him too, and that the show doesn't remotely shy away from that - and yet somehow it still absolutely shines through that both of them would be worse off without each other, that the "power of their bond" really has changed them both for the better as people. Not through any incredible magic connection, but just through those little moments where they save each other through things like Reigen telling Mob "It's okay to run away", or Mob telling Reigen "You're a good guy".

Because the show is so upfront about the limitations of their "bond", it really does make the emphasis on its positive impact and how fortunate the two of them are to have been influenced by each other really work and have value, I think - because it comes across as that kind of approachable, recognisable "miracle" that really can and does happen in people's daily lives. It doesn’t claim to be a perfect friendship, or to have the capability to fix all their individual problems just by existing, but it does still come across loud and clear that they’ve been a genuinely positive force in each other’s lives. I definitely came away from it with a greater appreciation for those little chance encounters and humble relationships that have helped me and shaped me as a person! On the whole, I'm sure the show isn't for everyone, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys shounen as a genre at all, because I feel that it really works as a remarkably critical and self-aware yet loving celebration of the spirit behind those kinds of stories.

#princess tutu #steven universe #mob psycho 100

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