#this is kind of about how I get drawn to darker narrative around queer identity

[variousqueerthings]

Something about Elliot Page’s interview in Time and Lil Nas instagram post to his 14 yr old self and the specific narrative of shame and naming where that shame comes from, our stories moving on from ideas of transition and coming out and into living and telling our younger selves “it’ll be okay, even if you didn’t realise it then, look at where we are now”…

idk, something about reclaiming shame and retroactively being kind to our childhood selves, because we couldn’t be kind then. Something about us telling stories about shame, versus the shame put upon us by others and how I want to engage with those darker feelings so that I can face them, in both fiction and reality…

#elliot page #lil nas x #this is kind of about how I get drawn to darker narrative around queer identity #but in an introspective sense - the soaking in of violence making me not be good to myself #and how hearing that spoken to by others and reading/writing it makes me feel able to look at it in myself #and also about reclamation - watched a play recently called Adam about a trans guy called Adam Kashmiry #who was a refugee from egypt who came to the uk and struggled with getting asylum because he wasn't able to transition #and the play is a fictionalised account of #what happened and it was created with him + he plays the lead #and there is a lot of different kinds of violence in the play but you're being guided through it BY the real Adam #you know he made it through and got the support he needed and is living his life #anyway something is different in some way... #something in the agency we have... not perfect not by far... but it is different... #(it's also a little bit about how I'm obsessed with reading fictional men in their 50s as closeted queers #and how I relate to their masculinity struggles as a transmasc but that's another post) #queer stuff

[dictacontrion]

Hey there! I always wanted to ask: as a writer, which literary works have influenced you the most? :)

Hi anon!!! This ask is so much fun to think about loads of non-fiction - creative essays, memoir, scholarly stuff, news - and still do. I took a lot of literature classes, so I was reading things from different historical periods, different countries, authors with different types of experiences. I’m pretty omnivorous when it comes to reading, and thinking through what I like most in each type of reading has done a lot to influence what I want my own writing to do.

But of course, there are faves! Or, not necessarily faves, but things that have stuck with me and that I’ve thought more about and been more influenced by. When I was little, Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, and thank goodness for Lucy Maud Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott and the people who gave me those books, for making the first stories I read ones where women were complex and had interiority and complexity and ambition and skill and were loved because of it, not in spite of it. There was a pretty formative Vonnegut phase, and I still admire his ability to make complex points with simply told very accessible stories, and the sort of line-blurring he does between sci-fi and not-sci-fi storytelling. David Foster Wallace’s essays and short stories have been big; his voice is very much his own, his writing is smart, his observations are incisive and funny, and his work manages to convey so many emotions simultaneously that I’m often blown away (can’t let you go without recommending “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”) Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, in addition to being my heroes, are phenomenal at giving form to unspoken things and pinpointing exactly that thing you felt, and somehow always knew, but didn’t have words for They’ve influenced my life as much as my writing, but their ability to articulate experience honestly and beautifully and unflinchingly is where I admire them most as writers, and I hope I’m influenced by that.

There are so many more. A whole bunch of queer theorists for how they combine the political and the aesthetic. The way Ralph Ellison uses metaphor in Invisible Man, the way Jeannette Winterson uses gender in Written on the Body, Dorothy Allison’s unwavering gaze in everything. Details in specific scenes in so, so many more books. A whole bunch of people who engage magical realism in different ways (interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, I think that has made it easier to write about wizards). A whole bunch of books that were influential because I didn’t like them (Jack Kerouac can jump in a fucking lake, pretentious dirtbag). And that’s not even getting into writing for TV and film, which I guarantee you has done just as much, if not more, for my sense of language and narrative.

Also, I know we don’t usually talk about these things in the same breath, but I don’t want to undersell how much other fanfiction writers have influenced me. After a very long spell of reading only nonfiction, it was @femmequixotic’s writing that reminded me that beautiful, evocative writing and the pleasure that comes from richly drawn worlds is a worthwhile end unto itself, and that’s what made me want to write fiction again at all. @firethesound‘s humor gives her stories a lightness and heart that’s made me way more interested in being a funny writer than I’d ever been before, curiouslyfic and abbycadabra makes me want to play with abstraction again, @eidheann reminds me that including my characters’ less noble reactions makes them realer and truer and shouldn’t be shied away from, @vaysh11 males me want to push my descriptive skills, blamebrampton made me want to try setting human stories against politics, @lol-zeitgeistic made me think through my world-building foundations in a whole new way, frayach and kedavranox made me want to explore darker themes, @icmezzo made me want to try writing magic front and center and making it visual and beautiful, so many people made me want to try writing sex and seeing what that could do for a story, which I’d never done before, and really, I could go on and on and on.

Truly, every time I read a great new fic, there’s something I take away. In just the last round of erised, birdsofshore’s Lumos made me want to think more about how magic would feel in the body, @thistle-verse‘s A Ghost in the Garden has me thinking about how to use tropes and how to more richly use canon, @femmequixotic and @noeeon’s Boom Clap (The Sound of My Heart) has me thinking about how to make canon richer and how to give familiar settings and characters new life, @blithelybonny‘s 1,000 Points from Gryffindor has me thinking about story structure and how to build OCs, @ravenclawsquill’s The Full Four Seasons has me thinking about when and how and why characters’ sexual identities matter and how to resolve conflicts around characters doing complicated things, A Ghost in the Garden and @lol-zeitgeistic’s Antediluvia both have me thinking about how to tell stories in fictional worlds that feel relevant to our own and how to do it without making the world seem bleak, and listen, I could go on and on and on some more, and still be talking about that one fest in this one fandom.

I still wouldn’t have have touched how These Inconvenient Fireworks made me rethink genre, or how Pull Me Under made me rethink coming out stories, or how tell me about the big bang made me rethink structure and how we write intimacy.

And I could talk about all of that and still not have touched how much the existence of fanfiction changed my writing - how accessible it makes it, how freeing it is to write in a context that transcends the boundaries that can pigeonhole published works, how it is to write in this kind of community of writers and readers, how much I love the variety, how much it’s shifted my sense of what makes writing worth doing, how much less it’s made me focus on what makes Literature Good and how much more it’s made me focus on what makes stories move people, what makes words reach into your chest and find something there that needs knowing.

So: fanfiction, dear anon. Fanfiction may be the most influential literature of all.

#i loved this ask really a lot #you probably were not expecting an essay;i would apologize except i'm not sorry #also if you want specific recs for influential professional authors come the hell on back and i will hook you up for any of these folks! #nice anons #irl #yay asks!