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Fandom Snowflake Challenge 2020 - Day 2
Jan. 4th, 2020 02:21 pm
Challenge #2
In your own space, talk about your fannish history.
The short answer is that I have a short one, at least when it comes to fandom online. I got an AO3 account in 2017; before then I'd never written fic, though I had been reading fic and lurking since my last year or so of high school. I read a lot of Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean fanfic, then moved on to Sherlock and eventually the Marvel Netflix shows. I discovered most of those fics through the TV Tropes Fanfic Recs pages, and as I read more and more I began playing out my own scenarios and what-ifs in my head, which I'd always done anyway, just never with the option of writing those stories down and sharing them online. And I didn't want (or thought I didn't want) to write my own fics for a good couple of years, since I figured that devoting so much time to unpublishable work--not that any of the original stories I was trying and failing to write back then were particularly publishable--would be a waste.
I eventually broke after going through a terrible stretch of writer's block. I'd read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which makes the point that it's more important to write what you want to be writing than to write what you think you should be writing, and I was also so miserable that at that point I honestly didn't care if I never wrote another original story again. My first fic wasn't especially good, and I never finished it, but it was an idea I liked, I had fun with it, and it opened up the floodgates: I wrote and wrote and wrote, more or less constantly, for the first time in years. After Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 came out I found my way into that fandom, started actually interacting with people and making friends, and I haven't looked back (not much, anyway) since.
Fandom is in a lot of ways a mixed bag for me: even though I wish I didn't, I still do worry about wasting time and not working on more professional writing; putting a story up online means it's there, in all its awkward, typo-ed, too-earnest glory (which is the exact same problem I'd have with original work, and at least on AO3 I can go back and edit if I spot a really outrageous mistake); and there are certain parts of certain fandoms that I...really, really, profoundly don't click with. But all the mixed-bag elements are still part of why I love fandom as a whole--you don't need to write perfectly, or be very sure of yourself, or agree with every hot take that comes across your dashboard. There's a place for everybody, a place to create new stories and find new friends and love new stories, whether they happen to be meticulously line-edited or not.
Oh! And I went back to check fanfiction.net for the two fics--one LOTR, one POTC--that were the first I ever read all the way through. The LOTR one is Misfit in Middle Earth, about a grad student who falls into Middle Earth, misses out on most of the high romance, but ends up charting her own (fun and moving) course anyway, and the POTC one is Memories of May, a Barbossa/OC story that's also fun and moving, and the first in an (unfinished) series.
The short answer is that I have a short one, at least when it comes to fandom online. I got an AO3 account in 2017; before then I'd never written fic, though I had been reading fic and lurking since my last year or so of high school. I read a lot of Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean fanfic, then moved on to Sherlock and eventually the Marvel Netflix shows. I discovered most of those fics through the TV Tropes Fanfic Recs pages, and as I read more and more I began playing out my own scenarios and what-ifs in my head, which I'd always done anyway, just never with the option of writing those stories down and sharing them online. And I didn't want (or thought I didn't want) to write my own fics for a good couple of years, since I figured that devoting so much time to unpublishable work--not that any of the original stories I was trying and failing to write back then were particularly publishable--would be a waste.
I eventually broke after going through a terrible stretch of writer's block. I'd read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which makes the point that it's more important to write what you want to be writing than to write what you think you should be writing, and I was also so miserable that at that point I honestly didn't care if I never wrote another original story again. My first fic wasn't especially good, and I never finished it, but it was an idea I liked, I had fun with it, and it opened up the floodgates: I wrote and wrote and wrote, more or less constantly, for the first time in years. After Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 came out I found my way into that fandom, started actually interacting with people and making friends, and I haven't looked back (not much, anyway) since.
Fandom is in a lot of ways a mixed bag for me: even though I wish I didn't, I still do worry about wasting time and not working on more professional writing; putting a story up online means it's there, in all its awkward, typo-ed, too-earnest glory (which is the exact same problem I'd have with original work, and at least on AO3 I can go back and edit if I spot a really outrageous mistake); and there are certain parts of certain fandoms that I...really, really, profoundly don't click with. But all the mixed-bag elements are still part of why I love fandom as a whole--you don't need to write perfectly, or be very sure of yourself, or agree with every hot take that comes across your dashboard. There's a place for everybody, a place to create new stories and find new friends and love new stories, whether they happen to be meticulously line-edited or not.
Oh! And I went back to check fanfiction.net for the two fics--one LOTR, one POTC--that were the first I ever read all the way through. The LOTR one is Misfit in Middle Earth, about a grad student who falls into Middle Earth, misses out on most of the high romance, but ends up charting her own (fun and moving) course anyway, and the POTC one is Memories of May, a Barbossa/OC story that's also fun and moving, and the first in an (unfinished) series.