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edenfallingDecember 16: Talk about your favourite themes/tropes! Which do you like to read, write, or both? Do your preferences change when it's fanfic versus profiction? Which themes do you think you've handled well, or do you want to try in future? (for krait) [Tumblr crosspost]
Hmm. I don't know if they're tropes, exactly, but I find myself constantly writing about people wrestling with ethical dilemmas and questions about morality in general, about people dealing with the lived experience of religion, and about people creating and navigating networks of social relationships. I'm very big on friendship and family. I like fairy-tale elements. I like to write about people who have everyday lives that keep rolling onward regardless of whatever big plot arcs are happening. I like to design cultures on both material and ideological levels.
I think I said once that you can summarize my habitual story arc as follows: a person attempts to balance their own needs and desires against the needs and desires of their community, and learns things about themself in the process. Sometimes it has a happy ending, sometimes less so, but you can map a LOT of my work onto that general structure.
What I like to read leans more toward action/adventure, though preferably with a high degree of character development and interaction, and interesting and detailed world-building. But I am all about exciting plots. I want stuff to happen. Heck, I want stuff to explode. I want whole galaxies to explode! (Which is funny, given how internally focused my own writing can be, but I am large; I contain multitudes. *grin*) I also have a soft spot for stories that run on fairy-tale or dream logic, with elegant prose.
I would actually like to write more action/adventure stories, with swordfights and battle magic and huge dramatic challenges and consequences, but the thing about that kind of story is that they run long, and I am so very bad at time management that I prefer not to start something that will require that kind of commitment. (Except when I do it by accident, of course. *headdesk*)
I think my fanfic and profic tastes are fairly similar: action/adventure and emotional realism, with a sideline in lucid dreaming, and gen is almost always more interesting than sex. The main difference is that I'm willing to cut fanfic a lot more ethical slack, because it's often an id-tastic reaction to canon rather than something trying to create an ethically coherent secondary reality. So I can cheerfully enjoy fics where characters are serial killers, or other extremely messed-up scenarios, which I would side-eye with extreme wariness if they were original works.
As for things I want to try in the future... *bites lip* Okay, I will be honest here. Someday I am going to write the story about a magician so powerful she could destroy the world before breakfast if she wanted to. Or the story about the escaped genetic experiments who accidentally become gods in a space opera universe. Or the story about a fisher who learns that he's the incarnation of one of the three creator deities of his universe and has no idea how to cope with the news. Or the story about the three people who fought to cast extra-dimensional demons out of their world and got stuck in a cycle of reincarnation doing the same thing every 150 years or so, for over three thousand years and are now supernaturally talented at their roles. Or the psychic on a prison planet who, from the planetary surface, holds the orbital monitoring station hostage in order to get galactic help during a terrifying plague. Etcetera. I haven't dared to write any of those yet because I have a hell of a power kink and those ideas are... um... not exactly a sexual turn-on for me, but embarrassingly close. And it is terrifyingly easy to lose control of stories which cut that close to one's own id vortex.
(You may notice that those story ideas still include ethics and religion and social networks and stuff -- it's not like my other ingrained obsessions go away just because I'm indulging a different one -- but there are a lot more big dramatic outward gestures to balance the inward reflections.)
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December Talking Meme: All Days
krait) [Tumblr crosspost]Hmm. I don't know if they're tropes, exactly, but I find myself constantly writing about people wrestling with ethical dilemmas and questions about morality in general, about people dealing with the lived experience of religion, and about people creating and navigating networks of social relationships. I'm very big on friendship and family. I like fairy-tale elements. I like to write about people who have everyday lives that keep rolling onward regardless of whatever big plot arcs are happening. I like to design cultures on both material and ideological levels.
I think I said once that you can summarize my habitual story arc as follows: a person attempts to balance their own needs and desires against the needs and desires of their community, and learns things about themself in the process. Sometimes it has a happy ending, sometimes less so, but you can map a LOT of my work onto that general structure.
What I like to read leans more toward action/adventure, though preferably with a high degree of character development and interaction, and interesting and detailed world-building. But I am all about exciting plots. I want stuff to happen. Heck, I want stuff to explode. I want whole galaxies to explode! (Which is funny, given how internally focused my own writing can be, but I am large; I contain multitudes. *grin*) I also have a soft spot for stories that run on fairy-tale or dream logic, with elegant prose.
I would actually like to write more action/adventure stories, with swordfights and battle magic and huge dramatic challenges and consequences, but the thing about that kind of story is that they run long, and I am so very bad at time management that I prefer not to start something that will require that kind of commitment. (Except when I do it by accident, of course. *headdesk*)
I think my fanfic and profic tastes are fairly similar: action/adventure and emotional realism, with a sideline in lucid dreaming, and gen is almost always more interesting than sex. The main difference is that I'm willing to cut fanfic a lot more ethical slack, because it's often an id-tastic reaction to canon rather than something trying to create an ethically coherent secondary reality. So I can cheerfully enjoy fics where characters are serial killers, or other extremely messed-up scenarios, which I would side-eye with extreme wariness if they were original works.
As for things I want to try in the future... *bites lip* Okay, I will be honest here. Someday I am going to write the story about a magician so powerful she could destroy the world before breakfast if she wanted to. Or the story about the escaped genetic experiments who accidentally become gods in a space opera universe. Or the story about a fisher who learns that he's the incarnation of one of the three creator deities of his universe and has no idea how to cope with the news. Or the story about the three people who fought to cast extra-dimensional demons out of their world and got stuck in a cycle of reincarnation doing the same thing every 150 years or so, for over three thousand years and are now supernaturally talented at their roles. Or the psychic on a prison planet who, from the planetary surface, holds the orbital monitoring station hostage in order to get galactic help during a terrifying plague. Etcetera. I haven't dared to write any of those yet because I have a hell of a power kink and those ideas are... um... not exactly a sexual turn-on for me, but embarrassingly close. And it is terrifyingly easy to lose control of stories which cut that close to one's own id vortex.
(You may notice that those story ideas still include ethics and religion and social networks and stuff -- it's not like my other ingrained obsessions go away just because I'm indulging a different one -- but there are a lot more big dramatic outward gestures to balance the inward reflections.)
-----
December Talking Meme: All Days
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Date: 2014-12-18 05:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-19 05:20 am (UTC)