I wish that I weren't so tired!! I've been up til 3am the last two nights whipping my weave into shape and it's only Half Way Done! Anyway, I love this. I miss you and your thinky writer thoughts. I miss that conversation among LJ peeps about writing and how to write and processes and stuff. And how I would reply to all this here by saying, there is no such thing as original. All ideas are recycled, it's just how you pull it off. The varnish, the finish, the icing is where your particular touch of This Is Mine comes. Because we are part of a community, ideas are cycled and recycled through our consciousness without us really even realizing it. We're influenced. Creativity does not, and should not, exist in a vacuum. I love that you wrote disguised fanfic for a class. I suspect that alot of people write disguised fanfic. Hell, every reinterpretation of another source is transformative works at work.
I'm much more comfortable writing fanfic than original fic, for a lot of what you mention here. Fanfic has a setting and a history and I don't have to explain it, people already know where things are or they don't care and it's about the characters. Here's the thing about Original Fiction, I think. There are rules that come from these Sources like publishers and teachers and critics that say "This is how you write" and "This is what a good story looks like". We box ourselves in and Genre Fiction becomes separated from Literature for no real good reason. For me, I know when I'm writing original stuff, my mind bombards me with the things that I've heard about how you're *supposed* to write and *what* you're supposed to write. It's exhausting and I usually end up throwing in the towel because who am I kidding.
Anyway, enough rambling. I am mightily impressed by your 12,000 words. I am at 3500, I think. So, one or two days behind. I didn't write yesterday, but I'll write tonight and tomorrow and then hopefully catch myself up this weekend. That's not going to be pretty because I also have a first draft on a paper due. Oh, joy (and Joy)! What on Earth was I thinking?
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I'm much more comfortable writing fanfic than original fic, for a lot of what you mention here. Fanfic has a setting and a history and I don't have to explain it, people already know where things are or they don't care and it's about the characters. Here's the thing about Original Fiction, I think. There are rules that come from these Sources like publishers and teachers and critics that say "This is how you write" and "This is what a good story looks like". We box ourselves in and Genre Fiction becomes separated from Literature for no real good reason. For me, I know when I'm writing original stuff, my mind bombards me with the things that I've heard about how you're *supposed* to write and *what* you're supposed to write. It's exhausting and I usually end up throwing in the towel because who am I kidding.
Anyway, enough rambling. I am mightily impressed by your 12,000 words. I am at 3500, I think. So, one or two days behind. I didn't write yesterday, but I'll write tonight and tomorrow and then hopefully catch myself up this weekend. That's not going to be pretty because I also have a first draft on a paper due. Oh, joy (and Joy)! What on Earth was I thinking?