Fiction writers introduction thread!
1. Definition
By fiction, I mean:
literature in the form of prose, especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people. (Google)
2. Introduce Yourself!
I understand we have at least one professional writer in the house (I cannot remember your username, sorry!), and several aspirant writers.
Every once in awhile, I get the urge to suggest some collaborative threads exercises, but it's hard to gauge interest without a better notion of how many fiction writers we have.
With that in mind, I make this call for introductions!
Please try to include:
- Have you ever made money writing fiction?[1]
- First writing language(s): Examples: English, Portuguese, German, etc
- Other writing languages(s): same as above. English is implied.
- Formats* : Examples: Short story, Romance, Play, Screenplay, etc
- Genres*: Examples: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, etc.
- Main themes*: Examples: relationships, violence, artificial intelligence, etc.
- Link to Writing Sample(s) on Tildes or Ghostbin (either as
textormarkdown) - What do you expect to achieve with your writing (anything, either subjective or objective)?[2]
- Apart from ~creative, where do you go for feedback?
- Are you looking for collaborations of any kind? Yes or No.
Footnotes
[1] The purpose of this question is not to assess the quality of your writing, but rather the position writing occupies in your life. Is this something you do in your free time, or does it have a central role among your other activities? I do not pretend to know how and why everyone writes, this is just a starter. Feel free to share as much as you want.
[2] For example: self-expression, philosophical investigation, external appreciation (nothing wrong with that), financial rewards, political or societal change, any combination of those.
* In order of importance
Professional (screenwriting).
Portuguese.
Screenplay, short-story.
Absurdism, fantastic.
Relationships, communication mishaps, the meaning of life (or lack thereof).
My main motivation is a desire for others to appreciate my work. I believe most artists are driven by that desire, with money sometimes working as a transitional currency. Every actor wants applause, and every writer wants sales.
That said, for practical reasons, financial rewards are also extremely important by themselves, and I would have no moral issues whatsoever adapting my writing to the market if I thought this would put food on the table.
Besides my roommate, family members and everyone I know that can read words, /r/destructiveReaders and /r/screenwriting gave me excellent feedback in the past.
Yes. Not necessarily in the writing phase per se [1], but it's always nice to have someone to give a quality critique of your work. Story exchanging seems to work well.
[1] I'm not against writing in collaboration, but it's hard to find people with compatible artistic inclinations.
Imma be a dick for the purpose of clarity as I explain my situation:
Why would you assume I'm aspiring to be a professional – or make money, which are distinct states of a writer – if I'm not making any money out of it? It's perfectly acceptable to be an amateur writer, earn money through it, and never make it your main source of income. It's equally acceptable to be an amateur writer and never earn anything out of it.
I'm an amateur writer.
My usernames comes from the fact that I sought to be known, at the moment of its creation, after that one fanfic series, Crystal Clear. I started it, but never finished or published: another case of performance anxiety turning into indefinite procrastination. I wrote a handful of other fanfics.
If you stretch your definition of "fanfiction", I've almost finished a 12k-word fan worldbuilding project called 2011: a Harry Potter AU where wizards never got stuck in medieval times.
Mostly my writing is original. Worldbuilding is a big part of it – currently bigger than the actual writing I do.
I started writing in Russian, then switched to English as my daily commucation in the language shifted from peripheral to majority. I now mostly think in English, which makes writing in Russian somewhat awkward. Not impossible, but awkward.
I like short stories a lot: you can pen them and publish them in under a day. It's what my early writing, from around 2012, consists of: one- or two-page short stories of varied contents.
I have a couple of book-length stories on the backburner.
Current work planner includes Frontiers, an episodic story – essentially a long list of plot-connected short stories, which is the format I apprciate the most right now. Crystal Clear is the same way, although in its own time-framing.
I'm also getting into interactive fiction as of recently. RPG-ish in mechanics and choice-of-option is what I prefer, inspired by Choice of Games (and Choice of Robots in particular, check it out). Currently planning the architecture of the IF engine I'd need to tell these stories my way.
Never understood genre division. Why would you want to limit yourself to a set of tropes?
But, recognizing that these are established sets of tropes... A lot of my work centers around urban settings. Urban fantasy is one thing I'm fond of. Lots of soft, intrinsic sci-fi elements where settings afford it. On the crossing of those is cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk.
I'm also fond of writing something that would be perfectly real-world fiction in a completely different world. One of my current projects is set in a world where smartphones are a thing but the Internet – or any remote communications – are not a thing because a physical problem called the Hard Barrier. Different countries, cultures, history. Otherwise? Perfectly grounded slice-of-life fiction.
Here is the initial one-sixth of the fanfic I've been working on recently. It's called Cybil, and it's inspired by Disco Elysium and its self-dialogue system. That fucking game made quite an impression on me: I don't usually write fanfics.
Most of my writing has been a matter of exploration.
I seek to do things others haven't tried before. Writing something existing – unless I'm using the trope purposefully – depresses me. When I take something, I seek to dissect it, see how it works and why. If it doesn't work afterwards, I throw it away; if it does, I roll with it. It takes a lot of time and a lot of thinking from first principles, but nothing else excites me as much.
Writing also helps me live "through the world", so to speak. Where I haven't been – mentally, emotionally, physically – I try to imagine. I look at the photos, read the notes, ask those who've been, and the rest I compose out of the things I know. This is why I enjoy writing about different worlds so much: it helps me "travel", similarly to how travelling to a foreign country gives me the hit of endorphines. It's an imperfect substitute for actual travelling, but it is exciting to build a world of my own.
There isn't an ultimate goal here: I go to where I can see from where I am at the moment.
Given that I haven't published a thing in years... Nowhere.
I don't think I've met anyone with a similar attitude to things – intense and almost clinically engineerial, yet still revelling in the beauty of it all.
If I could find someone like that, I want to talk to them right fucking now.
This seems to be the norm when it comes to worldbuilding.
I believe the short story is the most rewarding format for fiction because you get quicker feedback.
When you circumscribe your story to a well-defined genre, you get to play with a wide history of expectations that you can either confirm in the form of reinvention or deny completely to present a comment about the things it represents. Example: a story in the western genre that gives women agency and power.
You clearly have very interesting ideas to which you give a lot of thought. I'd be happy to read your stuff.
I never wrote anything like that, but I kinda want to. I always get stuck in the science part of science fiction. Maybe I'm too perfectionist because I end up reading a bunch of technical articles and eventually give up to transform it into fiction.
Let's talk!
You get to do the very same thing without subscribing to a genre. You can set a story in the times of the Wild West, tell about a female mayor who's doing her damnest to protect the people and make the city thrive, talk about her encounters with the gangs of bandits... and still don't have a western.
It just never made sense to me that I'd want to write a sci-fi story. I always wanted to write stories. The technology, the magic, the sociocultural background – just a backdrop. A backdrop that's very fun to work with and imagine and perpetuate, but a backdrop all the same.
That's the thing: I have nothing right now. I do have a set of short stories in Russian stuck somewhere on the Internet, but... yeah, no. They were written a long time ago.
Pick your poison. I'm sometimes on Discord, and I check Tildes a few times a day. Email would also be good if you don't want to do instant messaging.
Of course, it is! This is is just an arbitrary distinction for something that is way more fluid and complex. It says nothing about the quality of one's writing!
I rephrased the question to address your concern. Please tell me if it's better now!
As long as that's what you want to know, I'm fine with it. My concern was in excluding amateur authors who do it mainly for fun: I wouldn't want to dismiss folks who don't see their creative outlet as a means to an end, and I most certainly don't want to encourage turning hobbies into businesses if it would end up stiffling the creative flow.