(no subject)

[svollga]

What I really hate about last-days-till-deadline period is that this is the period I get tons of ideas and thoughts all boiling in my head (because my job is intellectual but mechanical at the same time), and I don't have any time to work on them, and they just keep growing.

Now, I suddenly have a desire to write in two more fandoms, both with het pairings which is totally new area for me. Well, not entirely new - but I've been writing slash since my first fanfic (which included a one male/six females orgy and male/male final pairing), and I tend to think of myself as a slasher. So, I feel like I'm walking into a strange land.

Actually, while writing this, I remebered that I have some het stories, or het pairings in multypairing stories. But the only time I had to write about developing het relationship was in a Gwen/Hart bdsm-done-wrong!story, which doesn't quite qualify as experience in writing het.

But do I really have to have experience in writing het? I discovered that it is easier to me to think about the stories if I forget that the characters are of different sex, because then, I plan it like a slash story. On the other hand, being male and female is an important part of their personalities and their dynamic, and I know it. Alex/Gene won't be the same if Alex were male, it would be more like Sam/Gene. Prentiss/Hotch has tons of additional bits to it because of Prentiss being female - a possibility of pregnancy, Hotch's distrust to women...

On the other hand, it makes it all the more interesting. I'm working on my own internalized prejudice this last year - misogyny and heterophobia, among other things - and writing het would be a very useful experience. (I already tried my hand in writing femslash, and made a good job with it in PWP, though now I want to write some long story with adventures and character development and relationship development.)

Comments

[milkymoon]

It's pretty interesting how romantic dynamics can be affected by the genders of your characters. I personally don't write fan fiction, but I do occasionally write fiction with romantic overtones, and I find writing het love stories different from writing gay or lesbian ones. (I tend to gravitate towards writing lesbian characters, mostly because there's just something about writing two women.)

[svollga]

Yes, they are affected, and it is very interesting! There are things that are problematic in one case but not in the other - the most obvious and often addressed are pregnancy in one case and homophobia in the other.
I found female characters different fpr a long time mostly because I had this not-quite-conscious idea that 'female' must be something special, and this something I don't get. It took me a long time to understand that female characters are as different and unique as male, and this special thing does not exist.
I plan to write femslash to have an experience in writing about two women and their dynamics! For now, it's not even a draft but already feels fascinating.

[ellia]

I don't think you need experience in writing het, if you've got a story you want to tell then go for it. It can be hard to move out of your writing comfort zone, when i first started writing fic, i kept away from het and femmeslash, because i found myself putting too much of myself into the female characters, and ending up with them feeling too personal. I'm trying to move past that now i'm a little more confident in my writing, and am hoping to write at least a couple of femmeslash and het fics for kink_bingo this year. I'll be interested in hearing how yours works out, i love reading about the way people write.

[svollga]

Yes, comfort zone is problematic sometimes. I don't put myself into any of my characters (or rather, I put parts of myself into any character whose PoV I'm writing, but it's not obvious), but I find het dynamic laced with social issues I know mostly in theory (I haven't been in het relationship since teen years, and most of my friends are queer in same-sex relationship). I keep thinking that I might forget something important (like contraception).

I signed up for kink_bingo, too! :)

[ellia]

kink_bingo is fun, and it's so low pressure it doesn't stress me out like some challenges.