Fic questions meme

[john_amend_all]

Memed from auroracloud:

Pick a question and ask me - and copy the questions to your own journal if you feel like it!

1. What made you start writing fanfic?
2. Which of your own fanfics have you reread the most?
3. Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.
4. Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?
5. You've posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you'd written it?
6. Name three stories you found easy to write.
7. Name three stories you found difficult to write.
8. What's your ratio of hits to kudos?
9. What do your fic bookmarks say about you?
10. What's a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?
11. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?
12. For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?
13. Name three favorite characters to write.
14. You're applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?
15. Question of your choice!

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

1 & 2?

[john_amend_all]

What made you start writing fanfic?

This Time Round, principally. It being a shared Universe with a low barrier to entry, it was a good starting point for an aspiring fanwriter: a toybox with all the toys, so to speak. And the Storytime setting provides a library of existing plots to act as the backbone of a fic.

I think you have to take some of the blame credit, too; without your encouragement and feedback I'd probably never have got beyond the occasional drabble.

Which of your own fanfics have you reread the most?

Looking at my works, it seems to correspond pretty much to length — if I sort my fics in decreasing order of length, most of the fics on that page are ones I've reread. The winner is probably Ac Velut in Somnis.

As for why I do it — for the most part, I write (or should that be 'wrote'?) fanfic to get stories I want(ed) to read. So if I still want to reread them, hopefully they fulfil that criterion. I've sometimes wished I could drink from the Lethe-like fountain mentioned in The Great Divorce, to see if I'd still like the stories if I didn't know I'd written them, but that's a bit beyond current science.

[thisbluespirit]

I think you have to take some of the blame credit, too; without your encouragement and feedback I'd probably never have got beyond the occasional drabble.

Aw, my pleasure! I was more than repaid even with the Storytime Hamlet alone! ;-)

I've sometimes wished I could drink from the Lethe-like fountain mentioned in The Great Divorce, to see if I'd still like the stories if I didn't know I'd written them, but that's a bit beyond current science.

I also think counting on something like that to only take the memory of the fic sounds chancy. I forget enough else as it is!

[liadt]

No 4?

[john_amend_all]

Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?

I've just reread Holding the Baby, which I wrote ~11 years ago, to see if I'd do it any differently if I was doing it today. And... well, this comes back to the rereading question. Because I know I wrote it, I can't really imagine it any other way than it currently is. Except perhaps for changes in the formatting (these days I'd put blank lines between paragraphs or use <p> tags).

I think such changes as there have been are more related to the content of the fics than prose style (eg, countenancing 'ships I'd never have considered when I started writing, or fandoms I hadn't heard of at the time).

[liadt]

I agree the formatting isn't the prettiest.

[john_amend_all]

It reads better in the original ASCII; the HTML conversion has stripped out all the indentations at the start of paragraphs.