Fluffy Promptables

[scribblemyname]

We're prompting fluffy, lighthearted stuff of any variety, no canon/pairing/character information required, though permitted.

Comments

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

I guess saying that people didn't want to see it was wrong, but... it just makes it all a very pointless exercise. I've basically wasted years now, and all this time I thought I wasn't, that I was doing something productive with my time, I wasn't. And I not only wasted my time but everyone else's. It would have been better to never have written at all. I've made such a mess of everything.

[scribblemyname]

It would have been better to never have written at all.

On this point, I disagree. It would have been better to decide up front whether you preferred the give and take of reader involvement, engagement, and interpretation or the ability to control the material and feel comfortable with the world you created being exactly what you would have that world be.

Even as a reader, you seem to prefer things nailed down solid. Reading and writing interactively is not nailed down solid. You have a few options, but they are all fairly mutually exclusive:

1. Write and throw your work out to the void without ever, ever considering how people receive it. This is sort of the compromise, but it requires more resolve than I possess.

2. Write for yourself and don't share your work so you don't get it all mucked up in other people's expectations and interpretations.

3. Write for yourself and enjoy/thrive on the interaction with your work and other's interpretations thereof.

4. Write for others and enjoy/thrive on the interaction with your work and other's interpretations thereof.

I vary it up, but I'm a serious 3 and 4 for the most part. I am extremely protective of my canon, but I have room to love things outside my canon, so I'm never threatened by them. Canon is mine. I might gift a change to canon, but that's it, e.g. letting Shift marry Kilter in the end instead of letting her marry someone else before she gets there.

So when I don't think you wasted your time; I just think you have to pick an approach because you can't create a safe personal writing space then allow others who aren't "safe" inside without it getting gunked up. But again, all that's predicated on an educated guess: the idea that writing is something you used as a safe space.

The only solution I have to regain a safe space is to kick everybody else out of it. The only solution I have to keeping them in it is to find another safe space. I think the angst you've been feeling is that you want both: the safe space where you put it in the first place and the other people, so neither solution sounds appealing.


Let me add this: my writing got pretty bogged down when I allowed anyone physically near to me inside the space I wrote it in. I had to kick everybody out or I couldn't write. At all.

Fandom is safe space for me. Liana Mir is safe space for me. There's only certain people in this space and if anyone comes in that puts me on edge again, I kick them out and carve out that space again.

I don't think you have a lot of safe people. I don't think you're as comfortable with room for interpretation as I am. I think your safe space would just need to be smaller.

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

Choosing option two is wasting everyone's time, since I supposedly was going to publish and make it a part of my financial income instead of just a hobby. I got a website and had covers made, and if two was what I wanted, I shouldn't have done any of that.

I spent years in that path, not sharing anything with anyone, not people close to me or far away.

Then I started in fanfiction, that I shared, and it taught me a few things, but it put me into other people's worlds and things I knew better than to write about, but I didn't care because I was in a place where sharing my writing seemed like a good thing. Until I realized not only that I was writing against my own beliefs, I was doing it in part to get reviews. I did not think I was, wasn't one of those fanfic writers that held stories for ransom until they got reviews, but the way I reacted when I felt a story was getting ignored or when I had a bad review is not something I am proud of.

When I went into writing original fiction, I found I had almost no audience at all, and it was frustrating, but I thought it in some ways better that I didn't.

I thought I was chucking at least book 3 out there in accord with number one, same with my stubborn insistence on posting serials or snippets even after I left the few writing communities I'd tried and failed to join.

That didn't work, either.

I don't see how I can thrive on other people's interactions with my stuff. It isn't healthy for me. It puts too much of my happiness in other's hands, for one, but I also don't have all that many people to share with, and most of them don't have the time to read as much as I can write.

I don't have anyone to kick out of my space, either. I lost the twins in December, another friend a few months before that, and so I have a grand total of four people that see my stuff: you, my best friend (only one story there,) my mother, and one other girl who has seen a couple stories.

I know I'm not comfortable with interpretation. I have a lot of squiks, a lot of lines I don't want crossed, and I have also in the back of my head not wanting to stumble anyone else with what I've written.

I don't see anything to clear out, and I don't know how I could isolate myself more than I already have. *shrugs*

[scribblemyname]

This is what I meant: you seem to want an audience but are uncomfortable with an audience and it's implications.

When I say safe space, I'm not talking about proximity. I'm talking about control. A safe space is controlled by you. My safe spaces play by my rules and only have people affecting how I emotionally feel about that space who are playing by the same rules.

Very few people in this world relatively speaking play by the rules you do with reading and writing because you nail things down and that makes it comfortable and okay for you, but the world of reading/writing in general plays by the rules of the author writes what they intend, let it loose, and then it's no holds barred what the world does to it in return.

It's your vocabulary, your genre, your being closed to interpretation... You want the audience but you want it on your terms, which means you were right that publishing isn't the right world for you, and I was wrong. Publishing is on the reader's terms and no two ways about that. You have to be willing to write, resolve, and cede control to the reader. If your writing gives you the ability to control a world into something comfortable, then you need to keep that control, not give it away.

Fandom probably worked pretty well for you WHILE it worked because it's on the author's terms, which is why it's sacred, safe space for me even when my nerves are shot and I'm nothing but a big, huge scream that can't write an original fiction word to save my life. I write it when I need to put things back on MY terms.

I hope that makes sense.

I hope that makes clear why I said if you want the audience but you're not comfortable with it, then I don't have a solution because the two approaches are mutually exclusive and that's probably why this has all been so frustrating for you.

If there's anything you ever figure that I can actually DO to help, just let me know. I can't think of anything now.

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

I don't think there is anything.

I don't think there is a viable way to make what I have and what I did work, and I don't see any way of continuing on as I have.

It doesn't work. I never did, and I do still think it would have been better not to write because it has distorted my path too much and it so much a part of me that i don't know how to separate it, but it seems the only way to move on and get out of this rut is to let it go.

[scribblemyname]

All things considered though, if you're looking for something to replace writing with, you might consider something that gives you control. I hate the phrase, but for lack of a better one, some people call writing "playing God." I'd look for something with that kind of offering, something that lets you set the rules as easily as writing does.

For me, it was graphics for a while. I'm good at those, so it worked for me for a little bit until I got the itch in my blood for words again. I know you've been having a hard time figuring out what to displace the writing with.

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

I never considered writing as a means of control and when people brought up that phrase of playing God, it made me want to quit I found it that offensive. I was never trying to compete with God when I wrote. I was a documentary maker at best, along for the ride as an observer and nothing more.

When I discussed giving up writing before, the challenge was finding something that occupies my mind when I'm doing it. Most of the other things don't engage my brain enough. And I'm not an artist. It just frustrates me to see my lack of skill and inability to translate the images in my head to paper when I draw. So I can't see art as a viable alternative. I can shut down or divert my brain with video games or puzzles, but I have to have something that occupies it to maintain interest for more than a few obsessive hours.

There really isn't anything in the world quite like writing, so I don't see myself replacing it any time soon.

[scribblemyname]

For the record, I did mention I hate the phrase. I just couldn't figure out a quicker shorthand.

And I wasn't recommending art, just mentioning that I used it for a while. Though graphic art. Can't draw to save my life.

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

I know. I'm just saying I never consciously thought of writing as a means of control. It's dismaying on many levels to find that's what I have been doing because I really do hate the idea of playing God.

I only ever really did graphic art for my fandoms, and I sucked at it, too. There's a reason I have a cover artist. I wish art was a viable option, but it isn't. That's part of why writing is so soul destroying. There's nothing like it. There are creative endeavors like art or making things (sewing, crafting, etc,) but there isn't the same level of mental challenge in those things for me (or there is too much challenge on the physical side in art's case.)

So I don't really have anything that interests me like writing, and since there really is no safe place in this world, there isn't much point in trying to use something else to create that. I don't know why I bothered doing it with writing.