I hear you.  BABIEZ!!!!fic is as annoying to me as arbitrary saccharine endings.  (Or arbitrary anything, really.) That's not to say that babies and happy endings never happen, it's just that I dislike either of them being used as an excuse for NOT having a well-thought out plot or character motivation. 

There's a reason my sig line* says what it does at the bottom of my posts: above all, I believe fic–any fic–has to make sense.  If you make it senseless, you run the risk of losing your audience because they cannot comprehend what you're trying to say.  If that happens, you've failed to communicate and stories are about communication:  of an idea, of a principle, of a mirror held up to real life.  If you cannot do that, you haven't achieved anything but a waste of the reader's time.

That's not to say that all fic has to be High Art or be Deeply Meaningful.  It just has to make enough sense to forge a connection with the reader.  The reader has to identify with or recognize SOMETHING in your fic, whether it be comedy or tragedy, important or trivial.  In short, try not to lose sight of the human condition, the things that are universally recognized because they are what make us human.  It matters not what genre you're writing in, or what point in history you currently reside or what culture you're from: no matter what time you're from, no matter where you live or where you go, you cannot escape being human. 

I try to remember that when I write.  Shakespeare was a master at it.  So were many others whose work we were required to read in school.  And give it a few years–there are people alive and writing today who will or have already achieved that status.  I doubt I will ever be counted among them, but I can still strive for that same quality.  If it leads to writing better stories, that's a solid win.  If it leads to failure, at least I will have put in the practice and learned from it.  Still a win in my book.

I guess this is just a long-winded way of saying I dislike stories with easy endings and predictable plots.  I expect more out of myself as a writer and I sure as hell expect more out of authors as a reader. 

Does anyone out there feel the same way?  I'd be interested in hearing you weigh in on the issue.


*My sig line on that forum reads: It's no surprise truth is stranger than fiction.  Fiction has to make sense.

As to the claim “It's just fanfic…” it really tears my ass when that phrase is used to justify sloppy thinking, sloppy research or just plain sloppiness overall.  If I had a dollar for every fan fic writer I'd seen on the internet trot out that phrase as justification for a glaring continuity error or out-of-character actions or sheer unbelievability, I could afford a top-of-the-line computer with all the bells and whistles that could probably write my fic for me.  Like a joke that falls flat, justifying badly executed fic by saying it's 'just' fanfic only gives the medium a bad reputation.  Furthermore, it trivializes the dedication serious writers devote to it. 

Make no mistake, for those of us who love writing, writing is an act of devotion.  Because it's a communicative art, it's also an act of faith in the readers' intelligence and goodwill when you share it.  Sharing it becomes an implicit contract to respect others and deliver a decent product. Posting badly written fic reflects not only badly on you as a writer, it's an insult to your audience and a diservice to all.  Please understand, I'm not talking about people at the beginning of the learning curve of the craft, I'm talking about people who are capable of doing better and blowing off their obligations as a writer out of expediency or sheer laziness.  It's people like these that make me wonder why they write at all if they are not willing to put in the effort to turn out something that reflects their abilities.  To say nothing of their potential.

If you're writing fan fic and posting it, it's because you love it and want to share your product with other people with the intention (one can fervently hope) to entertain them.  Art comes into its own when it is shared with others–as a form of communication and a thing of beauty, it best serves its purpose if it's seen by someone other than its creator and as such, it behooves the creator to make the artwork as best as he or she can.  That way the message of the piece comes through and can be appreciated.  It is ultimately less satisfying to everyone if the audience consistently 'doesn't get it' when it comes to the artist's work, and history is rife with instances when the audience is blamed for being too dense to appreciate the form when the fault lies in the artist's execution.  'Fine Art' galleries are crammed with examples of this.  I hope that fan fic can escape this outcome and while there are bajillions of badfic out there, there are enough writers producing enough good fic that there's still hope for the genre as a lasting literary art form, instead of being a fad like platform disco shoes and mullet hair-dos.

Furthermore, I think that there's a little bit of a performer in all people who create, whether they're creating paintings or sculpture, film or music, poetry or prose.  How else can you explain the proliferation of boards like this one?  And sites like LJ and DeviantArt and MySpace and all the rest of it? We do it because we love it, but we also love it when others see it and tell us what they think or liked about it.  If we're lucky, they'll give us money afterwards, too.  Even so, if your art is your avocation, you'd do it for the love of it and not the money, but no matter what, if you're going to show it to others, have the professional pride of the art and of the self to show your best. 

As for pride, the debate as to how much is too much and how little is false modesty….well, I am not sure I'm up to tackling that one.  LOL.  But I would be interested in taking part in that discussion, should anyone decide to take it on.

As for sex being hard to write…well, it is and it isn't.  It's hard if you don't have a very clear idea or goal for the sex in the first place and before you laugh your head off over the apparently obvious goal of sex, please let me explain what I mean.

Just like any other human endeavor, sex can be frivolous or it can have meaning.  Certainly a good portion of the human race came about through pursuit of the former over the latter, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about.  If you have a very clear idea why your characters are engaging in sex, it's easier to write.  You know what they're going to do, how they're going to do it, what they prefer when they do it and so on.  Speaking strictly for myself, if I don't have a good compelling reason for the sex, everything I try to write falls flat.  (No pun intended)  It just doesn't work.

Your mileage may vary as to what constitutes a good compelling reason, as would the reader's.  As a writer, there's an element of selling the reason, of making it believable and the best way to do that is to know your characters forwards and backwards, or at least know the reason for doing it forwards and backwards.  It also helps if you respect your characters and what they're doing and why.  Lack of respect is a key element of bad sex in real life and I find it's no different in fiction, either.  If you respect your characters' integrity and feelings for sex, you can sell it to the audience more effectively.  And show some class as a human being at the same time.  Again, speaking strictly from my own personal experience, I cannot effectively sell anything I cannot respect, whether it's vacuum cleaners or top-shelf margaritas or a home-delivery freezer service.  Nope.  Nyet, nein, nada.  I don't even try.  Writing sex scenes falls into that same category–I have to respect it and the characters in order to sell it.

And really, once you've done that, the hard part is over.  That's because anyone who's actually engaged in it knows how sex works.  LOL. There's no reason to bog the reader down with excruciating detail as to what went where or how fast or how hard or how soft.  Writing sex erotically is often more an exercise in economy with words, rather than profligacy.  Again, for the reader who's experienced sex in person, they can fill in the details to their own satisfaction far better than the writer can….and leaving the reader the room to do so makes the experience a tailor-made one, rather than a trite cliche that bores them silly. 

I mean, really.  Which would you rather read?  A laundry list of heaving bosoms and molded thighs and hyperbolic climaxes? Or something you can make up for yourself that's uniquely your own?  As the justifiably famous burlesque great Gypsy Rose Lee once said: “The trick is not to be naked, but to think naked.”
 

Maybe it's the writer in me that dislikes being spoonfed sex and instead insists on taking over the wheel.  LOL.  Certainly I've read published fiction where the sex scenes were so heavy-handed in execution that I just want to whip out my red pen and edit it right there on the page.  Or throw the book across the room.  Sometimes it's a crapshoot.

Of course, I understand there are people out there who just love that sort of detail.  For them, there's plenty out there to choose from.  I just happen not to be one of them, either as a consumer or a provider.  That's just the way it is.

***

If anyone on my flist has an opinion on this, please feel free to comment.  That's why I cross posted it here.  I'm interested in what you have to say.
 

After a rather busy spring and summer, I've finally dug out from under and realized I'd been away for way too long.  Also?  I can't seem to read my Flist past a month's worth of backlog.  (If anyone can help me access entries from farther back, I'd be in your debt.)

What kept me away? 

First:  Raleigh CSTS--which was a success, despite my silly paranoid fears of screwing it up royally-- raised $5,342.27 (Equality Now = $4,647.27, Kids Need to Read = $695.50) for the cause(s).  My heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone who helped--all my crew who worked so hard, and the theatre who graciously waived the site fee--and also to everyone who bought tickets and raffled for swag and showed up in costume and made the event the fun evening it was. 

Thank you: You know who you are.

Second: my kids were home from school for the summer and despite the fact that I'd got my butt away from my laptop and registered them for 4 (non-consecutive) weeks of theatre camp, there were still plenty of days where I had to leave the house with them to find stuff for them to do.  Unlooked-for benefit: I've discovered that, yes, my oldest daughter is responsible enough to a) go to the corner store or to her friend's house across the street from it without me as escort, and b) she can actually be left at home to look after her little brother without killing him so I can get an errand or two done.  Needless to say, I'm OMG grateful that the world isn't as full of pedophile kidnappers as I thought in Case A, above, and I'm OMG annoyed  that in Case B, that I didn't remember babysitting at almost-twelve wasn't as fraught with life-and-death when I did it as I imagine it would be today.  No doubt it's all the fault of my paranoia over Case A.   Needless to say, it was a somewhat lucrative summer for my oldest, because she didn't watch her little brother for free.

Third: I've become an RPG hermit.  Alas, I used to laugh internally at people who would spend 72 hours straight gaming over the weekend, whether it be D&D or Amber or whatever, and then complain they have no life.  Only now I look at myself and realize that I've become just that person....only I do that peculiar brand of insanity for 7 x 24hrs a week.  I'm literally at my keyboard every day writing up SOMETHING:  synopses for the two games I'm in--though the weekly-like-clockwork-on-Tuesdays game is the main instigator of this--and when I'm not doing synopses, I'm doing game-related fic, or game-related drawing or game-related Photoshop.  And that's not to count the time I'm trying to plot my sadly-stalled OC Firefly fan fic.  (More on that in a moment...)

Fourth: Photoshop.  I was finally stationary long enough for the PS bug to bite me.  Actually, it took buying a new laptop the first week in May, one that I specifically chose for its processor and graphics card (both of which were beefy to handle those really processor-hoggy computer games that everyone plays these days), all the better to run Photoshop, which was giving my beloved old laptop hives as it progressed in its age.  See, I have the idea that I can learn to paint with the program on my computer using my WACOM tablet.  I'm teaching myself how to do it.  It's slow going.  And OMG, there is a ton of stuff online to lure me away from the drawing board and just veg out in front of my laptop monitor, watching tutorials on *how* to do stuff, instead of just *doing* the stuff.  But I'm improving.

Five: My fic is finally coming together.  Funny how getting a white board has helped.  I got the idea from watching an episode of Castle (more on that in a minute...), seeing how both the writer and the homicide detective have a board where they pin up the facts and start looking for connections.  I've said for years that I suck at big-picture sussing, but I'm a whiz at the close-up details.  Why?  I finally figured it out--I'm nearsighted as hell and it affects my thinking.  If  you can shrink the big picture until it's the size of a 2 x 3 foot postcard, all of a sudden, I can see all the pieces of the puzzle and suss where they're supposed to fit, BECAUSE everything fits into my field of vision.  Literally. 

I shit you not.

The effect is quite like what happens when I stand on a chair in my kitchen and suddenly realize I can see the *tops* of things.  Which happens when you're short like me.  I can see things like my counters all the way to the back splash.  (Dude, there's a head of garlic behind my utensil can that could date from the Pharoahs.) Or the top of my fridge. (Dust bunnies, begone!)  I can feel my brain shifting inside my skull to accomodate the info the new sight-angle creates.

That's my whiteboard working on my fic.  It's in my head.  I just have to type it out.  As soon as I can stay awake for it, which leads to...

Six: I'm dogmeat tired. 

It wasn't enough that summer vacation with the kids led me to stay up regularly til 2-3AM in the mornings because all three of us could sleep til 10AM, which I'll readily admit is the hour I finally feel human no matter how conventionally diurnal I happen to be.  It wasn't enough that my husband got called out to California on a business trip of 10 days and decided to have us come with....and get back less than 48 hours before the kids started back to school.  It wasn't enough that my kids are going to two different schools this year due to their age difference.

OH NO.

No, I had to settle down in a county that has a seriously f*cked up bussing policy and a serious lack of busses to handle the student load and having found out that my daughter's middle school--a hard-to-get-into academically challenging magnet school--required her to get out and wait for the bus to pick her up at 05:45hrs in the frikkin' morning, I in my infinite wisdom resolved to DRIVE her to school at a more reasonable hour, thereby letting her gain an hour and a half more precious sleep than she'd otherwise get, while going without an hour of it on my side of the ledger.

Furthermore, after dropping her off on the other side of town, I race back to make breakfast for my youngest and get him off to school less than two miles away, on time.  Because HIS bus requires him to get out on the curb before I even get him up in the morning. 

Now, I can hear fellow LJer cesario and my friend Kim (who strangely enough is related to my husband from way back in the 1600s) snorting and rolling their eyes at me.  I know both of them endured insane bus schedules during their school years and all I can say is, I'm sorry they did.  And because I have the car and the gas to drive both my kids in separate trips to school in the mornings, I will do it to avoid encouraging such insane bussing schedules by making use of them.  It's bad enough that I have no real affordable alternative to public school--my household makes too much money for government assistance and not enough money to send my children to private school (where they don't have to jump through the hoops that public ones do).  Neither do I have the brain cells and the emotional fortitude to homeschool my children: if I did it, I would go insane.  Since poverty and insanity do not a stable homelife make, homeschooling and private school are not options I can take advantage of.

So, I'm tired and the minute I take care of the breakfast dishes and dump a load of laundry in the washer, I head upstairs for an hour's nap that somehow has managed for nearly two weeks turn into a slumber of 3 hours.  Why?  Because I'm still on West Coast Time.  Check the time stamp on this post if you doubt me.

And that, my friends, means when I AM awake, very little time is actually devoted to writing in the daylight hours.  Which is really when I get the best stuff done. And because I'm not getting the writing done, I'm getting more and more bitchy from the itch to write that's going unscratched. 

Bright side?  I've rediscovered coffee.  With a dollop of something alcoholic to fast-track the caffeine into my system on the mornings I'm exceptionally rocky, I can at least stay awake til noon before needing that nap.  And there's another bright thing on the horizon to look forward to.

To wit: Season Two of Castle and the release of the Season One DVDs is coming...in a little over two weeks..  I was curious about the series when I heard Nathan Fillion would star in it, and I gave it an hour of my time when it premiered.  I initially had mixed feelings about it, because though I liked the female lead, Beckett, I found Fillion's Castle to be annoyingly boyish and smug.  Luckily, I liked it enough to watch it a second time and was able to see with some relief that the writers gave Castle a serious side.  And that was the end of that: I became a Castle fan.  And wonder of wonders, we were given a show starring Fillion that didn't get cancelled but got picked up for a second season.  I'm glad I was able to redeem myself after having foolishly ignored Firefly during its maiden voyage on the airwaves.  Unlike with Firefly, this time I did see the premiere episode and this time I did understand it was worth watching.  Needless to say, I've subscribed to the Castle online forums on ABC's website, and what do you know, there's a fan fic thread there.... 

Imagine that. 

I might conclude that I will fail my save, botch my roll, and end up getting sucked into writing Castle fan fic.... unless I get off my ass and bury myself into my own OC fic again.  My ass is buried enough already, but I'm looking to dig it just a little more deeper.  My fic is getting insistent about it.  And I miss having the long conversations with my characters like I used to.  (Make of that what you will...)

But it's a close call.  Hulu.com has Castle eps loaded online and I find them curiously compelling viewing.  However, given my image-junkieness, it's never long before looking leads to wanting, and wanting means doing up some Photoshoppery.  Luckily (or unluckily, as you like it) Hulu.com is my friend only so far as I can take somewhat unsatisfying screen caps of the episodes for Photoshop shenannigans.  Why do I say somewhat unsatisfying? Because there is no single-frame-advance button available online. Which, let me tell you, is crucial for capturing just the right frame for just the right PS project.   So the possibility that I'll squander hours and hours has been lessened to just hours as I try to capture just the right frame.  My impatience with the online controls at Hulu.com preclude my being sucked in completely--no matter what Alec Baldwin and Dennis Leary would have you believe.

Which means I'm actually free to visit my sadly-neglected LJ again.  But mostly, it's my fic and my stupid sleep rhythms that have made it nigh unto impossible to devote my time to LJ like I used to. Which, if you've known me for a while, was never really assiduoulsy done in the past anyway.

And now it's 03:00hrs again and I can look forward to sleeping in come the morrow.  I wonder which kid or cat or gerbil or early-rising chatterbox of a bird is going to thwart that cunning plan for me....?