a paradigm shift, or two dudes in bed
Jul. 29th, 2015 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
veronica_richOne of the first romance novels I found in Grandma's bookshelves when I was about 11 or 12 was titled "Captain's Woman." It featured all the best tropes: girl forced to live as a boy to please a cold grandmother for an inheritance flees home at 17 and stows away aboard a pirate ship as the cabin boy, is found out by the captain to be female, they fight for a while and then embark on a torrid affair, he casts her aside for her own good, she becomes a real pirate, they meet again, blah blah. She was a fiery emerald-eyed redhead, he was a devilishly handsome rogue. Because why not.
This wouldn't be the last pirate romance I'd read, or the last pirate history book. I was sort of put off the pirate romance genre a few years later, though, when I came across a novel in which the pirate captain blatantly forces himself on the heroine ... and she later falls in love with and "tames" him. I found the whole thing so repugnant that I didn't even finish the book and decided the bad taste in my brain was a sign to move on to better romance writers like Jennifer Crusie.
It was over a decade later when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie hit theaters. My interest in the A-Team fandom was waning - as inevitably happens with all my fandoms; it's not their fault - and I was ready for something new. Before getting into watching reruns of the A-Team in 2000, when I watched something with two same-sex characters who seemed to give off a vibe that was not quite friendly, not quite platonic, I'd chalked it up to my imagination and ignored it, probably because I was raised in a very heteronormative atmosphere and hadn't really learned to look beyond that (though Xena and Gabrielle sure did test it in the 90s). But by the time I watched Jack Sparrow and Will Turner sparring and arguing and cursing, I was willing to engage in some fanciful imagining for the sake of fandom fun.
Starting to write m/m romance and sex was strange for a couple of reasons. First off were the pronouns - "she" and "he" are relatively easy, but "he" and "he" are trickier, and it's repetitive to constantly be using the names. As verboten as the practice of using "the tall one" and "the older one" and other descriptors is in writing, I can understand why slash writers use the convention - they're looking for another way to say "Jack and Mack boned" without having to use the names all the time.
Second is trying to adjust your thinking about romance and gender. If most of the male-female romantic interactions you've read have adhered to a mostly traditional Western gender-dictated roles paradigm, there's a tendency to want to slot your two characters into that template, no matter how "off" or unsuitable it might be for those characters. Writing two men getting ready to fuck forced me, over time, to question why males are often written a certain way and why females are written another way, and to experiment with it in different stories - both slash and het stories I wrote as I went on. It forced me, at least, to think more about the characters themselves and how they might react in the situations I was writing, and to each other.
But, lest I fall into the trap of overstating the importance or role of slash in modern fandom, let's be clear: I saw two characters interacting well onscreen and I wanted to get them together for sexytimes. We're not talking about Proust or Tolstoy here. There are plenty of excellent fanfic writers who deal exclusively or mainly in het or gen stories, who have found a way to question notions of what's traditional or trope, and rise above it (which I am not suggesting I do at all). I've known a few fanfic writers personally who went from fandom to regular paid publishing, and there are a number of well-known authors who have proudly admitted to writing fanfic either in the past or even currently. One whose name doesn't seem to come up much now is Peter David, whose TNG, Star Trek: New Frontier, and other books I read voraciously through the 90s and into the current millennium - he's a fanboy-made-good on the publishing front.
So, I guess this raises another dilemma for a lot of fanfic writers who have also harbored dreams of being A Real Author someday and haven't achieved it (including yours truly): What is the value of writing all that fanfic, anyhow?
This wouldn't be the last pirate romance I'd read, or the last pirate history book. I was sort of put off the pirate romance genre a few years later, though, when I came across a novel in which the pirate captain blatantly forces himself on the heroine ... and she later falls in love with and "tames" him. I found the whole thing so repugnant that I didn't even finish the book and decided the bad taste in my brain was a sign to move on to better romance writers like Jennifer Crusie.
It was over a decade later when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie hit theaters. My interest in the A-Team fandom was waning - as inevitably happens with all my fandoms; it's not their fault - and I was ready for something new. Before getting into watching reruns of the A-Team in 2000, when I watched something with two same-sex characters who seemed to give off a vibe that was not quite friendly, not quite platonic, I'd chalked it up to my imagination and ignored it, probably because I was raised in a very heteronormative atmosphere and hadn't really learned to look beyond that (though Xena and Gabrielle sure did test it in the 90s). But by the time I watched Jack Sparrow and Will Turner sparring and arguing and cursing, I was willing to engage in some fanciful imagining for the sake of fandom fun.
Starting to write m/m romance and sex was strange for a couple of reasons. First off were the pronouns - "she" and "he" are relatively easy, but "he" and "he" are trickier, and it's repetitive to constantly be using the names. As verboten as the practice of using "the tall one" and "the older one" and other descriptors is in writing, I can understand why slash writers use the convention - they're looking for another way to say "Jack and Mack boned" without having to use the names all the time.
Second is trying to adjust your thinking about romance and gender. If most of the male-female romantic interactions you've read have adhered to a mostly traditional Western gender-dictated roles paradigm, there's a tendency to want to slot your two characters into that template, no matter how "off" or unsuitable it might be for those characters. Writing two men getting ready to fuck forced me, over time, to question why males are often written a certain way and why females are written another way, and to experiment with it in different stories - both slash and het stories I wrote as I went on. It forced me, at least, to think more about the characters themselves and how they might react in the situations I was writing, and to each other.
But, lest I fall into the trap of overstating the importance or role of slash in modern fandom, let's be clear: I saw two characters interacting well onscreen and I wanted to get them together for sexytimes. We're not talking about Proust or Tolstoy here. There are plenty of excellent fanfic writers who deal exclusively or mainly in het or gen stories, who have found a way to question notions of what's traditional or trope, and rise above it (which I am not suggesting I do at all). I've known a few fanfic writers personally who went from fandom to regular paid publishing, and there are a number of well-known authors who have proudly admitted to writing fanfic either in the past or even currently. One whose name doesn't seem to come up much now is Peter David, whose TNG, Star Trek: New Frontier, and other books I read voraciously through the 90s and into the current millennium - he's a fanboy-made-good on the publishing front.
So, I guess this raises another dilemma for a lot of fanfic writers who have also harbored dreams of being A Real Author someday and haven't achieved it (including yours truly): What is the value of writing all that fanfic, anyhow?
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no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 02:26 pm (UTC)1. First of all, I think the more you write the better you become. I'd written two books before I got into fandom and my writing now is SO MUCH better. Not that I couldn't have parlayed all that writing into actual novels, but I don't think that I would have benefitted as much, mostly because there are no financial goals here. If you write a piece of fanfiction and get some feedback great. If you write a novel that isn't well received, then it impacts your future goals in publishing. You might get dropped from your publishing house. Your agent might dump you. There are a host of things that can happen. In fanfiction, all you do is, well, have a reader walk away. So I do not consider those tens of thousands of words I have devoted to fanfiction a loss. I am a MUCH better writer now. I'm also a much better reader. Which, sadly, has affected how I read because so much of what is out there is total crap. Alas.
2. You build a community. I have lots of friends who are writers, but I wouldn't call them close friends. I have close friends from fandom. People that I fly across the country to see.
3. You can (I think this is changing, however) build a community of readers. Cassandra Clare built an entire market with her Draco triology. She could go to a publisher with her fantasy series and say, hey, I'm the most popular writer in the HP fandom. And, hello, book contract.
4. The most important, perhaps? It's fun!
no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 02:26 pm (UTC)1. First of all, I think the more you write the better you become. I'd written two books before I got into fandom and my writing now is SO MUCH better. Not that I couldn't have parlayed all that writing into actual novels, but I don't think that I would have benefitted as much, mostly because there are no financial goals here. If you write a piece of fanfiction and get some feedback great. If you write a novel that isn't well received, then it impacts your future goals in publishing. You might get dropped from your publishing house. Your agent might dump you. There are a host of things that can happen. In fanfiction, all you do is, well, have a reader walk away. So I do not consider those tens of thousands of words I have devoted to fanfiction a loss. I am a MUCH better writer now. I'm also a much better reader. Which, sadly, has affected how I read because so much of what is out there is total crap. Alas.
2. You build a community. I have lots of friends who are writers, but I wouldn't call them close friends. I have close friends from fandom. People that I fly across the country to see.
3. You can (I think this is changing, however) build a community of readers. Cassandra Clare built an entire market with her Draco triology. She could go to a publisher with her fantasy series and say, hey, I'm the most popular writer in the HP fandom. And, hello, book contract.
4. The most important, perhaps? It's fun!
no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-30 02:03 am (UTC)I was just reading several of your posts about fanfic writing, and you're completely right about creative enterprises for their own sake. It does NOT need to be "practice" for "real writing." However, I can see why it leads that way. People who find a pre-existing character or situation to be an inspiring prompt, and then find they have some success with it, may very well want to grow into writing original fiction (erotic or otherwise! fan of both). I can see how it might be a stepping stone. I have struggled with this a good deal myself. I grew up wanting to write my own stories, but wound up writing fanfic for a time, and then wanted to return to some of my own ideas.
And thank goodness for everyone who writes fanfic, so when I go searching on AO3 for something about whatever British tv show I've become obsessed with, someone has written a tasty little morsel for me to enjoy! :-)