OK, there’s one more thing I want to think about. My decision to damned well write some original fic this year. I decided to do a Season 2 of TD *because* I had already made up my mind to do the original fic.
Problem is, while I’m getting plot bunnies for TD 2.01, I am coming up empty with the original fic. I feel like I did when I was a teenager–a writing urge but nothing to say. No story bumping at my mind demanding its voice. Well, no specific story.
One of the exercises I’m doing to get my mind thinking along those lines is isolating the themes that really speak to me in movies I like (since I’m cleaning up my VHS movie collection). Themes are big with me, that’s what TD taught me. I need to explore themes that really speak to me through fiction. In the case of TD, they’re Identity. Family. Being different, and accepting your difference. Fuckupedness and the journey to wholeness.
The latter of which makes me suspect…Connor is currently filling that space that Valerie filled a few years back. My poetry girl.
And who am I as a writer without that muse? I thought Terri from GS was stepping into that space–god knows I’ve been writing her story in my head during the past few years. She emerged out of GS, like Valerie emerged out of MR when neither story started out to be about them.
And of course Noel still speaks. And Tricia. There *is* energy behind these characters. I can feel it. And yet I’m afraid that if I start writing them, I’ll just have the L-Word in Space again. Dykes to Watch Out For on a university campus.
What was once my niche, or seemed it–the lesbian soap-opera–has been finally filled with popular entertainment. Who thought we’d see the day?
I.don’t.want.to.write.that.
And yet I fear I can’t write anything else.
And why should it matter what I write? Because in the back of my mind is a voice that says, this time it’s for real. This time you will try to get it published. So it can’t be cliche.
And maybe that’s what’s really keeping me from getting started. When I started MR, it was just for fun. I could write anything I wanted because it was just for me and no one was ever going to see it except for me. It didn’t have to say anything profound, it could be full of my personal kinks, it was For Fun. And I didn’t, *didn’t, DIDN’T call it a “novel.”
No wonder I’m stymied. Everyone expects a writer to be published. *I* expect to be published. Or at least, they expect a writer to be read. We all know how knowing something will be read can stymie stymie me. Not necessarily–I worked through that in TD quite successfully. But then, I knew it was nothing more than fan fic. Not to go beyond the internet home it has. And so within the constraints of character and canon, I could play. Explore and weave in myth. Come up with my own wrinkles on Jossverse metaphysics and monsters. Realize as best I could the portrait of someone else’s characters and world.
But it’s time to stop copying the Mona Lisa and paint a painting from scratch. And I stand poised before a blank canvas with classic writer’s block. What does an artist do? S/he experiments, I suppose. Painting and sketching a dozen little things until something grabs her.
Eww…drabbles? Short stories? Ewww…give me a broader canvas!!!
So…what? Back to basics, *my basics*, back to it’s just a story a personal entertainment only I get to decide where it goes it’s not a novel it’s playing. Fine, except, how do I erase that voice that says, “don’t start this unless it’s going somewhere ultimately *novelish*.”
Fuckety, fuck, fuck. How to *not* take myself seriously?
ETA: It’s interesting. As I’m mulling over possible themes and story ideas in my mind, I keep coming back to the theme of isolation, disconnection, as a place where the story starts, and the story is about connecting again.
You can’t escape yourself, can you?
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 