the fandomless state

[cimorene]

I am in the habit of saying I've had writer's block since the 2016 election, because November 2016 was the last time I managed a daily writing routine and the last time I worked on a piece of writing regularly. I was so upset by the election result that I couldn't do anything creative for months, and by the time I could have the Penguins (NHL pro hockey team) had gone to the Trump White House and they all shook hands with him. I had been writing a silly telepathic AU but one of the protagonists was Sidney Crosby, and I couldn't bear to write it after that and didn't want to read any of it either.

There have been several times since then when I've tried to work on abandoned WIPs. I spent some hours over a few weeks trying to cut and paste bits of the hockey fic, trying to get a version I could publish without any RPF names (in this case because I refuse to associate myself with them, and not for any monetary reason), but I gave up because the connection to real events was too strong and I didn't want to end up with the equivalent of those films where they change one or two letters out of a well-known brand to make sure you know which one they mean. I was like, that's the whole POINT, that I don't WANT it to be about them, but the problem is that it was and they were recognizable, there are thousands of words' worth of WORK that went into making it recognizable, but I don't WANT to publish anything recognizably about them, so I guess I have to leave it in the trash. It's sad, though, because I was having a lot of fun with the telepathy stuff. I greatly enjoy both reading and writing deconstructions of popular fanon tropes that are typically written with the same poorly-thought-out logistical problems. The telepathy trend in hockey RPF was a prime candidate because I've always loved telepathy in fiction, going back to actual sff novels in my childhood.

Anyway, that wasn't the only time. I spent even longer trying to pick back up and work on a My Chemical Romance novel that I was about 50% done with in 2008, the last time I was writing really volubly and prolifically, a story that I lost the ability to finish when my support network of friends active in the fandom and talking about it and keeping all our fannish interest up sort of tapered away. (I think this was one of those periods when people were mad at various members of the band and there was lots of vagueblogging, but I could be misremembering.) This latter one was such an extreme AU that I'm confident it would totally work if I changed all the names and everything; but I have never managed to get back into a groove, or to really decide how to tackle the next act of the plot.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about these over the years since then, because although I am used to saying that I have writer's block, I think a lot of what's happening is actually a completely different problem: not having a fandom anymore. I have spent time reading in a lot of fandoms since 2008, but I have not felt excited to participate in an active community with other fans whom I want to share ideas with since then. It's not simply that I haven't had an idea for something to write, because that isn't really an insuperable barrier; phrasing it that way is, I think, a bit backwards; it's really that I can't get excited about taking part in the fanfiction conversation.

If there's a great body of fannish work stretching back years and I'm still really interested in all of it and I have a new idea, but it's basically a dead fandom that doesn't have other writers I'm excited about currently writing in it, then I'm not going to get excited about writing.

If I have a fantastic idea and I know for a fact that one of my best friends is interested, but there's literally no fandom and the only way anybody else will read it is if I manage to write it for Yuletide, then I'm not gonna get excited about writing it (uh, unless I get a chance to write it for Yuletide, I guess, but that would require me to sign up, and I have more and more trouble finding enough fandoms I can sign up for as time goes on).

If the canon is current and still updating and there's plenty of buzz, but there's only a tiny smattering of fanfiction, I'm not going to get excited about writing.

There has to be a COMMUNITY of writers having a conversation that I'd like to join in; it has to be more than just one or two, so that there's like a whole... pool of ideas in the shared universe that everybody is participating in. It usually seems to me that only a minority of fandoms are really active enough to describe this way, and the canon has to be exciting to me too. And also, these writers have to be people I want to enter a conversation with, which will not be the case if they're all posting WIPs with authors' notes about how they haven't bothered to get a beta or an American picker. More power to them, I guess, if they're enjoying fandom the way that feels good to them, but it's not a conversation I'm gonna be eager to join any more than a conversation about sports or the Bachelorette or where to buy vinyl records in Turku.

I suppose in theory the answer to all this might be to write something original instead, but they aren't really equivalent.

I have spent more and more time "without a fandom" as the years go by. Not even just not having a fandom to belong to, but not even having a fandom that I'm currently reading in: that is truly impoverished, from the point of view of me fifteen years ago. I can always find fanfiction to read - there's years' worth of stuff to reread out there! But you don't always want to reread things, either. (Maybe this is why I've spent so much time reading genres/bodies of work like vintage Golden Age murder mysteries and medieval romances.)

My wife has been watching the terrible US primetime soaps in the 911 franchise and reading that recently, and before that she was watching the terrible show Roswell: New Mexico, and in each case she started off by reading some random fiction and progressed to watching the show, but by the time I was desperate enough to have potentially considered reading some, I had had time to be put off permanently by seeing the show. In the case of 911, I've seen enough to say the shipping seems probably correct but I hate one of the characters too much to want nice things to happen to him. (I would probably have been fine if I read first, but too late.) She contends that the fandoms are fairly active and there's a good proportion of good fiction in them, but I suspect her standards are affected by shipper lenses. Also I might be more picky in general, although it's hard to say because I read things that I don't consider to be good on purpose, and enjoy them (just in a different way), whereas she tries to only read things that are mediocre or better, and likes to discover things by surfing around through bookmarks and rec lists to try to improve the odds. My habit, on the other hand, has always been kind of bottom-dredging - I used to call it archive-diving or fic-spelunking - combing through the archive myself with my chosen filters, scanning and discarding on the basis of headers. I usually find that a random rec list is no better than throwing a dart at a pile of fic; only recs from someone whose taste I have some reason to trust have a good enough success rate for me to spend time on them.

We were both really excited about Hannibal and Black Sails, and although I did read some fanfiction in both cases, even then we couldn't join the fandoms, or actually even want to join the fandoms... possibly because the show writing was too good? We are really into Interview with the Vampire (television) now, and Wax even reread all the Anne Rice vampire books up to the point where they got too crazy like, last year, in celebration. But even though IWTV is decidedly NOT too good, I guess maybe the show is good enough that it seems more rewarding to see where it's going? But it also might be that after reading the Taltos books I am not sure if I'm up to reading any more of Rice's work and I would never consider writing in a film fandom without reading the books it was based on, while Wax just could not vibe with it (if I remember her expressed sentiment correctly). There is a fandom there - not a huge one, but one that it would be possible to follow and read, but it's kind of... I keep going back and checking on it to see if I find it more appealing yet and then sighing and leaving again.

Maybe I just got old and, you know, lost too much synaptic plasticity to adapt to what the big fandom masses are doing anymore. I'm only 42, by the way. But I guess that could actually be it.

Comments

[torachan]

I haven't written fic for over ten years now, and towards the end it was very sporadic. I sometimes miss writing, but I haven't read or watched anything during that time that grabbed me so much that I wanted to seek out the fandom for it, and without a fandom or friends who are also writing, I just don't have the motivation.

It was so much easier when I had a close group of friends on DW and we were all writing together and sharing fandoms, and it got me to write and read in fandoms I didn't particularly care about on their own (like LotRiPS or SGA) because there was that shared energy that made me want to participate. But then people drifted away to Tumblr and Twitter and other platforms and I never really got into posting anywhere other than DW.

[cimorene]

Yeah, that all sounds correct. I also picked up interests in adjacent fandoms from fannish conversations back in the day. Even though I am still active on DW, and I see a lot about what people are watching and writing, I also see a lot less fannish posting on DW than I did on LJ back in the day.

I suppose the last time I had interactions with a group of friends might actually be before fandom landed on dw - a lot of interactions happened on Twitter as well as LJ... I have never observed a good-sized group of people actively talking about a fandom I was interested in on DW at all. It would probably do the trick if it happened.

[barbaratp]

É conforme envelhecemos acho que o refinamento de nossos gostos vai ficando mais firme e a linha entre gostar, querer e participar deixa de ser tênue. Eu mesma às vezes só leio as fics, sem ver a série e nem mesmo participar do fandom. E suas atividades de dragar o fundo dos arquivos por diferentes fics. Eu meio que faço o mesmo, vou na categoria, procuro o ship ou tag/tropo que gosto e vou lendo uma por uma, apagando do histórico o que não gosto e favoritando as que gostei. Mas não se sinta mal por ser tão sistemática sobre o que você pesquisa, escreve ou lê. É normal.

[cimorene]

I don't feel guilty for my reading habits, but I do feel sad and anxious when I can't find any new and current fandoms that I want to read. It's so nice to feel excited and part of a fandom that you'd think it would be easier to cultivate on purpose!

[barbaratp]

Fandoms são como uma planta em um jardim que cultivamos demais e ela morre, mas quando deixamos a natureza fazer seu curso naturalmente ela nasce onde menos se espera, às vezes no meio do cimento onde nunca pensamos que ela vingaria.

[princessofgeeks]

I feel your pain.

I first noticed you and your writing in Lotrips and you are an amazing and beautiful writer. But the sources of our inspiration are often very mysterious and the right combination of external and internal conditions can be elusive.

I think the kind of vibrant, communicative community around a fandom was in part a wonderful artifact of Livejournal 20 years ago. Fandom the way we did it then has certainly changed completely for lots of reasons. (In fact there is a discussion about that right now at my journal ha ha.)

I think the kind of communication and ongoing discussion you crave is probably happening on Discord, but I don't know much about Discord. This is just what I hear from friends.

I am sorry that the politics of the hockey players you liked ruined that fandom for you. So sad.

I loved your work and hope you find a keyhole back into writing somehow. And I wish the same for myself.

HUGS

[cimorene]

Wax actually has a bunch of fun discussing things on fandom Discords for her two recent bad shows. I could probably be active on an IWTV discord, or even a Black Sails discord after all these years although I don't remember all the plot beats anymore. But the pace of stuff going by on Discord is pretty fast and it feels a lot more anxiety-producing and socially taxing for me when it's all real time convo like that. And for that matter, I still love Star Trek, my first fannish passion, but idk if conversation on a discord would work out there because I often feel like an old fogey being like "all you young people in this conversation are completely wrong" when I witness other people's conversations about Star Trek (usually because they're using portmanteau names for pairings, which have always infuriated me).

I could probably write golden age mystery as a fandom without talking to people personally about it because that's the way that genre always worked, but I would have to do a lot of research and also practice how to write mystery since I've never done it before.

I could probably write Regency again (I did it once for Yuletide, lol), but the problem there is that 80%+ of the people interested in it don't care about historical accuracy at all and that is so completely opposite to my interest that I have no way to engage with them.

These are the kinds of things I end up thinking about (around in circles) every time I fall into this kind of philosophical debate with myself.

(Thank you for the support!)

[princessofgeeks]

Oh, I totally get it.

I can't do the constant real time stream, either, one of the reasons why I never investigated Discord. And why I can't do Twitter or any of its imitators. The only way that kind of live real-time discussion would work for me is if we were all watching an episode or a movie together.

Yes, there are lots of barriers to writing for sure. I long for the days when it just seemed so easy and poured out of me in several fandoms!

I don't like portmanteau pairing names either.

But I am happy here in my backwater on Dreamwidth.

I didn't need the group interaction you mention for the writing itself but I loved the days when I was part of a group of writers whom I knew, for a given fandom, and there were lots of fic to comment on each week and lots of challenges and ficathons that I enjoyed writing for.

I learned SO MUCH from writers who taught me and beta'd for me in Stargate; that was when I finally tackled learning how to write a plot that wasn't a pure romance plot where the declaration of love or the sexual encounter was the climax.

I know there are still people here who would read and comment on fic if I wrote it in my old fandoms but I am not sure if I will write for one of them again or if I will find a different fandom to write for.

I can love canons without being drawn to write them -- Star Wars, for example. And I too have a lot of unfinished story ideas and also a one-third finished fantasy novel gathering dust.

Wishing you the best, regardless, now and always.

[cimorene]

That didn't bother me with Twitter, even though you could read it constantly - it felt less immediate and threatening than a chat or text conversation for some reason. I don't think this really makes sense per se, but in my mind it felt more like posting on lj (dw), with a good insulating layer and no expectation of real time. Also since discord is more like chat rooms, it's like... every time you leave you potentially miss a bunch of stuff; it probably only works if you don't feel a pressure to "keep up" but just treat it as like a virtual coffee shop you can drop into - like IRC, which Wax and I both used for fannish conversations a lot in like, 2004-6. But if I do that my imagination has a chance to paint it as like walking into a coffee shop full of strangers, lol.

[cesy]

I have found that a Discord that is small enough I have a chance to keep up is then too small to have the volume of fic I want to read. There is a bit of community around Victoria Goddard's fandom, as well as overlap with KJ Charles and Alexandra Rowland, but none of it matches LJ/DW back in the day. But I also don't spend as much time on fandom internet as I did back then.

[cimorene]

A current book fandom can provide intermittent reading but they rarely get big enough to take up most of one's fannish time, I think. They make for a nice little packet of new reading each Yuletide usually, but I'd always have to read something else a lot of the year.

[vass]

Do you think stress might be a factor? The stuff with your job and the stuff with your cats... either of those on their own would be enough to put a dent in plenty of people's ability to be enthusiastic.

[cimorene]

There definitely have been times when I was way too depressed and stressed to write or engage happily, but there have been several periods where Wax and I were both flourishing as well! Perhaps a factor, but not a complete explanation.