Fic Talk > General Discussion
Fanfic/writing/fandom etc... Question(s) of the day
mare:
Along the lines of what we have been talking about in here, if you could pick two stories you have written as a before and after to show us how much you have grown as a writer, which two would you pick?
FrickingKaos:
This was an easy question. I am so sorry for bringing up this story again though, I'm sure you're all tired of me talking about it lol. For the before I'd say Incomplete, my first story I wrote at AC. It's just completely different from how I write now. For the after, I am pretty sure you guys can guess which one I will say. Figured You Out. For me FYO is my best work, and I am just proud of myself for taking that chance and writing something darker than what I would normally.
RokofAges75:
This reminds me of the review you left me earlier for CC. :)
I'm gonna cheat a little and pick three that go together, my three cancer stories. :P
1. "Don't Wanna Lose You Now" http://www.dreamers-sanctuary.com/vault/dontwanna.html
This was one of my earliest fanfics; I wrote it around April of 2000, when I had just turned 15. It's a Brian story, because Brian was my victim of choice back then, although Nick is the one who dies in it, from complications of surgery after giving Brian his bone marrow to save his life LOL. It's really cheesy and amateur. The writing is very simple and more tell-y than show-y; there are some chapters that are only a few paragraphs long with no dialogue because it's all summary and other chapters that are mostly dialogue with not a lot of description in between. I'm pretty sure the only research I did for this story involved looking up things in my Lurlene McDaniel books, because that's what it was clearly inspired by.
2. "Broken" http://absolutechaos.net/viewstory.php?sid=5354
Three years later, I gave this type of plot another shot, after obsessively plowing through the Swollen Issues series. When I started Broken, I was a 17-year-old high school senior, and I was taking AP English, where all we did was analyze the symbolism in classic literature, and you can totally see the influence of that in my awkward attempts to include symbolic imagery in the first half of this story. On the other hand, I had gotten better at showing, not telling and now tried to show EVERYTHING, so that it took 17 chapters for Nick to even get a diagnosis and ended up being 150 chapters long! I also went through a phase with song lyrics... I had a whole playlist/soundtrack of songs that inspired me, and I pasted their lyrics into the beginning and ends of chapters, sometimes in the middle, which I realize now is really cheesy and distracting and annoying! But I did learn how to research with this story; it's a lot more detailed and medically accurate than the last one, although there are still some mistakes. What's interesting is that I think the quality of writing gets drastically better even from the beginning to the end of Broken. What happened is that I started college right in the middle of writing it, and I think making that huge transition and "growing up" in real life helped me grow up as a writer too, because everything I've written since Broken has been so much better than anything I wrote before it.
3. "Curtain Call" http://absolutechaos.net/viewstory.php?sid=10159
I started this one about seven years after Broken and just finished it last year. I wasn't sure what the reaction would be when I started writing another cancer story, and I worried people would see it as a pathetic attempt to recapture the "magic" of Broken, which was my first story that got pretty popular. So I set out to learn from my mistakes in Broken and make this one as different as possible, simplifying the storyline, telling it from first person, writing a female lead who was very different from Broken's Claire, toning down the melodrama, and getting rid of the song lyrics and soundtrack and all the stuff that made Broken cheesy. Broken taught me a lot about how to research for this kind of story, and I now had access to resources that weren't even on my radar when I started Broken - everything from Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube to medical journals and personal blogs. The result is that CC is super detailed and, as far as I can tell, mostly correct. The premise may not be as believable, but in terms of writing, it's a lot better.
Sorry, that was a super long answer!
Sakabelle:
I very rarely go back and read my old stuff from back to front, though sometimes (as some of you have also said) I'll go back and read a chapter of something if someone leaves a review and I've forgotten what's happened in it.
As for things that display how I've grown as a writer? I have this horrible teenybopper website from when I was fifteen that not only includes a bunch of self insert Nick fics, but also includes "banter" between my friend and I before every story lol
But as for stories on AC, I guess probably In Pieces. I'm still sort of proud of it, but now when I look back, it was really far fetched and the worst part about that is when I was writing it I was trying really hard to make it not so.
This is sort of weird for me to say, but I think in contrast to that, my challenge story Nick's Dirty Kicks would be the one to read to see how far my writing has come. It's got a completely ridiculous plotline, but I do think that the level of actual writing in it is pretty good and I'm really proud of the way it came out. I don't think I would have been able to do a story like that justice back when I was writing In Pieces. This story has the element of humour I probably would have put in back then, I just don't think I would have conveyed them as well.
RokofAges75:
Is your teenybopper website still online, Steph? ;D LOL I think any of us who started writing as teenies have sites/stories like that!
I loved your Nick's Dirty Kicks story so much, and what made it so funny was the fact that you took such a ridiculous premise and wrote it so "seriously" - and so well! Sometimes I think our best writing comes out when we write something completely out of our wheelhouse, whether it's for a silly challenge like that or just a different genre, like Tracy did with FYO. I know for me, when thinking of scenes I'm most proud of writing, like Mare asked about yesterday, I don't think first of the dramatic scenes from my medical drama type stories, because I'm so used to writing those, they don't stand out to me. The scenes I'm most of are scenes I really had to stretch myself to write, like the action sequences in 00Carter or the first zombie attack in Undead, stuff I'd never written before and probably wouldn't have been able to write well ten years ago.
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