#I’ve never shared fanfics of social media so I’m extremely self conscious about the idea 🙈

[meet-you-at-the-north-star]

So what if um. hypothetically. I had a bunch of extremely self-indulgent HBO war related x reader fanfics written. like what am I gonna do with those

[starberry-cupcake]

I feel like one of the things that has impacted me negatively in my creative process is the continuous exposure to social media fandom and its readily critical environment, in a moment in which I was most impressionable to it. 

When I was in my late teens, I had a blogspot in which I uploaded short stories and pieces of an ongoing project (now dead and somewhat buried). I look back now and feel a bit envious of that person because, even if so many years later I’ve grown artistically and learned a lot, and I consider I have advanced in what I particularly want for my writing, I am a lot more stagnant and self-conscious than I used to be.  

And one of the things that happened in the meantime was that I became a lot more engaged in online fandoms, and started using my art to create fandom content a lot more openly and share it.  

Which has given me positives, absolutely, and I’ve learned a lot through fandom, but it’s also made me increasingly more aware, especially in social media environments and especially on tumblr, of how critical people can be with media and with fanwork. 

Fanwork is, to me, a legitimate form of art. I don’t consider fanfic a “stepping stone” into writing, I consider it writing. But one of the true differences is that it’s set in a threshold in which writer and reader have the same rights and say over source material, which gives people a level playing field in terms of stuff like interpretation, characterization and criticism. 

Added to that, fandom, especially fandom on tumblr, is extremely picky and extremely reactive. 

I got to be here during the time in which tumblr was in its peak call-out culture and I also got to spend it in a fandom that was, because of the nature of its source material, drenched in social justice confrontation. People apologized in the beginning and end notes profusely in case they had done something that someone would consider problematic and begged readers to “call them out” if they had. That’s the level of pressure that specific fandom had at the time. 

Then, of course, there’s personal stuff I don’t want to get too much into, but as someone with ocd, especially pure o, and other things I don’t feel comfy getting into here, all of that had a bigger impact in me than I gave it credit for at the time, when I look at it now. 

So I grew disenchanted with my most meaningful projects. 

Workshops allowed me to write “discardable” stories, which I could complete and then forget about for the next class, and which I could feel less attachment to, from a personal level. Fics became mostly one-shots, with a couple exceptions (which I feel proud for having finished at all).  

Added to all that, there started to be an external pressure to write for a reward. 

Going to workshops and finishing university made it so that people around me started expecting results. I started getting asked, told and demanded for publishing work. Entering contests. Going with my stuff to publishers. I started to get pressure on using my work as livelihood and turn my art into a money-making thing, and do it fast. And it’s all with good intent, it’s done by people who are kind enough to think I could write something worth their time, but it’s still pressure. 

And it’s hard to explain why I don’t do it, why I don’t go out there with stuff to publish. It’s hard to explain to them that the workshop stories they’ve read are all placeholders for something I actually want to do and I don’t want to waste time and energy trying to get them published because I don’t have an emotional connection to most of them at all. They are mine and I appreciate them, but they’re exercises, homework. 

This year I caved in and presented one in a contest, which I promptly lost. People tried to make it seem like a minor setback, but losing is never easy. I’m proud of myself for trying, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel disappointed at myself. 

And the most meaningful stories for me, which require longer work, hard work, research and thought, I started to feel afraid of. 

I started, gradually, to push them back. I’ve talked about them for years, when someone asked, a little bit, but I never delivered, because I set myself a grand task that I started lacking the will to ever finish, I became afraid of what it might bring in tow if I did. Not afraid of failure per se, but afraid of all the things fandom made me aware that people are intent against. 

I can’t be in the writing bubble I used to, naive and unaware, writing completely and unabashedly for my own self at all times. I write for myself, yes, but I also have, in the back of my head, that voice of criticism that has been feeding for years on what fandom has conditioned me to expect. 

The idea is still there, gnawing at me, and some days I can’t quiet it down and end up writing scenes and moments, without giving it too much thought. I’m trying to build back my own relationship with my piece, little by little. Try to see it from another angle, in another way, let it exist on its own without any ideas of what it could turn out like or how it would be perceived. 

I’m trying to build it back up from nothing, but there are still remaining pieces that haven’t left in all these years and that I can’t conceive the story without. 

And with online fandom, I sort of have built this idea of having a very delicate filter to what deserves my effort.  

I feel like there are so many authors, mostly older than me, with different backgrounds, that publish a novel every 6 months, and I feel that the fact that they never had another environment, another medium to explore their ideas other than getting a book published, made them be less critical on what to publish or not. 

They’re not gonna post a story on a sideblog or write a fic about it, they take every idea and store it for publishing. So they seem, to the outside eye, more productive. But they just have a different writing environment than I do. And they are certainly less tainted by immediate peer criticism as someone like me, who is on tumblr an ao3 on the reg. 

It’s not that stories that get posted online in sideblogs or turned into fics aren’t “as grand” as a published og work, but that a published og work takes a lot of effort, time, editing tasks, external eyes, external work, posterior work and an entire editing process that I, as an editor, am highly aware of and learned to only reserve to pieces I feel deserve such a process. Which, so far, have been none, as a result of all this. 

All in all, I feel like this can’t be a single experience. 

Because if online fandom and tumblr have also given me anything is the knowledge that 90% of the people I’m around of, fandom wise, writes fiction. I’m not anymore the weirdo at school who sat at the window and wrote stupid stories. I’m not special, I’m not “the girl who writes”. I’m one of a million people who write every day, who has very similar media background and inspirational favorites, and who does similar things to work on her craft. 

Still, the one thing that has kept me going in my most awful moments has been the knowledge that there’s several stories, especially one, that nobody else can tell, because it’s in my head. And if I’m not doing it for me, at least I’m doing it for that story’s sake.  

But the road towards regaining the relationship with a less judgmental and less hesitant form of writing something that means a lot to me...is tough.