flemmings | (no subject)

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writing

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Has anyone else ever written a fic that, well, that they just didn't want other people to read? I don't mean one of those edgy boundary-pushing things that you might naturally think twice about laying before strangers. I mean just, 'This is mine. I wish other people weren't going to read it' because when they do... somehow it isn't mine any more, or isn't as much mine as it was when I was writing it.

On a possibly not entirely unrelated note, the bit that came home most in Amadeus was when the dying Mozart says to the person he thinks is Death, 'I know I haven't written anything good yet.' Though I doubt the real Mozart ever thought any such thing, that line strikes to the heart of what being an artist is about- the gap between what you conceive and what you produce.

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I've had stuff I would never show, but mostly because I thought it wasn't good. I haven't had the "I only want this for me" story yet. Feelings like that soeetimes dull after time though, so in a month or a year, you might look at it and feel the same way, or feel distant enough from it where it wouldn't mean too much to share it (or not share it.)

Yep. Sure have. Only once, though. Very odd feeling, because usually I'm so obsessive "Oh, read this! Read this!" I couldn't do that for this one particular story because it was so personal and I was a little embarrassed about the setting (ripped bleeding from an RPG).

I've never written a fic that I didn't want to publish (except, as noted above, because I thought it was no good). But I do have this... ambivalence about reader interpretation, that varies mostly with how satisfied I am with the fic.

When I've put out something that I'm not 100% happy with, having people read things into it that I wasn't thinking of when I wrote it makes me happy. At times like that I feel the reader completes my work somehow, or validates it, by finding it good enough that they think about it and look for hidden meanings. On the rare occasion when I *am* completely content with a fic, though (usually the ones I write in a sudden rush of mad creativity between midnight and 3 AM) I've caught myself getting hacked off about that very thing. "Hello? This fic is complete, it *works*, why do you have to put in things that I never meant to be there?!"

But I do have this... ambivalence about reader interpretation,

The name of the game. Though it varies for me with commentator, not with my feelings about the fic. Some people find things I never thought of but am charmed to discover exist (possibly); and some people... think it's about Middle Americans when it's not. (Worse of course if they're right and Middle Americanism has crept into my Orientalist pastiche.)

Oh yes, definitely. Or perhaps rather with the attitude of the commentator. Some of the people who regularly read my fic will say "this latest one gives me vibes of X, did you do that on purpose?" And then there are some who will grab onto more-or-less-probable interpretation X, *assume* it's deliberate, *assume* that the fact I "obviously chose" to write something like that says something about me, and occasionally take me to task for it.

...needless to say, the former kind are the ones that make me feel flattered.

That kind of armchair psychology is one reason I don't archive my fics anywhere. Granted that often people's comments on a story say more about them than they do about my fic, still-- I don't actually want to know that much about a complete stranger.

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I think you and

sodzilla are pretty close to whatever it is that's bothering me. I like the fic I have and I don't like the idea of people reading it wrong, even if I'm never going to hear about it. (We'll take all the 'but no-one can read a work right including you' semiotic despair caveats as read.)

There are occasional stories I don't want to write but that's because they're multi-versioned. There are three ways the action goes and the dialogue keeps shifting about, and if I don't write it I can have all the possibilities simultaneously still. Only if I don't write it invariably the story disappears on me. One has to stick a pin through it eventually and mount it on velvet, or lose it forever.

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