Confessions of a Recent Slash Virgin
I wrote a Lotrips snippetfic, and I posted it to a mailing list with a note that it was my first ever RPS fic. But it wasn't, really. I used to write RPS fic all the time. Once I had a story that filled a whole notebook.
I was fourteen. I had a mad crush on Edward Furlong. Ergo, this romantic saga revolved around Edward Furlong and a girl greatly resembling me in a flattering way, whom had been run over by a car and was in a coma, but whose spirit had become EF's temporary guardian angel. No, really.
I think I'm more patient with Mary Sue writers because I was one. I wrote that story with all the innocence and enthusiastic self-absorption of the pubescent. My friends read it, and do you know, they loved it, and said so often, with many reminders to "write more!!!", perhaps about them this time. And I did.
It was a fantasy. That's all it was. And it took me a long, long time to learn that some fantasies, particularly ones in which I myself was a character, ought to stay in the head. I was writing Mary Sues until only a few years ago. Some of them were pretty good Mary Sues, but that doesn't change what they were.
All my writing is, to an extent, just another version of that Sweet Dreams RPS manglement in the pink flowered notebook. This isn't true for all yaoi/slash writers, or maybe even most of them. But it is for me. This is mostly the reason why I'll never be a particularly good writer. Oh, my writing itself is decent, and even good, but I've never struggled to improve my writing as I have my drawing. I am an entirely selfish writer. If I feel angsty, I will write a scene so dripping in syrupy angst that readers will want to slash their wrists just to stop reading. If I want certain of my characters to have sex, I will skip the buildup and jump to the NC-17 harrowing without rhyme or reason. And then I will never post it, because I am then unable to link the sex to the angst to the rest of the coherent story, and even though I am a brat of a writer, I am also an obsessive perfectionist and would die of shame if anyone found one of my fics not up to my usual standard, or even worse, bad.
I've never had my characters just run away with a story and do what they wanted to do. They're MY characters. They are my love slaves. My bunny farm. They do EXACTLY what I want them to do, or by God they never see HTML.
I think I'm always trying to compensate for the horrible stuff I wrote before. Yet I'm still writing for the same reason. And you know, that sucks.
So yeah. Lotrips. I did write some pieces, on which feedback was reasonably good. And I'm eating up all the Lotrips I can find. But I'm having...problems.
Everything I write is Orli. Orli, Orli, Orli. The boy is a ditz, for goodness' sake. As much as I love him, he just hasn't that much depth. But he's adorable, and so he's the protagonist of most of my stuff. And who is he paired with? Viggo. Dom. Maybe Elijah or Karl, sometime. The "cute" guys. The guys who look good together.
Billy squicks me. Why does Billy squick me? Because I don't find him cute, or rather I don't find him cute in a slash context. My yaoi background is betraying me: he's not pretty enough for an uke but not manly enough for a seme, therefore he does not compute.
Also, there are lots of pairings in slash that I just rear away from. The other day on Contre La Montre (a livejournal writing community and excellent slash resource) I found Brett Beattie/Richard Taylor slash, and my yaoi-conditioned mind screamed: "Oh, gross!!!" and jerked my hand away from the mouse. I find neither man attractive in the least, and so I flee what may possibly be a piece of very good writing.
That may be the fundamental difference between slash and yaoi: slash doesn't care who's uke or seme. There's top and bottom, but more on a case-to-case basis. And this is important--slash doesn't care nearly as much if the men don't look perfect together. This brings slash closer to what I imagine male homosexual sex really is, and that's harder to write because it's more demanding for me. Because you see, I really don't know how two guys (real guys who like real guys, not a couple of lovely boys who aren't even sure if they're gay) go at it. And I'm the kind of obsessive personality who wants to be right, not just make things up. (Many slash writers are unafraid of this, and so write much better stuff than I do. Or they actually know how it works, and then they really know how to write it.) Yaoi is so much more about aesthetics and images and the beauty of the pairing, whereas slash to my mind is gritty and tough and throws its emotions and characters on the reader.
And I fear RPS because it brings me too close to that old Edward Furlong story. Because these people are NOT my characters, or my slaves. And yet I'm recreating them, creating a collage-character made of fragments glimpsed on TV or in interviews or articles, even fragments gleaned from other people's fanfics that fit in with what I believe of them or what I want to believe. They become not the people they are but the people I want them to be. And then I have to walk the razor edge between fantasy and credibility. And it's so much harder than making up my own, as hard as that already is. It drives me right up the fucking wall, and I deeply envy all those people whose Lotrips I've been reading lately.
I've been working at it though, and I've gotten better. Billy doesn't squick me half as much as he used to; in fact I find stories with him in rather sweet. And I'm discovering that really good writing can bring me through a lot of squicks. So I'm forging on.
However, I'd like to say one more thing about Mary Sues. I like to think I'm a good writer, if not a phenomenal one. But I used to write Mary Sues. Sometimes they were all I wrote. And they were very, very bad. Awful, in fact. Almost exactly like those featured in MSTs, or on certain writers' "worst of the worst" lists. But some people liked them, and told me to keep writing. And I wrote more Mary Sues. And the stories got better and better, until they weren't Mary Sues anymore. I can actually write good, decent het as well as slash and yaoi. Why? Because no one shot me down. No one wrote: "God, this is pathetic and awful! You can't write, so for God's sakes give this up and don't inflict it on us!" Because if they did I would have taken their advice. And I'd have lost out on the joy in writing that I take now, as well as the joy in feedback that comes with it.
So be patient with the kids. If they can't take your advice, don't waste it on them. But please, give advice, not flames. If their writing pains you, imagine how much more your reactions pain them. The most important thing to remember here is that kids grow And you never know...with enough encouragement, a Mary Sue writer may grow up to be a good writer, or even a great writer, of anything including slash. There is always hope.
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