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I'm leaving tomorrow (well, as it's past midnight, technically today) for most of a week with my in-laws in Florida, so my slow and erratic responses to comments and whatnot will be even MORE slow and erratic than usual. I'll see if I can manage to avoid almost drowning this time. Wish me luck.
I was thinking today about writing in different fandoms, and how the exact nature of the source canon brings out different things in my writing. It's not just fanfic -- I write a little differently on different original projects, too, but I think that with fanfic the process is a little more ... obvious? Transparent? Because it's not a matter of thinking "Oh, this is YA, so I shouldn't [xyz]" -- trying to tailor a project for a particular market or rating, or just being subconsciously constrained by having decided "this short story is urban fantasy", for example. There are no market considerations at all with fanfic, it's entirely a function of what the source material makes me want to write, and that's what makes it so interesting.
The specific example I was thinking about today has to do with characters swearing. When I was writing White Collar fanfic, I tended to shy away from using profanity, for the most part. It just didn't feel right. Whereas for the MCU characters, even though the actual source material is just about as PG-rated as White Collar, it doesn't sound right if I don't -- especially for military or ex-military characters like Sam or Bucky. This makes a little more sense when it's a matter of consciously reflecting how they talk in canon, but in this case it isn't, really -- they don't swear all that much in canon, either. But that's how their character-voices sound in my head. Whereas if I were writing, say, Peter from White Collar, I don't think I'd have him swear (much) except in really desperate circumstances, as opposed to Sam who I think probably tosses around words like "shit" in his inner dialogue all the time.
I was thinking today about writing in different fandoms, and how the exact nature of the source canon brings out different things in my writing. It's not just fanfic -- I write a little differently on different original projects, too, but I think that with fanfic the process is a little more ... obvious? Transparent? Because it's not a matter of thinking "Oh, this is YA, so I shouldn't [xyz]" -- trying to tailor a project for a particular market or rating, or just being subconsciously constrained by having decided "this short story is urban fantasy", for example. There are no market considerations at all with fanfic, it's entirely a function of what the source material makes me want to write, and that's what makes it so interesting.
The specific example I was thinking about today has to do with characters swearing. When I was writing White Collar fanfic, I tended to shy away from using profanity, for the most part. It just didn't feel right. Whereas for the MCU characters, even though the actual source material is just about as PG-rated as White Collar, it doesn't sound right if I don't -- especially for military or ex-military characters like Sam or Bucky. This makes a little more sense when it's a matter of consciously reflecting how they talk in canon, but in this case it isn't, really -- they don't swear all that much in canon, either. But that's how their character-voices sound in my head. Whereas if I were writing, say, Peter from White Collar, I don't think I'd have him swear (much) except in really desperate circumstances, as opposed to Sam who I think probably tosses around words like "shit" in his inner dialogue all the time.