For the last couple of days I’ve been doing something I said I’d probably never do, something I long derided, even used as a short-hand for a certain type of moral and intellectual bankruptcy, and right now I can’t see me ever stopping. Chances are very good you’ll never bear witness to it.
Some background: A couple of weeks ago I. Wait. Okay, back in March last year, I. Hmm. No.
Right. Late September 2016 it started to become clear that the bad laryngitis and the terrifying moments of stopping breathing every time I slept wasn’t going away anytime soon and, quite frankly, I could probably have coped with the sleep deprivation, but, as the months went on, not being able to speak, let alone sing, properly started to fray my sanity.
After the HILARIOUS cancer scare (“Oh, that was just a clerical error!” Riiiight...), and a growing understanding of how to manage the underlying problem, my voice started to crawl back. I was underweight, quiet, squeaky, and in a permanent fog of tiredness, like a ultra-depressing throwback to my teenage years, but I was able to walk without having to stop and cough every ten paces, and I’d even got back on the bike by mid-March.
Then I see a casual acquaintance on Facebook on the lookout for voice artists - especially if they’re not male, middle-class, or English. They definitely had a surfeit of those, thanks. One of my burgeoning career paths, the long-dreamt-of step into narration work, had been scythed out from under me in the autumn, so I thought: let’s play them my Audible showreel, and see what they think.
A driech Saturday in March comes and I’m buzzed into a building where I’ll stand in a darkened corridor, walls wrapped in a menacing shade of insulating material, and make a recording of what was supposed to be a one-off character slot for Rusty Quill’s The Magnus Archives. Just to make things more “interesting” for myself, I decided to go with a flat Cardiff accent, which actually worked out quite well in combination with the laryngitic rasp, for this hard-arsed police detective character (even though I had to channel a combination of my school bullies and my dad to get there). It was fun, it turns out I read the “statement” part well and accurately (and could just about manage the small bit of acting dialogue either side of the storytelling element), and then I went home, curiously uplifted.
After the episode went out I got asked back to reprise the character, who was now to develop a bit of an arc. By this point I’d got enough of a voice back to feel I made a better fist of it, and had to do more Actual Acting, which turns out to be fucking difficult. Who knew. But I think I’m starting to get the hang of it, a few sessions down the line.
Following their social media output, I discovered that, not only do they have a large, appropriately obsessive following, but many of the fans write fanfic. Like: a lot of it. The (apparently) least distressing selection lives, again appropriately enough, in Archive of Our Own (aka AO3), a place where I’ve rediscovered my love for well-written transformative fiction, while avoiding the hell out of anything to do with the fandom I’ve somehow found myself a peripheral part of (okay, fine: I read two pieces, neither of them in any way sexual, in which my character threatens/ beats the shit out of/ stabs people; seems legit).
I am, you see, as big a hypocrite as the next person - I’ve enjoyed all sorts of original erotic fiction/ slashfic/ fanfic, the latter mostly based in the Whedonverse, over the years, but have been known to use the word “fanfic” as a shorthand, derogatory term for derivative writing, occasionally wondering why some of the people producing such frankly breathtaking work online, for free, weren’t using their talents to create, you know, original characters.
See, I definitely thought (and think) that there’s a massive place for written erotica - queer erotica helped me come to terms with my sexuality, and it being online means that there was nothing for my mother to find (although that did mean I had to read it all on university computers - I’m old, remember), for example. And it’s a place to channel things that are unethical, illegal, and frankly downright impossible. I’ve heard some fairly compelling anecdotal evidence to say that getting the more dubious stuff off your chest in virtual terms sublimates the need to carry things over into real life. (Of course, it’s quite difficult to find a genetically modified, flying version of your own arse who wants to do you so...)
And yet, from trying to pop off like a Rentaghost as a five-year-old, to the time in my teens I dreamed I was Doctor Watson, through the time I wrote an undying time-traveller into the Trojan War (again in my teens), to every time (arguably), I write a show/ poem reimagining mythological/ historical/ fictive characters, I have been engaging in transformative writing. Hell, Shakespeare and Marlowe did it. Matthew Bourne does it. Angela Carter did a lot of it. Patience Agbabi, Kate Tempest, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson, Alan Moore, Salman Rushdi, Tarrell Alvin McRaney, Neil Gaiman, Nnedi Okorafor, Ben Okri, and Margaret Atwood have all made moolah and reputations from it. George Lucas definitely did it. And, of course, if Joseph Campbell is right, we’ve only got a small handful of constantly recycled stories between us anyway.
Enough warm-up, Fay - tell us why you’ve got us here...
Fine. So, I have several writing projects that are currently on hiatus - most notably a commissioned poem that is about five months overdue (I’m so sorry), and a novel that I started last year while near-mute, which keeps growing, shows no signs of stopping, and is still at least 30% shy of completed. I have created nothing new except pieces in workshops and the odd new-poem-made-of-everyone-who’s-performed thing since August. In other words: if it’s planned, it’s not turning up. Argh.
Get on with it.
(Thanks for your patience so far!) Anyway, seemingly out of nowhere, on Wednesday this week, I picked up my laptop and started to write a wildly explicit bit of slashfic featuring characters from a piece of mainstream media. Within two days it had turned into eight short chapters of raw angst and filth which I posted, pretty much as I finished them, with minimal editing, onto AO3.
Within minutes of the first chapter going up, I had people I’d never met before reading and offering “kudos”, the platform’s “like” of choice. 48 hours later, and it has 375 hits (which I have to assume doesn’t translate to 375 people), a handful of kudos, and a scattering of complimentary comments (the person suggesting it needed a government health warning was a particular favourite).
I am, I have to say, feeling a little giddy (and mildly conflicted) about this. But we must analyse new experiences if we’re to learn and grow from them, so, what have I learned?
1. I can churn out what essentially amounts to a long short story (7135 words), with plot, development, structure, action, dialogue, and stuff, in less than two days.
2. When you have pre-created characters and worlds, all you have to do is a wee bit of tweaking, and their story is there. Everyone reading it knows the background, so there’s no mileage in world-building and exposition. (No-one wants to read 43 pages about Hobbit history, do they? Do they...?!)
3. I am a filthy, filthy bastard (mind: I’ve seen some of the tags on a bunch of these works, a set of rather hefty trigger warnings left, right, and centre - turns out I’m a filthy bastard who has strong preferences for consensual, safe(ish), adult, human encounters, and I’m good with that).
4. The dopamine rush from a stranger begging you to add chapters and end their torment is quite extraordinary. And apt, obviously.
5. There is something frankly liberating about being Not Yourself. It’s a long time since I’ve written under a pseudonym, and moving out from under it was liberating then, but this is something else now.
6. My poetry blog posts, and this one, easily garner 100-odd views these days, and I’m happy with that baseline. (Listen: I know where I stand in the poetry rankings of the world.) My most popular entry on any of my blogs ever topped 1400 views, but that was over the course of 20 months and, now I come to think of it, is actually a transformative piece (satire counts, right?). Hah! :D
Contrast this: within 48 hours I had over 300 views of this one work. If I’m after an easy fix on approbation, this has some quality juice to offer. (Yeah, I am aware of how that sounds...)
7. I am now really excited about writing prose again. Like: really excited. And yes: some of it is going to be fan/ slash fiction (see points 2, 3, 4 and 5 above), but I think the characters from the dusty novel can finally stop poking me in the head and making a variety of disappointed faces when I say “maybe later” (sorry, kids).
8. I don’t really write straight prose anymore. This last two days I watched myself changing words because they would sound better, have more rhythm, play with internal rhyme. Thanks, performance poetry - I’m going to be writing on a slant for the rest of my life.
So, that’s it, really. I’ve been dying to tell someone, so I’m glad it could be you. Thanks for listening.
(What’s that? A link to the work? Ah. No. No, I don’t think so, do you? I mean, you know: not yet...)
Go you!
ReplyDeleteThanks, J.S.! 😊
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