ladybusiness | (Reply)

From: (Anonymous)

[Ugh, feel free to tl;dr]

I kind of relate to what you said about money. I haven't written for a long time now, but even if I still wrote, I couldn't be a professional writer. As soon as I feel like I have to do something, it loses some of its appeal. So if one day I ever get back to writing, I'll try to get published, but not for money. I wouldn't want to earn a living from writing even if I could.

But actually... I do relate to what you said in other ways as well. The best time I ever had writing was back in 2003, posting on an art forum full of wide-eyed teenagers. I used to write poetry, and most of it was crap, but I still have a couple of poems I'm proud of. And I still believe some of those kids wrote some great things. At any rate, they moved me. They meant something to me. It was really great to be able to share that enthusiasm for writing--that enthusiasm for life, really.

Then I started writing fiction, and I never posted anything again. I think poetry was more manageable. I find it quite hard to write prose; I'm never quite happy with it. It takes me ages to come up with anything I'd be willing to share. So I lost that part of my life, and I miss it, but I'm not quite sure how to claim it back, because I don't want to write poetry anymore. The other day I picked up a short story I abandoned two years ago, and I worked on it a little, and I think it's almost a good story now. But you can't really be part of a community writing one short story every couple of years.

But anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to misrepresent fandom. I agree that trying to get published and sharing your stuff with a community are very different processes. I guess I was really just rambling about the end product, about the way many writers (and most readers) react to fanfiction, not about how it feels to write as part of that community. It's just that I'm sure there are fanfiction works that are just as accomplished as any "real" novel, and I can't help but feel that denying the writers the right to sell their work is just another way of refusing to recognize its value as literature.