30 Day Fandom Meme Day 10

[leethet]

Day 10 – Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?
Started a Snape/Lucius story that I never finished. It’s a pairing I can see, so it wasn’t out of my comfort zone. It just ended up on the pile of unfinished fics, as often happens (even with my OTPs). There're all kinds of pairings I can see, I'm just not interested in writing about them; so it's not accurate to say they're out of my comfort zone or pairings I dislike. It's all about whether I'm keen to write about them.

Comments

[elmey.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit bemused by the idea of choosing to write a pairing I didn't like. Writing is hard enough as is.

[leethet.livejournal.com]

I agree - that's like writing a genre you don't like - or, for a fanficcer, a fandom you don't like. Not that writers don't get asked for that, and I've heard the argument used in other areas of life, too. Someone who wants you to do something you don't want to do is apt to say "Don't be so cowardly; step out of your comfort zone." It's a pretty effective argument (who wants to be a chicken who never tries anything new?) until you realize the motivation behind it is just to get you to do something you don't want to do, that someone else does want you to do for their own selfish reasons.:-) (You can easily see men using this argument to get a woman to do something sexual that he likes and she doesn't!)

So you shrug and say "It has nothing to do with fear, or comfort. I'm not interested."

I think that question, and the previous, are phrased poorly. The assumption that a pairing I don't write is one I (a) don't accept or (b) find uncomfortable is silly, and I don't suppose they really mean the question to sound like that. There's what you're interested in and what you aren't - and, as a writer, I've definitely found that at times I'm very interested in writing outside my comfort zone. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's a good stretch when you're so inclined.

[elmey.livejournal.com]

The focus on pairings in the question makes it moot for a lot of writers.

As you say, presenting pairings in terms of "comfort zone" seems to me to have little do do with writing. A lot of things can take you out of your comfort zone in a good way -- change of POV for example. Well, if you can pull it off :)

[leethet.livejournal.com]

Yes - I find that I'm pretty self-indulgent in fanfic, but even here from time to time I push myself to be a little darker, or to try present tense or something. Then again ... I'm not sure it's a push, to be honest. Sometimes a story speaks to you in a slightly different way, and you just write it down that way. It's harder if it's not your usual way (for instance, death stories or dark stories, for me), but if that's the story that wants out, you just run with it as best you can.