gayalondiel_bak | Why I write: taking joy in tragedy. (Reply)

Sad is like happy for deep people.
~ Steven Moffatt, Doctor Who (Season [Fnarg-1.5], "Blink")
This is happening. And it hurts, and it's amazing. And I've been here for all of it.
~ Vaughan Sivell, Third Star
I'm fairly often completely happy. Like, for instance, when you get into a bath and it's exactly the right temperature, and you go "ahhhhh"... because those sort of things happen all the time!
~ John Finnemore, Cabin Pressure (Season 1, "Fitton")

I've been thinking a little bit about why I write what I do. In general terms my fic fits into three broad categories: Angst, Fluff, and Porn. Of these, the angst is very angsty, the porn is increasingly PWP, and the fluff is always slightly angsty and diminishing somewhat in frequency. And I think I've worked out why:

Happy is boring.

If I want to see happy, I'll watch an episode of friends or a chick flick/rom com, or I'll read some of that non-genre fiction my brother keeps buying me despite the fact that I've only read one of the books. I don't tend to do these things though, partially because I'm a genre snob, and partially because they bore me rigid. If I watch a rom com I know roughly what's going to happen, that the ending will either be people together or people alone but buoyed up on the decentness of people and ultimately it's a happy ending, which is all very nice, if I wasn't asleep on the sofa at this point. Even if it's got sad bits (I'm thinking of Simon Callow's character's death in Four Weddings) that's ultimately a point of growth for the remaining characters, and the personal tragedy of it tends to be engaged lightly, if at all. That's better, if you can have some decent angst that does cast a pall over the rest of it, but it's not really what I'm aiming at. I'm aware I'm generalising horribly, and I haven't seen enough chick flicks recently to know if that's still the prevailing direction: but I have seen enough to know I'm not presently fussed to see more.

If you read fic predominantly for fluffy, light stories that fix things and just have happy people in happy funny scenarios, that is absolutely a valid reason for reading fic and I wish you joy in it. Unless I list "fluff" in my summaries, though, this particular sandbox may not be for you.

I pick my fiction for two reasons: I want to see either the superb and the strange, fantastical things that defy limits of mundane imagination; or I want to see something that addresses the core of what it is to be human, to feel, to hurt, to ache, to break and shatter. Not in the rom com way where you know there's going to be a happy ending, but in a real sense where there might be bleakness, bitterness, you might actually lose everything you've invested into loving a character but the storyteller makes you risk loving them anyway. That's inspiring fiction, fiction that speaks to what it is to be a human, to be a soul, to love and be loved and hurt and weep and rage. If you're very lucky (and sometimes I am) the fantastical and the terrible come together in the same story. Lord of the Rings is always going to be the centre of my fandom world.

Beyond odd dalliances into the supernatural I don't write in a science fiction setting, my imagination doesn't have that sort of compass (yet). What I do have, and know, is how to write bitterness, grief, and personal tragedy. I like to take characters and put them in horrible situations not because I'm a sadist, but to explore in as real a way I can how a person goes on with living when life throws crap at you, how you pick up and carry on and still manage to make the world a beautiful poetic thing. And I refute the claim that that's not uplifting - in the Youth of the Heart sequence it does at times feel like I'm really clobbering the boys and Mary - because I am - but by the third chapter Sherlock, who is by definitition selfish and self-involved, is doing the right thing despite the hurt it causes him and John, because it's the right thing to do. If I'm the only person who finds that uplifting, well, there is still one person in the world who does.

The thing is, I'm actually quite a happy person. (I don't sound it, I know!) Yes, I'm a goth. Yes, I talk about death a lot. I have recurrent unipolar depression, but around that I have increasing comfort and contentment in the type classified above by John Finnemore, and those do come all the time if you look. I actually enjoy talking and thinking about death - I find it comforting. Maybe that's weird, but it's my kind of weird. The comfort of curling up with a book, film, cat, webchat, combination thereof - I don't need fic describing people being comfortable in that way because I can be comfortable in that way on my own terms. Sometimes I read gen fluff and enjoy it, but it doesn't stick with me the way a great story does when it breaks the heart or rends the soul, and then either finds a way to fix it that involves the fact that we are dealing with people, not deus ex machinae, or lets the characters work out how to go on with things in the face of that rending. Even if the answer is that they cannot go on.

I said on twitter that I was going to hold off the whump for a bit after Youth of the Heart, and I got a few sarcastic replies which were all variants of "I give it two days tops". Actually, I think that's right. A little time to heal - because I did hurt along with my characters when I realised where the story was going to land - and I'll be back to unfolding pain and grief and angst in the middle of my pet characters' lives. I'll still write fluff, because I do have a heart that wants them to be happy, but it's not my focus and even my fluff has angst built in.

Because I want to read, and write, stories about humans. And it is in adversity that we find our humanity, and tragedy where we find our heart, and in death we find what it means to live. And you can't beat that with a hundred fics about cartoon mice or tea by the fire, although you can end them that way.

YMMV.