Persisting to Persist

Persistence is something I struggle with.

I'm awesome at starting things; sometimes it seems like I'm starting half a dozen new things every day. Two days ago it was a fic rec list for one of my friends, yesterday it was the book What Color Is Your Parachute?, and today it's a resolution to earn some passive income before the close of the year. This is on top of this blog (already two weeks neglected), two to four fics I would be overjoyed to finish rough drafts of, the world's most half-hearted job hunt, and some home improvement projects I started in January.

So yeah, I am aces at starting stuff. Sticking with it is a whole 'nother story.

The things I have the least trouble finishing are the ones I can see a clear and looming ending for. One-shots used to be great for this. In my early fanfic career I finished gobs of one-shots. As I've grown as a writer and started wanting to write pieces with more substance, I've found this more and more difficult. A thousand word fluffy one-shot is pretty easy to bang out in a day or two. Seven thousand words of fluffy, angsty, developing friendship fic is way harder. And stuff that's ten or twenty thousand? More? It's so rough and flawed that I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. A lot of times I look at my documents and despair. Some days, like today, I close out of the documents and give up.

I never consider it a true surrender though, because I know from experience that I'll go into my word processor someday, maybe tomorrow, maybe in six months, and I'll hit open and see things I haven't worked on in awhile and I'll think to myself I wonder if I've got it in me to work on that now.

Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't.

Ideally, I would poke at all of these things a little every day. Everything I've mentioned above, not just the writing, and I would make slow, but inevitable progress. But that's the type of persistence I struggle with.

Right now I'm wondering why I even started this blog because ugh work and ugh I have to keep doing it. Doing things over and over is hard.

But hey, I'm working on it. This post is just one more step in developing my ability to persist.

On Word Art

I'm a visual artist as well as a writer.

My high school and college careers both centered around my drawing. I like things that look pretty. I actually discovered Tumblr this year and absolutely love it because it lets me fully immerse myself in visual goodies.

Anyway, the point is I am a visual person. And as much drawing as I've done, I'm still not to the point where I can draw something straight out of my head and have it come out to my liking. As a result, I've constantly got a head full of images I'd like to be able to get down on paper, but know any attempts to draw them would just result in pure frustration.

The other night I was desperate to get some relief and wanted to do a little writing, too, so I figured why not draw with words?

The exercise was actually really helpful with getting rid of the twitchy desire to see something, without having to form a whole story just to find a place for something I wanted to see.

This was the final result:

It's well past midnight and every light in the workshop is dark. Tony's still working, but he'd had JARVIS turn the lights off in deference to the sleeping hunk of muscle sprawled across his lap; Steve's pinned him where he sits on the cot in the corner and left him with just the glow of the tablet propped on his thigh, braced against the wall. Steve's feet are hanging off the end of the cot—even with his legs bent toward his chest—and he's got his right hand tucked under Tony's thigh so his fingers curl around the inside of Tony's knee, but despite how wildly uncomfortable it must be, he's knocked out cold. Tony brushes his palm over Steve's shoulder between tablet gestures, returning again and again for the warmth it leeches into his palm, the steady rise and fall of Steve's breathing.

Periodically Tony will wince as he switches from a dark program to a light one, creating a sudden flare of light, but Steve sleeps on, oblivious, a small, but growing wet patch forming beneath the corner of his slightly parted lips on Tony's thigh.

Post the First

I write.

I also draw and cook and read, but writing is the one thing I think about constantly. Even when I'm taking a break and don't want to write, I'm still thinking about doing it. I can go months without drawing and often put off reading things because the urge to write is so strong. I can't not write.

That being said, most of what I write is what is known as fanfiction.

Fanfiction (or fanfic, or just fic, as I usually call it) exists because someone read, or watched, or played something that they enjoyed so much (or liked but found lacking) that they decided to write something of their own using the characters, or in some cases the setting (the Harry Potter fandom has a lot of examples of this). The first things I remember inventing stories for are the Power Rangers and Disney's Aladdin. When I finally started writing my stories down and joined the online fandom presence, my first major fandom was for USA's television show Psych. Currently, I'm head over heels for the Avengers films.

I've dabbled in original writing; I tried NaNoWriMo a couple years ago and got 10K out of it, but nothing resembling a story before the lure of my fanfic smothered any interest I had in finishing the challenge. I started a novel a few years before that, but never really had a plot, just a huge cast of characters I had lukewarm feelings for and a series of violent action scenes. I've even tried journaling a few times, but I get so bored of hearing myself say nothing. I've considered writing a blog in the past, but I could never think of a topic that I thought I'd be able to maintain interest in.

Then the other day I realized the one thing I have an almost obsessive interest in (aside from writing fanfic) is the craft of writing. I have two full shelves of books dedicated to learning to write. When I go to a bookstore, I beeline for the writing section. I love trying to improve my writing and talking about writing and reading about writing.

I know there are tons of blogs about writing out there, but most of them are focused on novels or articles. I want to create a writing blog for the fanfic writers about the craft of writing fanfic.

This is that blog.