~~ sore on principle.

I realized that the reason I tend to like an author's whole body of work more than any single fic, often enough, is that particular writers tend to have a set of skills I can depend on... and it's those storytelling skills that really attract me, more than any one story. They're like a signature, something I can depend on. Sort of like brand loyalty, with cars or something: one knows that this model has to have some basic characteristics of the whole line. The way a car is made, then, is more important than the specifics of the actual make, so to speak.

I don't care for flashy fics. I don't want to be tantalized or drawn in by the promise of fanservice or a quick fix, even though I -can- be. What I want is a deeper satisfaction that would encompass those things but also transcend them. I don't want a fic to hit my kinks. I don't want to give it that sort of easy way in. I want to love a fic in spite of the fact that it hits none of my kinks, the fact that it refuses to go where I want it to. I want the fic to take me over and make me go where it wants to go. In the end, I'll thank the writer.

I've written things that could be seen as anti-kink before, I think, but I don't mean it that way, at least not this time. I just mean that I dislike the idea of reading (or writing) as purely mental/emotional masturbation. I hate thinking that the pleasure has to be shallow or easy in order to be effective... mostly because I've spent so much time chasing after fics that can easily be seen as a only a fix. I want to be a reader, not a junkie-- and I want writers to treat me as such. And anyway, after enough masturbation, even the biggest junkie gets sore. I'm sore, I guess.

I think I lash out against kink-driven responses to writing or fanart or whatever because I'm always in danger of being overwhelmed like that. Often enough, I just become a puddle of goo more than a person, being reduced to a quivering, unthinking mass by fiction or art. I'm just sensitive, I guess. But I don't want to always be wasting it, always allowing myself to act like some sort of crack-addicted rat or something.

So here's where my favorite writers come in. They seem to have principles, in terms of how much work they put into their stories; they don't seem to only indulge themselves, or just go through the motions. They're really -there- in the work, being honest within the framework of the fic no matter where that takes them.

In the end, I don't care how IC or OOC your fanfiction is, because I've found that really good fanfic always manages to convince me by doing all the work. What I like is fiction that does the work, basically. There's a sense of no shortcuts. That's what makes a good story to me, fanfic or not.

It may seem hard to believe, since fanfic, by "stealing" a setting & characters, seems to imply major shortcuts by its nature, but good fanfic (and all fic) is as much about reinvention as it is about variations on a theme, it seems to me. The best fanfic has to do both, to work for me anyway.

So I'm curious, I guess, as to what sort of principles you'd look for in writing. It was fun writing these down, anyway (wheeee, lists!)

( To start with, I came up with 9.... )