I wonder if you could see writing outside one's chosen pairing or favorite character or genre as necessary to stimulate good fanfiction writing. It had always seemed obvious to me that being too focused on getting the same couple (one's OTP) together over and over was limiting in terms of how one perceived those characters and how well one understood them. I mean, if you see the characters as a means to a specific end, how much does that impact the nature of the characterization, and can the accumulation of that tinkering have a cumulative effect on what you're willing and unwilling to tackle as writer and land you in a creative rut of some kind?
It had always been an instinctive feeling that while my attachment to the characters drove me to write fanfiction in the first place, it could become a hindrance if I let it become the dominant force in what I wrote, not just the 'why'. It's not a question of writing for entertainment or pleasure vs. writing to improve one's skill and become a better writer-- but perhaps it's just that I take both of these aspects of writing for granted. It doesn't occur to me to write for reasons other than fun, and at the same time it doesn't occur to me not to semi-consciously orient myself towards a deeper understanding and grasp of whatever I'm doing. And I do believe that heavy bias of any sort does interfere with understanding, so if one doesn't dissociate oneself from one's emotional triggers and kinks when one writes, the writing becomes more and more surface and is eventually skewed.
That 'dissociating'-- I'm not sure if that's just something I do myself or if it's a function of the altered mindstate one enters while one's imagination is in control and one experiences creative flow. I do believe that while creativity is inspired and encouraged by certain themes and characters, when exercised to a good extent it transcends one's preferences and biases and becomes something more all-encompassing. And while that sounds like the earmark of great writing rather than just 'writing', I feel that this transcendent state is actually an intrinsic property of a full 'flow' state. Thusly if one can readily perceive the writer's own unconscious impulses at work, maybe the flow hadn't been deep enough.
In this sense, writing about unappealing or difficult-to-understand pairings or subjects begins to straighten the potentially skewed character perception of an OTP-centric writer by forcing one to extend one's perception out farther and farther, so that one realizes there is no limit. It's as if the axis realigns and returns to base level or something (though that's a bit of a far-out metaphor). In my own experience, after writing the same pairing again and again (and again... and again), I no longer feel I can see it from the outside very clearly at all. In my many weaker moments, I write them differently depending on my mood that particular day rather than any conscious understanding of their dynamic. I project my issues onto them because it's easy, because the characters become like an old, worn shoe that I can slip on any which way.
Perhaps this is partly my own bias against doing the same thing repeatedly; in the end, no matter how you twist it, writing the same pairing for years with different variations is still writing the same thing, in some sense. And at some point, one just runs out of things to say about that one thing, and that has to be natural, doesn't it? There's only so much a single writer can do with a given pairing, because there's a limited number of takes and moods and surprises one can come up with, it seems like. And this process of accumulation would just accelerate if it's not broken up by going against one's own grain and writing things the way you don't want them to turn out, writing about characters you have to think about to understand or empathize with. If all one's writing is masturbatory in terms of theme, characterization and direction, doesn't it become almost mechanical or routine in the end? Perhaps even derivative of itself?
I think the point at which I'm writing H/D just because I love H/D, and not because I have anything different to say, is the point where I stop, anyway.
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