I continue to feel a little bad about it, so I thought I’d clarify a few things. When I replied to this ask in May, I was already worried about discouraging people from asking me about my writing and I tried to phrase my response in a way that wouldn’t sound like I didn’t want to be bothered.
Reading it now, I’m not sure I entirely succeeded and Anon, I very much hope you didn’t end up feeling it would’ve been better if you never asked.
So to clarify why I tend to talk very little online about headcanons, ideas and my writing in general …
The main reason I don’t talk about headcanons I have is because I don’t really have headcanons in the way other people use the term. For me, there is very little about a character that can’t change – rather, it’s all a question of how it’s explained. Soundwave, for example, has loyalty as one of his main character traits. And yet, there are situations where I can definitely see him betraying someone he used to be loyal to. Post-TFP for example, after Megatron has, in a sense, betrayed him first. And I can also believe that after such an experience, he might decide that in the future, he isn’t going to be loyal to anyone else to protect himself from being hurt again.
So the idea that the character has to stay the same in every story I write is something I find incredibly restricting. Of course I won’t change the character entirely, that’s not the point. But I will pick and choose from the known character traits to explore how being put in a given set of circumstances will impact on and change the character. A static character that never changes in any way feels – I don’t know – “dead” to me. Not like a real person. We’re all of us sometimes idiosyncratic, hypocritical, our identities are never quite as fixed as we’d like to believe they are.
I think this post pins it down pretty well, except of course I approach it from the perspective of the author. Can I convince myself and my readers that character X would act like that? How do they get to that point where it is plausible? Alternatively, how do they move on from that point? What happened to cause it, what needs to happen to fix it?
I’ve had pretty clear headcanons about characters in the past and it almost always ended up with me trying to write a story and abandoning it because I simply couldn’t see it happening. So when I figured out that I could instead ask “what would need to happen to make me see it?”, it opened up so many new avenues to explore and made writing so much more fun.
Thus, no hard and fast headcanons for me, and it’s fairly difficult to talk about something you don’t have.
When the author starts meddling …
Another reason why I find it difficult to talk about my stories is that I’m very aware that there’s not just a few people around in fandom who will take whatever the author says as gospel and insist that this is the only way to interpret any given story.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I don’t believe I have so much clout that I could single-handedly change the fandom interpretation of a canon character. With my own stories? There’s a good chance I can influence how my readers decide to interpret them. Plus, people don’t have to publicly fight about differing interpretations to still secretly feel that the author agreeing with someone else’s interpretation invalidates theirs.
Frankly, that’s not something I want to contribute to. I’m the author, I’m obviously not dead, but just because I know what I was thinking when I wrote it doesn’t mean I’m in possession of the One and Only True Interpretation of my story. Honestly, if I was writing solely to validate my own experiences, I’d do better not posting anything at all, because my readers are going to have different experiences, backgrounds, opinions, and consequently different takes on my stories. Personally, I think it’s great to read other people’s takes on what I’ve written – even when I strongly disagree it could be interpreted like that XD
The problem is, I don’t know who will read my comments on my own story when I post them online. With my friend and beta, I can be certain she isn’t going to take me too seriously – she’s proven time and again that she frequently knows better than I what I was thinking when I was writing ^^; I also know that she doesn’t take my take on the story, characters or plots as gospel, but instead as a challenge to tell me where I failed at conveying that idea. So I know that regardless of what I may say or write, she won’t feel I’m invalidating her take.
I try to always make it clear when talking about my stories that this is my take on the story, these were my thoughts when writing, and my readers are free to and should, in fact, have their own interpretation. But I also “grew up” on the internet with forums and mailing lists, and current social media just doesn’t feel like I can have a conversation with people, more like I’m simply throwing my takes into the face of anyone who happens across it. Which leads us to the next point.
I already mentioned it my introduction, but I do genuinely dislike social media because of the sheer volume of information I’m being bombarded with every single moment. My brain doesn’t cope well with that, it more often than not stresses me out to the point where I close the app and go do something else. The quantity, and I’ll be honest, the brevity of many posts, simply kills any desire I might have to interact.
Additionally, I spend a lot of time in an environment where checking if someone else has already said it is mandatory, and if someone has, my job is to then engage with what the person has said.
So there’s several things at play here – I don’t want to add to the flood of information unless I feel I genuinely have to add something to the conversation that hasn’t been said fifty times already, and I don’t really feel like I can interact with what I’m reading at the depth that I would like, because there is so much of it.
To make matters worse, this is fandom discourse and it is so easy – see above – to see the same or similar takes over and over until one is led to believe that it is the only possible take on a certain character/series/plot. Human brains unfortunately suck horribly at doing the math – when we keep seeing the same point reiterated again and again and again, we tend to believe it must be the truth or at least what “everyone thinks”.
When actually, we’ve just happened to stumble into the room where the “massive boner for character X having trait Y” fan club is having its weekly meeting.
I like talking about my stories and about writing my stories. But I am very hesitant to do so without being prompted to online. It’s a combination of an aversion to how social media works, concerns I have about how what I write might influence others, and that for me, posting about ideas I just had or am toying with on social media feels more like shouting into the void than sharing them.
Being in the fortunate position of having people who I can talk to about my special interests also means that I don’t have to – I simply phone them. And it takes a lot less effort and time to chat to my beta for two hours than it takes to sit down and type up the 5,000 word essays I tend to write when I do talk about my stories and writing. Plus, I’m getting the interaction and feedback in real time instead of “maybe” and “six weeks later”.
And in the time it takes me to write the essay, I could’ve also been writing the story.
This does not mean I’m bothered by people wanting to talk to me or asking about my opinion. If I was, I wouldn’t have made this blog. It’s just that posting online doesn’t come naturally to me for a variety of reasons, and as a result, I don’t really think about it as an option without being prompted to.
So please remember – the reason why this blog even exists is so anyone who wants can get in touch with me outside of AO3 🩵
