This post by @void-my-warranty gave me much food for thought because first of all, omg activating my 'is the sun some tumblr anon bothering you my queen' mode (tbh it's always latently activated on this hellsite when i see my beloved moots/writers bothered) upon noting voidy's reaction - I've also read that post in question re: "all smut is writers fucking all their readers" and I will agree to disagree with that premise; sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's definitely more than that imho?
The interesting thing about the meaning of stories is that oft times you start with an author's intention, but when combined with the lens through which a reader chooses to consume it (their heart, their mind, their mood, their past, their joys, their sorrows, what happened to them that day, or last year, or as a child, etc.) something quite curious occurs and the story can alchemize into something new and altogether surprisingly meaningful and wonderfully and cathartically important to both the reader and the writer in a way that wasn't anticipated when the fic was written/posted.
Drawing from personal experience as well as chats with IRL/tumblr moots here - I see smut as a way to explore and express sexuality in a safe space and by extension, fanfic/writing itself is a way to explore and express the entire spectrum of being human and all its crests and troughs. I find it hard to properly express sometimes how I feel about fanfic (cough or do I) and the impact it has had on me but poet Lemn Sissay's answers here in his interview with Natasha Lunn on love summed it up in such a poignant and beautiful way. Apt because well, he's an award-winning poet lol
text: Another way of feeling our shared humanity, I've found, is through stories.
Although there are fairy-tale narratives I could blame for my fantasies in relationships, there are also stories that have brought a real form of love into my life. I'm not referring to books or novels about love, specifically, but rather passages of writing that have the power to make you feel a little more alive.
The paragraph that gives you a tingle of recognition. The lines that feel as if they are directly written for a deep, secret part of you, that you weren't necessarily even aware of until it was woken up by words.
Reading such a passage is, I think, a form of love. Like any relationship, that intrinsic recognition is a way of understanding and being understood, of seeing and being seen. The psychiatrist Gordon Livingston said that 'the fundamental requirement for any satisfying relationship is a reciprocal ability to see the world as others see it, to be able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes.'
And that's what a truthful piece of writing does: by allowing us to access another person's reality, it shifts our mind into a higher gear of empathy. This deep clicking into place doesn't happen often. But when it does?
Those passages become a source of love for us to reach back for the next time we feel desperate or alone, like a float thrown out when you've lost the energy to carry on swimming.
This is how I have felt reading Elizabeth Strout's books and watching Kenneth Lonergan's films. It's how I feel every time I read - and speak to - the writer Sarah Hepola too. Her words carry me back to a peaceful place inside myself where I know what really matters. - excerpt from Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
I'm not even halfway through the book, but I highly recommend it already.
