Voices in the head

[estirose]

No, it's not a fic. For once. Amazingly. It's meta.


I was just talking to someone over IM, and I mentioned that one of my kamendressing characters wanted to hop onto a post. The character in question is, of course, a RP character, though I've written fic about her before.

This caused me to think about inspiration, and plot bunnies, and how I think about my stories. Sometimes I just get ideas. ("What would happen if Otoya survived and was able to help raise Taiga and Wataru?") Sometimes I start with nothing more than a word or a prompt (the fic "Kurisutin" started with the word "Cordelia"). And sometimes it's "Hey, Pancake wants me to write a fic about him and Kimiko!"

But having voices in your head is not seen as a desirable trait. In fact, it's a sign of mental illness, the homeless man talking to people that aren't even there. Something that's scorned. (Mental illness is rather overly feared for no good reason, but that's a topic for another day.)

I once participated in somebody's thesis on fanfic writers, to get to the bottom of what makes us write. To most of us, it seems to be a need, a desire to write, to keep the story going, to keep the world going even if it's been abandoned. To adopt worlds, to take care of them in the absence of the original creators. To extend the world if it hasn't been abandoned. To tell our own stories in a world that we like.

But I have to admit, that to have "voices in your head" is something that no sane (or mostly sane) person admits to. To say to someone "Hey, Greer wants me to write a fic about when she took Alberta to dinner" sometimes gets strange reactions unless you know that person thinks the same way, that having a character pop up suddenly in your head giving inspiration is not exactly a sane thing.

I have to think that each writer perceives their inspiration in a different way. For example, the "Greer wants me to write a fic about...." could easily be perceived by another writer as "Hey, I think writing a fic about Greer and Alberta having dinner together would be a fun plot." Or maybe just a simple "Greer. Alberta. Dinner" that becomes something more.

It comes down to, as a writer, what inspires you. How you see things. How you interact with that fictional world, either as a pro writer or an amateur, writing original fiction or fan fiction. I'd like to think that saying "Song wants to punch out that Imagin because Haunting stopped her last time" is not so crazy or insane. Or maybe I don't want to be seen as crazy.

And maybe I like the voices in my head....

Comments

[obsessivemuch.livejournal.com]

I love the voices in my head. They're often smarter and funnier than I am.