(To be clear: I am really not very good at doing this sort of thing on my own, and I can always use help, particularly if it's something like "hey, is the current story not going well?")

The first (and more obvious) thing is that I'm always really interested in the "social group of people who are into the same fiction" and "social group of people who are into the same fiction but for non-identical reasons" and in the latter cases, often people who write fanfiction. (I'm not going to get into any actual work of fanfiction, but just imagine a big fanfiction archive and lots of different fandoms and subcommunities and fanfiction worksets, like the way we have these worksets for, say, "fans of the X series" or "fans of the Y series" or whatever.) Of course, it's hard to know who else in a given fandom might have a fanfic interest – which makes it really hard to talk about these things with people who aren't involved in writing fanfiction or at least fanfiction which is not widely disseminated outside the fandom.

I know this problem is hard, because the fanfiction I write and read has this problem, but I also read a ton of fiction written by other people and sometimes I try to write stuff, too. (It's hard to do anything, because I have ADHD and most of my ideas are good, so it is hard to tell where I should start and what is likely to be bad – which of the things I wrote in 2012, for example, is best, which has aged best – etc. etc.)

The second thing, of course, is the "what would the story be about?" issue, which in the "writing fiction" context is often even more important than it is in the "writing anything" context, given that you don't have any other context to compare it against.

This isn't an issue I have with some other fiction genres like "young adult" – I don't feel like I need to know what a young adult story is about to enjoy it and have something to say – but it is a bit of an issue with the "literary fiction" (as opposed to the "experimental fiction" category, which may or may not appeal to you) stuff that I read. I read stuff by a lot of really interesting "literary" writers and what I like about this stuff is often the "things" that happen, in a very different way than a lot of the stuff I read. For instance, when I was reading The Goldfinch last year I had a sense that it had a certain "thing" going on, where there wasn't really any story per se, but something was there, some tension was there, a feeling was there. And I can't articulate what that feeling is, and it's not the feeling you get when you read something that's very, very similar to the same novel three years ago, or something. (By "very, very similar" I mean it's pretty similar in plot and plot elements – but the structure and structure elements are the same, but different, so you have a different "thing.") And that feeling is there in, say, the first two chapters of the book, although it builds up as you read and the whole book is ultimately very different. But this feeling is hard to describe, and I don't think it has any obvious name.

The point is, in order to talk about fiction, we should have something in common in order to talk about fiction. (You can imagine a situation where the two people involved could really have a lot in common because they're in the same fandom, but that's a lot rarer than when you're comparing an ordinary book to some other book.)

For instance, when I'm reading "literary" fiction, there are certain things that I tend to think of as "character moments": where a character in the story has a particular event happen to them which they have no way to avoid or change, and which can be viewed as having been a large or fundamental part of the story. For instance, I think of "Tiffany Aching and the Green Man" as having two or even more such moments. (Note that I am not thinking of the first-person-in-the-novel POV character as having this kind of moment – I just mean, in the plot, Tiffany Aching and the Green Man are in this situation, and their thoughts/emotions go through various stages of understanding and accepting or failing to accept or otherwise dealing with their situation.)

But here's the problem: I have a really hard time finding fiction with these kinds of moments in it. (Or maybe I just tend to focus on books written by people who seem to not have these kinds of moments, etc.) This is a problem, because having these kinds of moments is something that's going to feel really right to a lot of people, and that's a big part of what's attractive about a novel to me.

One of the things I do to try to counteract this problem is to search out books by people who are "not like that" – by writers who make you see these kinds of moments as a really, really big deal. But this can make it feel like I'm in this category that I don't belong in – and it's a category in which I don't want to be – and this can make me unhappy.

The third thing I want to say about this subject is "I don't like plot." This is a pretty subjective and difficult thing to say, but it's something I'd be curious to hear about. (I am a lot more comfortable with plots that are not about big events happening all the time – for instance, the big events are the end of the book, and that's nice, but the book doesn't have to end with one big event.) But basically, plots that have all of their events happening all the time seem to me like the plot of fanfiction or "plot porn," like stories that are not really about what's happening, but about how many times something is being repeated. Which is fine when I'm reading the fanfiction, sure, but not so much when I'm reading the book with an eye toward seeing a thing I'm interested in happening.

Frank, uh, what does this mean? 😭

Only-Fans:

1. For the avoidance of doubt: no.

2. For the avoidance of doubt: yes.

3. As of July, 2015, yes.

Not a single one. The closest I can get is "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night," but that's very stylized and kind of the opposite of horror

I think about 100