#tessiete

Oh nice! That is an incredible resource to have, then! Definitely!

Okay, so. Baby Tess, when she started to write fic did she have any hopes or goals for her writing? And how have those changed over time? NOPE. Baby Tess was always told to be a writer. Tess never wanted to be a writer, and still does not want to be a writer. But my dad says follow your talent, not your passion, and writing is the one artistic thing that I can control, and requires no outside help to support or promote it

Oh that's one I’ve never heard before: follow your talent not your passion. Yeah, I resent it a lot! But I don't think he's wrong! For a long, long time I essentially wrote just for me. My early fandoms were usually pretty dead ones, and the ones that weren't tended to be uninterested in what I liked to write about. I love maturity, and the tiny little complexities of relationships. I love Good. I love Good people. I love thinking about the morality of a situation, and the philosophies of civility, I guess?

Basically, my earliest stories had no conflict because it was often adult characters being very straightforward with each other, and clearing up any misunderstandings that existed in canon. And then later, it was often just intense character studies of people with no real plot or purpose. So I never got much interaction from the fandom at all.

I guess the change is that I used to write for me, and now I feel like I write for other people? I'm not sure that's a healthier outlook, but it's definitely one that produces more content! I don't think any of my stories appeal but I like to write things that defy expectation. I enjoy malicious compliance. I enjoy crack taken seriously. And I fell into Obitine out of spite for all the hate that Satine gets as a female in space.

So the stuff you wrote before was more likely to be gen as opposed to now? Oh, YES! I exclusively wrote gen. I mean, there were often romantic undertones, but nothing more than a kiss. Even now I'm much more fascinated by platonic relationships, and I love gen stories best. It's only in the past year I've tried my hand at smut, and for me, the appeal is less...Idk....horny? And more because I try to use smut as a way of replacing dialogue. Which I know is not unique to me - I love your fic, and treescape’s fic for example because you do that also! I didn't understand for a long time how smut could work

Oooooh! I wanna hear your theories on How Smut Works. I thought smut was exclusively voyeuristic for a loooooong time. I felt that in fandoms where the canon had no explicit sex that it was sort of weird and...not inappropriate but unnecessary to bring it into it? Initially a lot of the arguments I read in support of smut were to make adults seem "adult" which bothered me a lot because I firmly don't believe that sex is a sign of one's maturity.

Later, once I realised I was acespec, it made a lot more sense in that sex as a pure concept did not make sense to me. But then, I read trees’ work, and I branched out, and I realised that sex is kind of like a different landscape. And I found that for a lot of characters - characters I particularly liked - sex can articulate the things they can't actually give voice to. Like, Obi-Wan can say a lot more in how he bangs someone than he, as himself, can speak. Smut exposes vulnerabilities and truths in people.

I was talking to a friend the other day who is trying to write smut for the first time, and she was worried she'd expose her own kinks, and honestly, who hasn't worried about that? But what I've found is that that isn't the case. If you're true to the story, then you expose character.

Sometimes I’ll tuck away what I think I learned into my back pocket as something that’s interesting but not really what I’m particularly interested in writing. Sometimes I take the deconstructed idea of what I learned and write something where I try out the trick for myself. I wouldn’t say it’s copying so much as “hm, I think this is how it worked, is this how it’s done?” and then apply it to my own writing.

“Werdla” came after several re-readings of an Old Guard kink series by TheIneffableLily, who used this mood of safe and consensually sex where the kink served to make a charged emotional atmosphere, where the really truly dangerous thing wasn’t the pain play or what have you, it was the vulnerability that might be revealed through the sex. So I tried it out for myself in relation to Din and Luke, playing with the idea of Din’s helmet and Luke’s blindfold—which comes up a lot in dinluke fanfic, so much it’s probably its own trope at this point— Din’s vulnerability in removing his helmet to have sex with Luke and the trust that Luke is a good enough man that he won’t look. Later I found out that furiosophie was inspired by the mood I created in “Werdla” and used what she’d felt in it to create elements for her fic “Go and Get Your Hands Dirty.” So that’s kind of a beautiful thing in fanfic, when it’s done right and everyone is being respectful (and not stealing literal words, etc) how much of this work can be a call and response. Someone writes something that stirs a feeling in me, that feeling influences what I write next, only for someone to read my thing and get inspired to create their own thing from it. Sometimes it creates those “works inspired by” links in ao3, but sometimes it’s more subtle than that, and that subtly is where I absolutely live, die, and live again.

Tessiete: 100% ruth baulding. Ruth's stories got me back into SW, and prompted me to enter the fandom (first, intending to seek her out, but then I started writing). She just has this great balance, imo, of slightly overwrought prose that to me felt very original Star Wars-y. Kind of an elevated Lucas! And I love how she used language to convey character subtext (I've talked about this before, but she rarely uses the word "love" bc Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan don't know how to use it for each other, either. They always talk around it, and so the writing skirts it with metaphor.

Then, I'd say treescapes, and outpastthemoat. Moat has this ability to walk a fine line between tragedy and hope, and I find that particularly wrenching for Obi-Wan stories in particular. Often the most gutting parts of her fic are the smallest miscommunications. I strive for that subtlety. And with trees, her imagery just is SO evocative and poetic. She packs so much feeling into a visual moment. I literally change how I think about storytelling every time I read her work. I think about the details. The wrist bones, the lashes over the slate blue eyes, the little turns of phrase that reveal SO much. Just....incredible!!! I do consciously think of them - though it's not as clear cut as trying to copy them. Sometimes, it's just osmosis, or skill acquisition. But I think of them A LOT. Shey: I don't have one particular fic author I take writing inspiration from. Early on, I took a lot of characterization inspiration from the most popular writers in the Steter/Stetopher fandom because their take on the characters is what made me fall in love with the pairing. For example, Bunnywest writes Peter in a way I adore, and that has influenced the way I write him. Twothumbsandnostakeincanon's snarky, sarcastic Stiles is my favorite Stiles. So they, along with many others, have definitely influenced the way I think about the characters. I've spent way more time reading fic than I ever did watching the show, so the way I picture the characters is an amalgamation of the way I've seen them written over time. As far as "mindfully borrowing," that phrasing makes me uncomfortable. I do my best to keep out of other authors fics when I'm writing. (In fact, I don't read in a fandom that I'm actively writing in for this exact reason!) When you're all writing about the same characters it feels way too easy for "borrowing" to turn into copying.I also wouldn’t say I try to emulate any particular writer, either. I read a lot (32 published books so far this year, 150+ last year. Thank god for Kindle Unlimited!) and I really believe that I've learned a ton about writing because of it. I'd say the most useful thing I do to learn from other authors is read and think about the things I'm reading. What did I like? What did I dislike? What worked in the story and what didn't? WHY? On the other hand, there are plenty of authors who's work I absolutely adore and I aspire to write with the kind of skill they do. Definitely the two mentioned above, as well as Twisted_Mind, cywscross, kouriarashi, and ThisDiscontentedWinter (if you want more names, check out my AO3 bookmarks!). On the published author side, I'm obsessed with the writing of Onley James, Cara Dee, Alessandra Hazard, Hailey Turner, Neve Wilder, and Nora Phoenix to name a few. Willowcrowned: Ohhhh that’s such a good question. It’s hard to say what author most influences my writing because I’ve been writing for long enough that my go-to style has become a melange of bits stolen from some formative works. Since I do like to experiment consciously with prose style, if I’m ever trying to nail something specific, I’ll find an author that writes that way and use it as a reference. For “Smoke Raised with the Fume of Sigh,” which I wanted to have rich, luxe prose, I turned to Dark’s (hi Dark!) “The Things That Are Deadly.” For anything where I want economy of language without sacrificing setting, I’ll go back to Tolkien (my first and forever love). *

I think the benefits are huge - it's anti-mainstream, counter-cultural, and un-policed which like, where else are you going to find such fertile grounds for art these days. I think it allows people to engage with the things they love, I think it allows people to work through themselves, and their world. I think it's meant to be a safe and inclusive space, which is something we have to continually strive for. And I mean, reading it allows me to disassociate from the travails of customer service for multiple hours in a day.