probably a bit of a deeper ask than we’re all used to, but as a fic creator, what does “creative writing” mean to you?
mmm, thank you for this question!
I believe that, to me, creative writing is sort of the only place where lying and truth-telling are the same thing. Which sounds stupid but what I mean is that every other form of communication earns its credibility by pointing at the world: here is what happened and here's the evidence of it. Creative writing does the opposite because the point is to make something up, entirely, that is universally believed by anybody who's reading the work.
And the "how" of it is also stranger than people give it credit for. At least for me, you don't actually know what you're trying to say before you say it: you build the whole thing and then discover what it produces. Which is also why no algorithm will ever really do this, as you can't generate your way to a 3am realization. The story has to be capable of knowing things the writer doesn't, of pulling them somewhere they didn't plan to go. I feel that if the destination is decided in advance it's always pretty obvious, it lacks depth and true originality.
And fics are their own specific flavor of that strangeness. RPF even more so, because your starting point isn't even a fictional character but a real person. A human being with interviews and photos and the way they looked in a random video. So the question you're always asking is like "could this make sense if this irl person did it?" and sometimes the answer is genuinely no. And you write it anyway. Because you're curious about the version of them where it is yes. The point is to get creative with it, write the what ifs.
And then the other thing that I absolutely love is that there's this silent agreement you make with your readers. So you had this idea at 3am, completely unhinged with barely even a premise yet, and somehow you wrote it into something. And now people are following you down that exact strange corridor. Voluntarily, for some reason. Someone read your summary and went "yes, I want to go wherever this is going" and now you're both in it together, finding out what's at the end