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In retrospect...
My approach to fanfiction has changed drastically over time. Long gone is the little girl who would sit up in bed at night, scribbling away at any available piece of paper in the dark, stommach fizzing with excitement and glee at her own ingenuity. (Ah, those were the days... it was about eight years ago now since I started writing, I think!)
I miss how easily stories came to me back then. How simple it was to just let my pen fly over the paper and how slightly frustrating it was that my fingers weren't fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. Then came "Narn i Moralphwen".
That story changed everything. I had decided that I was going to write it properly, and so I set out to formulate all kinds of masterplans and lots of schematics to represent the symbolic proximity between the characters throughout each chapter. I also had a list of all the topics and scenes I wanted to include. It should have been monumental - instead, it turned out to be a tepid fanfic with a silly OC that sapped away all of my creativity while making it into FF.Net's C2 "Worst of the worst" (or some such title to the effect).
Not quite learning from my mistakes, I soon after set out to write another fanfic, this time for Saint Seiya: "A Torre dos Ventos". I took a mixed approach: I let each chapter write itself as I'd done in the beginning, while I kept tabs on the overall progress of the story with the methods I'd devised for "Narn i Moralphwen". This is still my current strategy, although I eased back on the schematics after a while, lol.
It's funny how this evolution accompanied my own growth as a person. I lost my naïve cheerfulness and became a lot more cynical after going to college, and it shows on how serious (and sometimes heavy) my writing style has become. I would never be able to write something like "Ennor: my style" at this point - my last (barely-)humourous fic "Eu conheço-te?" is proof enough.
On a minor scale, it also shows on the fics I choose to read. I still read a lot of trash, because you never know what pearl of an idea might be hiding inside, unknown even to the author, but still I've become a lot more selective. I never used FF.Net's search filters quite as much as I do now. I only read fics that prominently feature certain characters in which I'm interest, and that feature them in certain situations. All other fics, no matter how good they are, can burn as far as I'm concerned.
Anyway, all this was to say that I fear my writing style has become too serious and analytical. I feel like I'm constantly stiffling the characters...
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