This and that

[luzula]

1) In case you didn't see it on ds_noticeboard: On Saturday 7 pm GMT, seascribe and I are going to meet up on Skype to watch either a couple of due South episodes, or the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt. We haven't quite decided yet. Do join us if you want! My Skype-id is luzulae.

2) I still have the last part of it to read myself, but if you missed sage's workshop on writing casefic, you should check it out! I really recommend it.

3) I did some statistics on my own fic, and out of 29 scenes where Benton Fraser has sex with another man, 22 are from his POV and 7 from the other man's POV. OTOH, out of 7 scenes where Fraser has sex with a woman, 1 is from his POV and 6 are from the woman's POV. I feel that this is kind of telling. *facepalm*

Comments

[sage]

eep, thank you for reminding me I need to finish editing in the internal links! And answering some comments! *adds to list*

[luzula]

And I should read the last part! But OTOH I'm finishing up my dSSS now, and that takes precedence...

[calvinahobbes]

Thank you for the casefic link, I shall have to check out it. *bookmarks*

[luzula]

I hope it's useful to you! : )

[desireearmfeldt]

That is interesting data and could tell all sorts of stories...what story do you think it tells? :)

[luzula]

Well, my interpretation is that I have a general tendency to write from Fraser's POV, but that when I write het this is apparently trumped by some sort of self-insert thing. Whatever, I freely confess my desire to have sex with Benton Fraser.

It actually took me the longest time to be able to write sex from a woman's POV, whether het or femslash. The thing is, I know what's it's like for me to have sex in my own body, and I'm female. But obviously sex does not feel the same for all women, and I was kind of caught between writing my own experience and deliberately writing something that is not my own experience. It was more freeing to write from a man's POV because I have no experience of that at all (though of course I can do research). But I finally found a solution to writing sex from a woman's POV: I managed to go deeper into the character POV and find out what they wanted and what they would feel like. I got away from the feeling that what I was writing necessarily had to do with me.

[desireearmfeldt]

Heh, I would have assumed "write the female point of view" or "identify with female characters" before "self-insertion" as a general principle. :)

(I find I, myself, have a strange tendency to write heterosexual romance from the male character's POV. I haven't come up with a totally satisfactory explanation for why I do that. And I don't always do it. But then, I don't write all that much explicit sex, and the issues are perhaps somewhat different for that specific case.)

I also wonder...Fraser het (assuming we're not talking about genderswapping or crossovers) is by definition a story about Fraser + some character who is much less focal and well-defined in canon (even if it's Thatcher or Frannie; certainly if it's someone like Janet or Denny), or an original character. In a situation like that, is there an instinct to write from the POV of the less-well-defined character?

[luzula]

Heh, I would have assumed "write the female point of view" or "identify with female characters" before "self-insertion" as a general principle. :)

Well, that may also be a factor? And I was exaggerating--I didn't mean self-insertions in the sense that the characters are me. I mean, considering several of them are Fraser/Victoria, that would be kind of scary. *g* At least to me, they do feel to me like they are actually written from the specific character's POV, and not like veiled self-insertions. But still, I think there's some sense of identification going on there.

Hmm, the only het sex I've written which was not with Fraser was a Ray K/Stella piece, and that was from Stella's POV. Note to self: try writing het sex from the male POV more, if only as practice.

I also wonder...Fraser het (assuming we're not talking about genderswapping or crossovers) is by definition a story about Fraser + some character who is much less focal and well-defined in canon (even if it's Thatcher or Frannie; certainly if it's someone like Janet or Denny), or an original character. In a situation like that, is there an instinct to write from the POV of the less-well-defined character?

Not for me, I think? I mean, I've written Fraser/Smithbauer, Fraser/Eric, and Fraser/OMC, and in all of those cases I wrote from Fraser's POV. I do tend to identify with Fraser a lot in general.

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

Interesting topic to contemplate in all seriousness...after (my brain being "gutter" + "brain" = OTP) having a chortle about various ways of reading "self-insert thing".

[luzula]

Yeah, it's an interesting topic in all seriousness. *gazes into navel* Although yes, brain-in-gutter is another way to approach it. *g*