So. I have a theory.

I've been writing rubbish for the last couple of days. It's rubbish that I find amusing and it is fun and easy to write, but all the same there it is - rubbish. I am well aware of this fact and I'm just going with it because while I suppose that technically I could tweak this bad idea of mine into something vaguely resembling a coherent and worthwhile story, I decided that all things considered it really wasn't worth it. The amount and time and effort that would go into making it non-OOC, non-ridiculous non-claptrap is time I'd rather spend elsewhere when it's not even a sure thing that it'd work.

In the course of writing this nonsense, which is rather unfairly prone to grow by thousands of words every time I so much as glance in its direction, I have come to wonder if maybe this is what writing badfic is like.

Now, first things first: this isn't my railing against all you people who can write quickly and fantastically to order. Perish the thought. It's just me wondering, through my experiences of writing what I know to be bad fanfiction quite unlike the work I usually struggle to produce, if bad fanficcers feel like this all the time and - not knowing what it's like to actually have to work at a piece of prose in any way other than figuring out what happens when and then aiming themselves at the end - mistake for the actual craft of authoring a story. It can't be coincidence that so many bad fanfics just stall, their authors baling as soon as the story actually required a degree of thought put into it as to where to go from here.

If the craft of creating then authoring a story can be likened to painting a picture of a vista that only exists in your mind, writing like this is doing the same thing with fuzzy felt. It's fun but the end result isn't a beautiful landscape, it's a load of pre-cut colored blobs on a fuzzy blue board. It's just not the same.

You see, while writing this I'm hearing barely a peep from my inner editor. Bitch must have gone on holiday or something.

The problem with writing like this? I'm not producing this terrible story this quickly because the Holy Light of Inspiration has descended on me; it's because I'm genuinely not trying very hard. It's easy writing, which for me at least means almost by default that it's also self-indulgent, stupid and all other shades of not very good. Oh, I'm having fun, don't get me wrong - but I'm not about to kid myself that the finished product is going to be worth anyone else taking the time to bother to read. Because it's crap.

I can't escape the feeling that this isn't so much writing as it is a detox for my imagination - just dumping the stupid stuff on paper to rot so that I can tell some real stories later on. It's the fictional equivalent of sticking a hose in my ear and waiting for the leaking to start. I put all these ridiculous thoughts down onto paper in a coherent form and, satisfied that they've found expression, they quietly slink away. That's it.

I don't have to put any real effort involved in this stuff. There's no conscious attempts to make it work, to justify anything that happens from a narrative standpoint or to take the time to string together a coherent plot. I'm not even trying to make it accessible, it's work with a perceived audience of one. The most thought I've put into this involves coming up with a laundry list of Stuff I Want To Put In and then seeing that it ends up in there in some vague kind of order. It's actually pretty fun to be able to just pour thoughts onto paper without constantly having to second-guess myself or wondering that if I decide to do Thing A now it will somehow stop Thing E from making sense any more, but it doesn't feel like I'm actually writing a story. I'm just doodling with words.

There's nothing the matter with doodling with words, mind: just don't stick the resulting mess in a gallery then wonder why the praise isn't rolling in.

No, producing something that is always going to be bad and silly while I continue to write it like this has not given me a renewed appreciation of what it's like to be a bad fanficcer and deciding to cut them some slack. It's actually making me wonder why in the world so many fanficcers seem to be incapable of realizing that the rest of the internet just doesn't need to know this shit.

My problem isn't the production of bad fanfiction. It's the fact that having stuck the metaphorical hose into their ears and let the resulting heaving, semi-coherent brainmess spatter where it may, the bad fanficcer's immediate response is to sit back, heave a satisfied sigh, and slap the whole thing up on the Pit under the title All That I'm Living For or something else equally emotastical and irrelevant because clearly that - that easy, purgatory spiel, that process of taking a private fantasy and dumping it onto paper the better to make room for the next one - is what writing for an audience is all about. There's nothing the matter with wanting your impossibly hot proxy to bang Aya, or to see him bang Schuldig. Really, there isn't. I just don't understand why drag the rest of us into it. Daydreams we can have by ourselves.

That being the case, I will not be sharing the fruits of my own pointless, nonsensical labors with the rest of the 'tubes. There's just no point.