At 13:03 04/01/02 -0800, you wrote:
People really write stories just for themselves?
Yep. Or at least 'a person'.
I feel baffled-- writing is hard work,
I'm going to disagree--or at least vary--right here, and say that for the majority of the time I find writing to be both easy and fun. If I didn't, I wouldn't do it as a hobby. Hard work is something I only do when I get paid to. :-)
whereas picturing things in my head is easy, and can be done in endless variations.
Indeed it is, and I do a lot of that too. It's one kind of fun. However, I find picturing things has distinct limitations. When I daydream, I do it in detail--line by line dialogue and so on. There is only so much that I can keep in my head at one time. I have to keep running over it to remember it. So if I start thinking of a story, by the time I get through three or four scenes, I've lost the earlier ones.
I only started writing fanfic quite recently, because it took a suprisingly long time for me to realise that if I simply wrote things down, I'd be able to remember them. Obvious, you might think, and you'd be right. Why it took so long for me work it out, I have no idea. Possibly because I thought it would be too difficult and I'm basically a chronically lazy person (see above).
I can daydream in vivid colour, but I can't keep a hundred thousand world novel fresh and clear in my head. I could outline the plot, but that wouldn't be the same as seeing every scene. It's certainly not the same as being able to sit down right now and be able to read it again.
And I do, genuinely, like to read them again. I also like to reread profic novels--in fact, I usually enjoy books more the second and subsequent times through, when I'm less distracted by the plot and can enjoy the prose more.
I write only in order to be read.
This seems very strange to me--almost unimaginable, in fact. But that's why I love talking to people about why and how they write. Everyone is different, and fascinatingly so.
So, tell me, why does a peerson write it out if they don't care if anyone reads it? As a record of their imaginings? I'm seriously curious.
A record of my imaginings is actually a very good way of putting it. A record, and also a foundation for future imaginings.
I love world building. I would far rather write AU stories than strict canon, because that's what interests me. Like self-insertion characters, AU limits the potential audience but, as I've said, that's not a real concern for me.
By writing stories down, I can create a richer, more complicated AU world to play in. Because I have a record of what went before, I can build on it, make the characters more detailed and so more real, and the plots more intricate. Relationships and people can evolve, but if I want to go back and set a story at an earlier point in the timeline, I can easily get myself back into the voices of the characters at that 'when'. I can have 'canon' stories, and stories that may or may not become part of the characters' reality, and I can keep them separate.
Stories can reference the past and foreshadow the future. Characters can remember something that happened fifteen stories and three years (of their time) ago--maybe an incident which I didn't place much importance on at the time I wrote it--and it can have profound effects on what happens in the current story. Similarly, I can go back and read earlier stories, and find things in them I didn't see before, which lead to entire new stories.
And if all I want to do is daydream away a boring afternoon at work, I have my world ready to play in...but if I come up with something I particularly like, I make sure I write it down.
love Anna