neesha_dreamer, tartanshell and cuban_sombrero ! *waves*Question time: do you ever suffer not so much from writer's block as writer's 'blank'?
They say write what you know, but a lot of us write what we don't know, especially in fanfiction. I mean, I would love to have a magic wand and a teacher that could turn into a cat, but nope. If I'm writing something I'm not familiar usually I just do a bit of research, then try to relate it to something I do know about, so I might not know what it feels like to be missing a leg, for example, but I know what it's like to limp.
Yet there are some things that I just can't write, maybe because they're so outside my sphere of influence. I've read some lovely smutty fanfictions (admit it, who hasn't?), but when it comes to romance in my own writing I get up to a bit of groping and then I hit a wall. I don't think (or at least I really hope) that not all the authors I've read have actually done some of the things they write about, so I wonder if they just don't have that 'blank', or maybe they hit it when they try to write about someone learning to ballet dance...
So, I'm curious, has anyone 'blanked'?
Storytime: A Fred and George ficlet for you, just a bit of fun, only about 300 words and U rating - that's 'universal'.
Getting Rid Of Leftovers From An Early Experiment
“Do you think she’ll notice?” George asked.
He looked around furtively before lifting the roof of the hen house up, shifting it to one side a little and upending a large bag over the gap, making sure that the mouth of the bag was inside the gap so none of its contents landed outside the hut.
Fred grabbed the bag above where his twin was holding it and shook it back and forth enthusiastically. “Nah, she won’t.”
“Yeah, but it’s Mum isn’t it?” George’s eyes kept flickering across the backyard to the windows of the house, checking to see that no one was watching.
“She doesn’t know everything,” said Fred, but he sounded less than convinced of his own words. “She thinks all those explosions in our room are just us messing around.”
George rolled up the now-empty cloth bag and stuffed it up his generously-sized Weasley jumper, although technically it was Fred’s since it had a large ‘F’ on the front, but they always swapped.
“Coast’s clear,” he said, eyes still on the house. “In the backdoor and straight-”
“-up the stairs. Good plan.”
They put actions to words, heading inside as fast as possible without going fast enough for it to look suspicious, just in case anyone was watching.
“I think we’ll need to work on them a bit more,” Fred said once they reached their room. He flopped backwards onto his bed with a sigh. “Maybe something to make the after effects disappear once the charm’s worn off.”
“Something like that, yeah.” George pulled the bag out of his jumper and threw it at his brother’s head.
(In their little hut at the bottom of the yard at the Burrow a number of chickens wondered why it had rained canary-yellow feathers, but chickens only have small brains and they didn’t bother thinking about it for long.)
A/N: An early version of the Canary Creams where the feathers molt, but then land on the floor and after all the experimenting Fred and George get up to that probably amounts to a lot of feathers....
curious