The more I learned about writing, the less I wrote (in which I mourn my former productivity and lack of self-awareness).
I first opened the notes app on that one old Samsung S6 sometime during cold November 2015. At 11 years old, I typed up the title of my first story with unquestionable confidence.
One year and twelve one-shots later, a 12-year old’s Wattpad story about a certain group of Italian YouTubers reached the top ranking with over 100,000 views.
It has been ten years since that fatidic moment. Today, at 21, I still write fanfiction – yet everything seems to have changed.
ACT 12
Every day at school, during the fifteen-minute morning break, I would sit on a bench and write. Then it would be time for lunch break, and I would sit on a bench and write. No plan. No outline. Just a phone with a home button, a vision and the serotonin of a kid with no social anxiety and no language skills either.
The premise was clean enough, as far as self-insert fic goes. My original character, clearly me at nineteen (I was twelve, I was dreaming big), discovers she is the cousin of one of these YouTubers and gets folded into the group. Normal. Sweet. Perfectly functional slowburn found family setup.
And then comes the drama.
See, the thing about writing with no plan and updating close to a daily basis: the plot thickens whether you want it to or not. You run out of wholesome cousin content around chapter twenty and suddenly your hand is moving and someone is getting into a car accident. Except, for me, car accident felt small. Car accident felt understated for the emotion I was trying to convey. So it became a truck. The truck runs into the car. The OC throws herself in front of her YouTuber loverboy to protect him (what a girl). She goes into a coma. Obviously. He is by her side every single day, the only one clinging onto hope (and yes, this is called hurt/comfort, but I did not know it was called hurt/comfort. I invented it independently on a school bench in 2016 and I want credit).
The coma led to memory loss, as comas do in fanfiction, as they have always done, as they will always do, world without end amen. He has to remind her who she is. She has to fall for him again from scratch even if at some point later she regains her memories. This is a whole trope with approximately four million AO3 fics tagged ‘amnesia’and I wrote it at twelve with zero awareness that I was hitting beats older than I was.
Then, realising I had plot holes the size of the truck, I started patching earlier ones by introducing new and more dramatic plot elements. And if you know you know because every longfic writer has been here, we have all been here, we have all written ourselves into a corner and responded by adding a coma.
Then there was the antagonist. She caused the accident. She was, it is revealed, in love with the guy. Except then, plot twist, we found out (well, I also found out) that she was actually in love with the OC (another fun new dynamic to fix an earlier plot hole!!), and she hadn’t even known the OC was in the car, she just wanted the guy out of the way.
The antagonist’s situation is, in retrospect, a masterclass in accidental queercoding by someone who did not know queercoding was a thing, or that queer was a thing, or frankly that people could be gay.
Here is what I know: at some point, I decided the antagonist’s gender. And then I changed my mind. Whether it went girl-to-guy or guy-to-girl I genuinely cannot tell you, it has been ten years and I’m clearly elderly now. What I can tell you is that the reason I changed it was not narrative. It was not a bold creative choice about representation. It was because twelve-year-old me looked at what I had written, clocked that this character had feelings for someone of the same gender, and thought: hm. something seems off. I’ll just make them the other gender instead.
Accidentally wrote a trans character to avoid writing a gay one. Did not know either of those words. It seems the road to accidental representation is paved with twelve-year-olds who thought they were just fixing a continuity issue.
Later, a certain bathroom makeout scene became a meme in my community. I was twelve. We move on. If you were there, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Eventually I had written so many dramatic escalations that the only narrative exit available to me was the oldest trick in the book, the literary emergency exit, the ‘I have no idea how to resolve this button’: it was all a dream. Every single thing. The coma, the truck, the memory loss, the antagonist’s complicated lesbian-non-lesbian feelings: dream. Gone. Resolved.
Book two begins with the entire group of YouTubers having had the exact same dream. About each other. Simultaneously. And deciding to make it real.
This is insane. This is also 100k views. These are not contradictory facts.
ACT 21
I know what a theme is now. I want you to understand that this has ruined my life.
At twenty-one I am a better writer in every measurable, technical, objective sense. My dialogue has quotation marks. Both of them. Opening and closing, like God intended, like every style guide demands. For four years of my childhood I was writing dialogue with a single dash and a line break, with every character’s words basically floating in their own little paragraph like a Tumblr post from 2013. I thought it was stylish. It was not stylish. It was a crime. I have since corrected this and the correction has cost me everything.
Because when I learned the rules, I learned that I could break them wrong. And that was it. That was the end of the unbothered era. You cannot unknow what a motif is. You cannot unread a single ‘show don’t tell’ writing tip without it taking up permanent residence in your brain and screaming every time you write the word ‘felt’. She felt sad. Did she though? Did she FEEL sad or did her throat close around something she couldn’t name while she stared at the ceiling at 2am trying to remember what his laugh sounded like? WHICH ONE ARE YOU WRITING?
Twelve-year-old me wrote ‘she was sad’ and updated the next day. I have been staring at one paragraph for forty-two minutes.
The plotting situation is genuinely clinical. I cannot write a scene, cannot place a single line of dialogue, cannot introduce a single minor character, without knowing exactly how it will echo three hundred chapters from now. Is this foreshadowing? Is this a Chekhov’s gun? If I put this gun on the wall in chapter four does it go o\ in chapter ninety seven or am I just describing furniture? I am outlining things that have not happened yet in a story I have not finished starting. I have a 70,000 word document that I have never shown anyone with scenes from chapters I’ve never even reached to write.
Twelve-year-old me had no such document. Twelve-year-old me had vibes and a bench and fifteen minutes of break time and somehow produced a hundred and twenty chapters in a year. A hundred and twenty. Thousands of words. Updated daily. No outline. No beta. No idea. Just continuous forward momentum.
I have not updated in three months. Perchance this fanfic writer is doing a little meditation retreat. Perchance she is thinking about structure.
The found family dynamics that poured out of me at twelve with zero effort (the big group, everyone loves everyone, pillow fighting during sleepovers, someone always making tea, someone always sleeping on the couch) I now spend hours trying to reverse-engineer. How did I do that. How did twelve-year-old me nail ensemble cast dynamics, the kind of thing fic writers spend years trying to get right, while also including a truck, a coma, an accidental trans character, a dream sequence, and a bathroom makeout scene that became a local meme? How was all of that in the same document? How did people read it and ask for more?
100k views. I need you to keep holding that number. A hundred thousand people read the truck. A hundred thousand people were there for the memory loss arc. A hundred thousand people witnessed the dream ending and came back for book two anyway.
I am twenty-one. I have craft. I have intention. I have a novel-length planning word doc with bullet points and scenes and an outline so detailed it has its own outline.
I have not posted anything in months.
Grow up, they said. It would be fun, they said.