4 things: birds in my fics, bookbinding process, formative fiction thoughts, bird bones as metaphors

[sophia_sol]

one

I'm enjoying the thought that if a person reads any one of my fics from the last few years, yeah there's probably something birdy mentioned or present but it doesn't have undue narrative attention. but if a person reads a bunch of my fics, well, a suspicion will have to arise that it's a bit weird for birds to keep on coming up and being relevant like this in so many fics!


two

the problem with bookbinding is the steps that involve "let your project sit for hours to days while glue dries or paper flattens"

what do you mean I can't just hyperfocus and push through from start to finish in one inadvisable go


three

I've been thinking about the idea of formative fiction, and it's a concept I have always struggled with because like....how do you tell if a book or movie or whatever was actually formative, in that it contributed to forming you?

sometimes media has been obviously formative to me in that the wider experiences I had around a book did have noticeable effects on my life -- for example, how other people reacted to me reading it, or the experience of engaging with other fans of it.

or sometimes my enjoyment of a piece of media or engagement with it was reflective of other pre-existing formative influences in my life, in that I was only exposed to that media or predisposed to enjoy the things it's doing because of aspects of the environment I grew up in

or sometimes a piece of media took up an outsized amount of my attention and interest, or was particularly compelling to me on a visceral level from a young age, and which points to themes which continue to be a presence in the narratives I enjoy engaging with. but that doesn't mean the piece of media caused me to be interested in the theme, since it might have been speaking to an interest which was already within me. and it doesn't even mean that piece of media is was what made me realise I was interested in the theme?

so I'm really not sure I can say that any particular piece of media was specifically formative to me!


four

recently I was reading a short story that said something intended to be weighted with meaning about the hollowness and frailty of bird bones....I was immediately like: bird bones are thin and hollow but strong for their size! they are dense and they have a better mass to strength ratio than mammal bones! your metaphoric resonances are wrong!

Comments

[lokifan]

recently I was reading a short story that said something intended to be weighted with meaning about the hollowness and frailty of bird bones....I was immediately like: bird bones are thin and hollow but strong for their size! they are dense and they have a better mass to strength ratio than mammal bones! your metaphoric resonances are wrong!

Hahaha been there (though not with that specifically).

Totally agree on the formative stuff, too, but I might decide I don't care and post about it anyway.

[cahn]

Hahaha been there (though not with that specifically).

Me too! :)

[pauraque]

I was like, "I don't think my fandom presence is suspiciously birdy" and then I looked at the fandom name I've had for the last 20 years. Oh right. (Not many people know that's the name of a bird, though!)

When I say media was formative for me, I usually mean it was something 1) I consumed at a young age 2) that introduced me to concepts important to my understanding of the world as an adult 3) which I think I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to until much later when I might have already formed strong beliefs about its themes. Of course you are right that it's not possible to say definitively that I wasn't already predisposed for some reason to find them compelling, but even if so, the specifics of their presentation influenced me in how that predisposition was shaped into more specific perspectives. Maybe I am naturally an empathetic person, but Black Beauty gave me very specific impressions about animal welfare at a young age when nobody else was talking to me about it. Maybe I am naturally optimistic about humans, but Star Trek gave me very specific ideas about human potential and the inarguable fact that Luxury Gay Space Communism is the ideal human society; if I'd found a different piece of media that spoke to my optimistic tendencies, maybe I'd still believe humans have a positive future but my thoughts on what kind of future it is would be different.

[sophia_sol]

I definitely didn't know that the pauraque is a kind of bird until recent years! I would say it's because we don't have pauraques in my region but there's plenty of birds in my region I had no idea existed before I got into birds lol

that makes a lot of sense to me as a way of framing formative media! I do feel though that for myself, even with that framework, I have trouble pointing to specific works...I think that for me it takes enough processing time for the influences of a book to seep in that by the time the ways it shapes me have settled, it's been long enough that I can no longer point backwards to where they came from? maybe?

[chestnut_pod]

You know, I think next year I might start to "fic birdwatch." I wonder how many species I can get on my lifelist!

[sophia_sol]

omg I love that! I definitely do birdwatching when I'm reading books by ursula vernon (or under her pseudonym t kingfisher) - she often will have appropriately specific bird references and I always delight to see it

[cahn]

oh interesting with formative fiction... there are some books where, the way I describe it in my head, there is a "before" and "after" reading them. Like, there is a bit in The Dark Is Rising (uh, one of my formative books!) where Will thinks, "the world he had inhabited since he was born seemed to whirl and break and come down again in a pattern that was not the same as before," and that's how I feel about these books. A Wrinkle in Time, The Dark Is Rising did that to me as an elementary school kid... Ender's Game (I know, but it did) and The Tombs of Atuan to a somewhat lesser extent as a middle schooler.

interestingly, I can't think of movies or TV shows where there was this sort of stark "this changed the way I thought about things" except for, of all things, Star Trek V, which was the first Star Trek I'd ever seen and which I was like, "wait, you can do this??" Which is highly ironic because I of course learned later that most people don't consider ST:V to be a particularly good movie, but it blew my mind.

[sophia_sol]

oh wow I didn't realise that for people who talk about formative fiction it can be so obvious that there's a before and after! that's fascinating! and it's so alien to my experiences....I didn't know that this is one of those ways in which my brain is just different than standard

and hey, when we're young we have less experience with books and movies and narratives as a whole, and something can be mindblowing or revelatory despite significant flaws because they still introduce us to something we haven't had the chance to encounter before! no shame over one's formative books/movies not all being widely considered "good" :)

[geraineon]

Hm, I guess for me, I'd agree with what pauraque said about formative fiction. Sometimes, it's a collection of things that has the same themes/themes that are related. Sometimes, it's an explicit slash fic I stumbled upon when I was a kid XD (I didn't really think about it until now, but in hindsight, that was incredibly formative!)