December daily: What I enjoyed writing

rhi prompts: what story did you most enjoy writing?

It's an interesting question, because I find that the stories that I'm now most proud of are usually ones that, on the whole, I did not enjoy writing.

Or -- that's a little strong, but they're usually the ones that were a major struggle, that went wrong over and over before they went right, that even now I can look at and see the cracks and the places where what I had taken on was just that much beyond my skill level so that I fell short of what I had in mind. That was the story with The Teeth of the Hydra in Due South, the last story of the Interface series in SGA, and of course Transfigurations in Harry Potter.

At the other end of the spectrum are low-ambition, low-stakes things. Smutlets are like that, of course. One-shots in fandoms that don't really exist are, too. I think it's because, if there's no fandom to engage with and no other stories to be (as academics used to say) in dialog with, the problems that a story has to solve are going to be fairly simple ones. (Can I, while staying within reasonable tolerances of canonicity, get these guys in the same place at the same time with a little privacy? Can I imagine them having sex while still sounding like themselves?) Where there's an active fandom, those questions have already been answered in a way that satisfies me, and so I feel compelled to take on bigger ones. (Can these two people actually have a relationship that doesn't look like the 'relationship' between a cat and a baby mouse? Canon gives us a character who always chooses some particular thing over everything else; can he choose love over that and still be himself?)

The stories that have been the most fun to write have been ones that were neither cakewalks nor spacewalks but just nice walks. Breaking and Entering in Inception, Higher Education in The Breakfast Club, Abstain in SGA, Amenable in Sherlock -- they're nice lengths, they unfolded in the writing process pretty much in order, they didn't do that thing where you finish a draft and then you discover (or your betas tell you) that it's flat and lacking in bite and you need to go through it again and unfold it into the third dimension.