Oww..oww..Stop that! It Hurts!!
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| Title: | Oww..oww..Stop that! It Hurts!! |
| Creator: | Clio |
| Date(s): | 2001? |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | multi |
| Topic: | writing fanfiction |
| External Links: | Oww..oww..Stop that! It Hurts!! (archive.org mirror) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Oww..oww..Stop that! It Hurts!! is an essay by Clio at Slash Sluts.
In it, the author discusses the hurt/comfort genre, though veers off into general tips about writing.
Part of a Series
- Why are the slashier tv shows so rarely slashed? by Clio
- Feminizing Men: A Male POV by LuckyD
- Feminizing Vs Effeminate by Clio
- Suddenly Gay?!? by Clio
- We Have Seen the Enemy and She is Us by Lefey
- The Muse's Bitch by Clio
- Oww..oww..Stop that! It Hurts!! by Clio
- How to Write Bad Fanfic in 10 Easy Steps by Snarkybitch
- 4 Characters in Search of a Plot -- Slash Version by Snarkybitch
Excerpts
Now I love h/c (hurt/comfort) fics as much as the next person. I mean I'm a big fan of angst. Love angst and that is often accompanied by some h/c. A good healthy dosage of angst can really help a story come along. Hell, in some pairings the angst is necessary to overcome some shit from canon. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing though. Some writers tend to cross the line from hurt/comfort right into out and out torture.
A while back I read this one series of stories (that I think prompted a bitch on this subject) where the writer(s) crossed that line from h/c to just torturing the guys. The line is a subtle one and is crossed easily. Here's a tip: If there is more hurt going on than comfort, it's moved into the torture arena. This series of stories I'm using as an example started out good enough. I had read the first couple of parts that were posted to the lists and liked them well enough. When I came across a site that had more parts to the series posted I was excited about it. I ended up being disappointed.
I have seen many series go bad, because the writers were making the plot up as they went. Stories change as we write them, some turn out to be very different from their initial conception as time goes on. When you write a story and post it to the net, it's out there. I think writers get stuck in thinking that there is no changing it. 'Even if you post a revised version, people still remember the first one. So why bother?' Thus, writers are perhaps often reluctant to post revised versions. Which is to bad. Sometimes you have to change things early on to get the characters out of a fix you've gotten them into later in the story. Sometimes changing something in the beginning is the only way to save them in the end. I think writers shouldn't be reluctant to repost some revisions if that's the only way to have things work out.
N ever put any character through so much torture they will never recover. I've read stories where characters are just raped repeatedly. There is no recovering from that. It is hard enough to recover from being raped once. Some people never do. I had a great aunt who was raped, some guy broke into her apartment and attacked her. She was shattered, it took years for her to recover. It's no different for men than women. It's unbelievable for them to recover after about a minute.