A Paean to Creative Circuits: grateful thoughts on fan-creation and exchange

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 00:14:29 GMT

(These are inevitably not very original or ground breaking thoughts, but I feel them with a new acuteness today, and they are wholly new to me : ) )

Dreamwidth friends, the most beautiful thing's happened! One of the people reading my Stucky fic Love Among the Ruins, @northwolvess, unexpectedly created a playlist with a song per chapter, and it's _exquisite_. I have been rereading the story so far with that chosen song on loop and it was BEAUTIFUL experience.

I wanted to write about it because I am both so delighted by the surprise and also so startled at how intense the impact is, and I wanted to think about why – that lovely alchemy of exchange, so central to fandom. I won’t be academic, I want to stay particular and personal. And obviously this is all old hat to all of you, you are all super experienced and may be amused at my novice marveling :D -- but let me think about it.

So why am I crying happy tears as I hear this amazing music? I guess it is that somebody read the words, the feelings I was trying to convey in the words (devotion, love, sadness, tender joy) and felt those things too, in a different and new way, and then found MUSIC for them, and then gave it back in turn! It's like a beautiful circuit of melancholy & joy.

Listening to it is simultaneously disorienting and familiar, uncanny in the absolute best way. The music is SO moving, and it absolutely takes me as a hearer to the places the chapters were! - via a totally different thing. I am struggling to find words for this -I feel like I have kind of been given the story _back_, like somebody took it, turned it into a new and different beautiful thing, an iridescent lovely thing, and then made a gift of it.

I think also, in this instance, it means so especially much because this fic is so incredibly intimate and vivid to me, and draws on so much of my own emotion (and to some extent experience, though I didn’t realize that when I was writing it!) and also the many many years of research that went into it. I mean, I have been thinking about these things for more than eight years. And to have THAT somehow echoed back, makes you feel SEEN and HEARD in a way that is actually profoundly moving. I feel, like, personally seen. It’s very moving.

I feel incredibly heard. It's incredibly moving. I am genuinely sniffling. It's lovely. I am so so surprised, both by the action, and by how intense it is as an exchange.

comments

Still all about the poignancy of ex-Soviet assassins

A Paean to Creative Circuits: grateful thoughts on fan-creation and exchange