Writing Advice: Be Weird

This month’s question comes from Josh Hale: “In regards to the idea of making 'weirder (queer) art', do you particularly aspire to make weirder stuff? Is that the sort of content that's reserved for yourself, or is most of your writing these days dedicated to patreon, with the goal of being published eventually in one way or another? If so, does that impact what you allow yourself to pursue?”

This is a really good question. I’ve thought some here and there about why I write the particular things I write, recognizing that I’m fortunate enough to be able to write pretty much what I want, so I’m happy to talk about that a bit more. Also, talking about my own writing gives me the chance to drop in a bunch of links to my books… ;)

Firstly, I’ll acknowledge that being fortunate enough to write what I want is because I started out that way. I wanted gay furry stories and so I wrote them, and enough people liked them that I made a little money from them. But while I try to put a queer element into everything I write (there are a couple exceptions), I get bored easily of writing the same kind of story over and over. I wrote a bunch of gay furry romance, and then got interested in supernatural New Adult adventure, wrote a mystery along the way, a midlife crisis/gentrification story, an alternate history fantasy, and a plain ol’ epic fantasy adventure, among other things. Some of those things I think count as “weird,” depending on your scale, definitely when you put them all in context together. But anyway, the point is that I started out writing what I wanted to write and continued doing that, and people who found my work and liked it came along for the ride.

(I recommend that writers write what they want, because that’s the only thing you have real control over. If you were chasing the market, then in 1999, you might have started writing a book about a magic school; in the mid-2000s you might have tried a vampire story. But so were a lot of other writers, and there’s no guarantee that by the time your book is ready, those trends would still be as hot. The books that started those trends weren’t written in response to the market; they were written because the writers loved those stories and wanted to tell them. If you write your own book, you might find it harder to sell (I have sent out many agent queries and have yet to get a response more positive than “I like the writing but I don’t know how I could sell this”), but you will have made a book that you’re proud of. Keep at it and the audience will find you.)

But back to the question at hand (at paw). First off, let me clear up how my Patreon works: Everything published in Patreon is intended to eventually be published in some form. The Patreon is a place where supporters can see early drafts of my work months or years before it becomes a book. Not all of my books go through Patreon first, however. Many do, because I have two Patreons and one of those has a higher tier that gets an additional story, and my foxy paws can only type so much at a time. But the forthcoming Weasel Under The Sun, for example, did not get serialized in Patreon.

Second, let’s talk about “weird.” As a definition, when I talk about “write weird stuff,” what I mean to say is, write the story that resonates with you and include those things that you might not have in common with the world. I feel that a lot of times, people repress in their writing the parts of themselves that they don’t think the majority of readers will connect with. I want to see those parts, because I want to know what else is out there in the world, what other ways to live there are, and because you never know; maybe there are a lot of people repressing the same thing. That’s how the furry fandom keeps growing: we keep talking about our weird like of animal people and a lot of other people keep saying, “Oh yeah, me too!”

As regards my work, I don’t really have a cache of “weirder” stuff that I keep for myself (and close friends); I feel like mostly the stuff I’m writing is pretty weird in the sense that furries are not very mainstream, and queer fiction is not very mainstream. The romance community was a little startled by Out of Position, but a lot of them still liked it. However, within the furry community, my work is maybe not very “weird”; furries and queer people are pretty accepted. This past year I saw the launch of a series of furry books about trans superheroes, which is great if not technically what I would call “weird.” Even in the furry community, there haven’t been many books with trans main characters (The Price of Thorns is one of those!). Furry writing is branching out to cover a lot of different types of main characters and topics, and that’s how it should be. Even within our community, there are new and different horizons to explore.

I don’t reach too far out beyond myself to find things to write about; I don’t seek out “weird” things. I do, however, have a pull to write things I haven’t seen out there in the world before, or things I haven’t seen with a gay furry twist. Plus, I want to highlight experiences my friends and I have had that maybe a lot of people haven’t experienced. So a couple of my books now have featured poly relationships as I’m living happily in my own, and the upcoming Azure City is going to be in some respects about a weird imagining of the dystopian corporate landscape we’re currently struggling through, and the Wolftown series is a werewolf-infused take on our modern civil rights situation. But also, Weasel Under The Sun is just an Agatha Christie mystery with furries and lesbians (and maybe a touch of class struggle) and the Robin Hood fanfiction I wrote (hopefully out next year) will mostly just be a fun adventure in the woods of 13th century Europe with a fair amount of sex. Are those weird? Maybe. I dunno. It’s just what I wanted to write, so I wrote them.

And that’s my advice to you. You’re weird, because we’re all weird in some way. So write the stories that are yours. Be weird; be yourself.