u/Emotional_Bit_6090

I've been actively reading fanfiction for many, many years, yet I have only picked up a handful of books during this time. I'm trying to read more books this year tho and I've gotten through a couple already. I noticed two major differences:

1. It was difficult for me to imagine the characters from books 😭 there are many of them with varied characteristics to memorize. I'd been so used to reading fanfiction of characters that I already had visual representations of.

2. Narration style. I'm used to either character-centric or omniscient third person narrator from fanfiction, so it took me by surprise when one of the books I read had an "omniscient" FIRST person narrator. Another one was first person from the pov of a mentally ill girl, and it skipped a lot of punctuation and spaces on purpose. I loved both of these concepts and want to write fanfiction implementing them.

What has been your experience personally? With all the discourse about "fanfic prose"/"tumblr prose"/"purple prose" going around just recently, I expect there to be a lot of differences tbh.

Btw, I understand that these are two different mediums and not really comparable, but since both are fiction literature, it makes for a fun conversation.

I'd been mostly clean for ~2 years, but relapsed recently. The thing is, back then I had mastered the act to the point which I knew exactly how much strength to apply to get what I wanted, but now I'm scared that I'll mess something up if I apply too much force so I can only do babycuts. I've been doing this since I was around 9 - 11 and that thought had never crossed my mind until now that I'm 24. Has this happened to anyone else? It's very frustrating because I don't get the emotional release I'm seeking with how superficial I'm doing them now, but I'm terrified to go deeper than intended (even though I have a lot of experience and know that realistically it's hard to go dangerously deep).