Your Fictional Farm is Wrong
Apr. 30th, 2019 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://bit.ly/2WgBGfk
kailthia:
elodieunderglass:
lynnafred:
Or, How To Write Life on a Farm
By me. A person who spends more than half their waking hours on a farm.
So you’re sitting down to write a fic, and you decide on a farming AU. It’s something that you don’t expect to put a lot of time in, it’s only for fun, and really, let’s face it: you haven’t been to a farm since your second grade field trip where you got to pet a cow and that one really unfortunate kid (you know the one) slipped off the bus and fell in mud and had to walk around in borrowed coveralls three sizes too big all day.
If you’re expecting something like this:
(yes that’s my farm STOP JUDGING ME)
Then you’re forgetting the two most important things about farming.
Farming is GROSS and farming is WEIRD AS FUCK.
Read on for some schooling about life on farms and how you, too, can incorporate some good old farming zaniness into your next WIP.
Keep reading
Things Are Gross and Things Are Strange
a couple other things of note from my own experience in a farm family:
farm people are not sentimental about the animals. You learn very early as a child that the critters get turned into food. You can be fond of the animals, but that’s tempered by the fact that there are no pets on a farm. Even the domestic animals work - the cats kill mice/bugs, the dogs help with other animals and/or chase away birds, etc
similarly, any child on a farm knows that meat doesn’t come from behind the counter of the store. If they’re young, they probably don’t see/help with butchering, but they know.
Animals poop a lot. A lot.
You have work clothes/shoes - especially boots, for safety reasons. You change out of them when you come inside. They’re dirty and stinky. For your convenience as a writer, treat it like a uniform. Your character doesn’t spend their non-work time in their fantasy McDonald’s uniform, they wouldn’t spend it in their barn clothes. For some of the same reasons.
All the things in the bulleted list in the OP are true, and correct, but they are notably vegetable-centric. Understand that if you add in livestock, it immediately gets one thousand times grosser and more stressful, because like, it sucks if you forget to roll up the wall of the greenhouse and your seedlings get too hot and die, but when you forget to roll up the wall of the chick brooder and your baby chicks have the exact same thing happen to them it is SO MUCH WORSE. I won’t get into how many animals eat one another sort of casually, or the things you’ll find inside of a chicken on the processing line, and so on. And the poop. Oh god the poop.
Also, anyone whose cute farm AU includes a farmer’s market?
That shit is not cute, for the most part, and there are meetings, and there’s drama, and it’s super, super, super exactly like the rest of the real world. I support them, of course, and I love working on the farm, but I don’t for a second think of the farmer’s market as a cute romantic place.
(Your picture was not posted)
kailthia:
elodieunderglass:
lynnafred:
Or, How To Write Life on a Farm
By me. A person who spends more than half their waking hours on a farm.
So you’re sitting down to write a fic, and you decide on a farming AU. It’s something that you don’t expect to put a lot of time in, it’s only for fun, and really, let’s face it: you haven’t been to a farm since your second grade field trip where you got to pet a cow and that one really unfortunate kid (you know the one) slipped off the bus and fell in mud and had to walk around in borrowed coveralls three sizes too big all day.
If you’re expecting something like this:
(yes that’s my farm STOP JUDGING ME)
Then you’re forgetting the two most important things about farming.
Farming is GROSS and farming is WEIRD AS FUCK.
Read on for some schooling about life on farms and how you, too, can incorporate some good old farming zaniness into your next WIP.
Keep reading
Things Are Gross and Things Are Strange
a couple other things of note from my own experience in a farm family:
farm people are not sentimental about the animals. You learn very early as a child that the critters get turned into food. You can be fond of the animals, but that’s tempered by the fact that there are no pets on a farm. Even the domestic animals work - the cats kill mice/bugs, the dogs help with other animals and/or chase away birds, etc
similarly, any child on a farm knows that meat doesn’t come from behind the counter of the store. If they’re young, they probably don’t see/help with butchering, but they know.
Animals poop a lot. A lot.
You have work clothes/shoes - especially boots, for safety reasons. You change out of them when you come inside. They’re dirty and stinky. For your convenience as a writer, treat it like a uniform. Your character doesn’t spend their non-work time in their fantasy McDonald’s uniform, they wouldn’t spend it in their barn clothes. For some of the same reasons.
All the things in the bulleted list in the OP are true, and correct, but they are notably vegetable-centric. Understand that if you add in livestock, it immediately gets one thousand times grosser and more stressful, because like, it sucks if you forget to roll up the wall of the greenhouse and your seedlings get too hot and die, but when you forget to roll up the wall of the chick brooder and your baby chicks have the exact same thing happen to them it is SO MUCH WORSE. I won’t get into how many animals eat one another sort of casually, or the things you’ll find inside of a chicken on the processing line, and so on. And the poop. Oh god the poop.
Also, anyone whose cute farm AU includes a farmer’s market?
That shit is not cute, for the most part, and there are meetings, and there’s drama, and it’s super, super, super exactly like the rest of the real world. I support them, of course, and I love working on the farm, but I don’t for a second think of the farmer’s market as a cute romantic place.
(Your picture was not posted)
