fic writing crazy
Aug. 30th, 2011 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been thinking about writing, and I think that writing fanfic requires a different kind of crazy than writing original fic. I mean, either way, we have people in our heads talking to us. The writing skills have a lot of overlap. Fanfic and tie in fic and screenwriting for established shows all require you to grasp character voice, and mostly want you to work to template, with established genres and possibly a five act structure or something. It's writing inside scaffolding. Original fic has to build its own scaffolding, decide its own structure for certain, figure out its genre, and put character descriptions in somewhere (which my fic, at 54000 words, has thus far failed to do. A couple of comments on skin tone and hair color, quite a lot about uniforms, and some names. I may need to fix that.)
The major difference though is that fanfic is a conversation. It may be the part of the conversation where you realise everyone wandered off or possibly stopped to feel eeew, but it's part of a conversation. There's people talking about it already. You are taking in what they say and responding to it. You know there's going to be a response. Okay, sometimes that response is deafening silence, but seriously, any fic can get at least one hit. Some of mine on AO3 only had one, last I looked, but it was the stuff I put warnings on for first ever finished fic that is quite terrible. I'm kind of glad there's no eyeballs accruing to the terrible fic. But even so, somebody looked at it. I can't imagine why. Possibly to point and laugh.
ANYway: Fanfic has an audience.
Original fic requires you to talk into the void.
There is not just a blank sheet but an empty auditorium. Nobody is talking about these characters. Nobody will miss them if you say sod it half way through and stick it in a drawer. You have a head full of imaginary people, but you are the only one who imagined them, which may or may not be crazier than the way fanfic does things, I can't figure that part. But you are definitely, as you are writing, talking to yourself.
Different kind of crazy.
The risk/reward ratio is all different too. I mean, if someone reads and likes my original fic, it's not because of the fanfic characters I buried in the skeletons of it. If it were fanfic it would be terrible fanfic. The mega crossover of doom with everyone out of character. It is no longer fanfic, and it no longer draws on those shared structures. So if someone, somewhere, actually reads it on purpose, it's because they want to read me. My thing. What I wrote. Out of my head.
Big win, if it pays off.
But, conversely, if nobody reads it, that's kind of deeply depressing.
Plus any *fail that turns up in the story is because I put it there. I can't blame the source texts. Well, I can blame western society and British-with-American-imports culture, but beyond that, no blaming. If I screw up, I screw it up. It would be embarrassing.
Also, nothing is in the story because it was in canon. If my kinks are showing, I have nothing to blame. It makes it a bazillion times more embarrassing trying to write sexy bits. I can't point at a billion other fanfics doing the exact same thing (only much more so). Anything to do with sex is just sitting there on its own. No social framework. No genre of shared mostly-porn. Just science fiction with sex.
Plus there's the thing where I'm in a conversation, but I have read much, much less of it. Written science fiction, all of it, is a conversation. But I haven't read much of it since the 90s. I used to read dad's Analog subscription. That was like skimming the conversation. But I haven't for way more than a decade. So whatever everyone has been talking about, I haven't read it. There's a lot of ways that could go bad.
I have watched SF television and movies, but they're having a different conversation, often looking back several decades for inspirations, and thinking they're clever. I know I'm not being clever. I've set up a central conflict where one side is saying 'not people!' and the other side is saying 'people!' and the SF genre, as a whole, has long since decided 'people!' I mean, when Data was on trial, was anyone in the audience voting for him to be equipment? Not so much. So why have this argue again?
... television is still having this argue. See: Battlestar and Terminator and Dollhouse. What makes a person, not so much simple or settled.
But, to SF readers, is it pretty simples? Quite possible. And then nobody cares even slightly about the book because they've decided it already.
... the book exists to get Malcolm and Trice to fall in love. But they're up to holding hands in hospital so far, and I'm 54,000 words in, and that thread just isn't central enough to call it a romance, so I need to do proper plot. Which I wanted to. I just... don't think I've done it very well.
Most of that is me being insecure though.
So there are a lot of ways that writing fanfic is a different game than writing original fic, and does not prepare you for it.
And having written a ton of words does not actually make it easier to write another ton of words into that big empty.
The major difference though is that fanfic is a conversation. It may be the part of the conversation where you realise everyone wandered off or possibly stopped to feel eeew, but it's part of a conversation. There's people talking about it already. You are taking in what they say and responding to it. You know there's going to be a response. Okay, sometimes that response is deafening silence, but seriously, any fic can get at least one hit. Some of mine on AO3 only had one, last I looked, but it was the stuff I put warnings on for first ever finished fic that is quite terrible. I'm kind of glad there's no eyeballs accruing to the terrible fic. But even so, somebody looked at it. I can't imagine why. Possibly to point and laugh.
ANYway: Fanfic has an audience.
Original fic requires you to talk into the void.
There is not just a blank sheet but an empty auditorium. Nobody is talking about these characters. Nobody will miss them if you say sod it half way through and stick it in a drawer. You have a head full of imaginary people, but you are the only one who imagined them, which may or may not be crazier than the way fanfic does things, I can't figure that part. But you are definitely, as you are writing, talking to yourself.
Different kind of crazy.
The risk/reward ratio is all different too. I mean, if someone reads and likes my original fic, it's not because of the fanfic characters I buried in the skeletons of it. If it were fanfic it would be terrible fanfic. The mega crossover of doom with everyone out of character. It is no longer fanfic, and it no longer draws on those shared structures. So if someone, somewhere, actually reads it on purpose, it's because they want to read me. My thing. What I wrote. Out of my head.
Big win, if it pays off.
But, conversely, if nobody reads it, that's kind of deeply depressing.
Plus any *fail that turns up in the story is because I put it there. I can't blame the source texts. Well, I can blame western society and British-with-American-imports culture, but beyond that, no blaming. If I screw up, I screw it up. It would be embarrassing.
Also, nothing is in the story because it was in canon. If my kinks are showing, I have nothing to blame. It makes it a bazillion times more embarrassing trying to write sexy bits. I can't point at a billion other fanfics doing the exact same thing (only much more so). Anything to do with sex is just sitting there on its own. No social framework. No genre of shared mostly-porn. Just science fiction with sex.
Plus there's the thing where I'm in a conversation, but I have read much, much less of it. Written science fiction, all of it, is a conversation. But I haven't read much of it since the 90s. I used to read dad's Analog subscription. That was like skimming the conversation. But I haven't for way more than a decade. So whatever everyone has been talking about, I haven't read it. There's a lot of ways that could go bad.
I have watched SF television and movies, but they're having a different conversation, often looking back several decades for inspirations, and thinking they're clever. I know I'm not being clever. I've set up a central conflict where one side is saying 'not people!' and the other side is saying 'people!' and the SF genre, as a whole, has long since decided 'people!' I mean, when Data was on trial, was anyone in the audience voting for him to be equipment? Not so much. So why have this argue again?
... television is still having this argue. See: Battlestar and Terminator and Dollhouse. What makes a person, not so much simple or settled.
But, to SF readers, is it pretty simples? Quite possible. And then nobody cares even slightly about the book because they've decided it already.
... the book exists to get Malcolm and Trice to fall in love. But they're up to holding hands in hospital so far, and I'm 54,000 words in, and that thread just isn't central enough to call it a romance, so I need to do proper plot. Which I wanted to. I just... don't think I've done it very well.
Most of that is me being insecure though.
So there are a lot of ways that writing fanfic is a different game than writing original fic, and does not prepare you for it.
And having written a ton of words does not actually make it easier to write another ton of words into that big empty.