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kaigouRecently I followed a link over to the ferretbrain, a review-site from a group of Brits, with a focus mostly on SFF (fiction and games) but with occassional forays into romance, history, and other fiction genres. After reading (and being generally pretty impressed by) the original review linked to, I started following links within the site, and ended up on a DNF review for Cassandra Clare's first book.
Now, the disclaimer here is that I've not read it, and had no interest in reading it, and that for the most part, whether or not Clare's fiction is any good -- as an objective value -- is pretty much irrelevant to what I'm about to say here. She's getting mentioned only because that review discussed her work, and more specifically highlights a pattern found in a broader scope of works. The reviewer seems to me to be pretty fair about the fact that the work is ostensibly a rewrite of a Harry Potter AU, observing that:
From there the reviewer considers the specific story, the characters, per the usual review. What crystalized things for me was the reviewer's explanation about where she stopped reading. Thus far, the basic plot has been protagonist meets demon-hunter, hijinks ensue, and shortly after that (maybe 60 pages into the story overall), the protagonist happens upon this young demon-hunter while he's alone in a music room, playing the piano. Up to this point, the demon hunter has been
The reviewer goes on to suggest that fanfiction works on a basis of potential plausibility, that is, giving the reader a situation or behavior not seen in canon that, when argued/presented by a skillful fanfic writer, become plausible (believable) extrapolations of the original character. But this also means paying more attention to the character's actions, mindsets, mannerisms, whatever, both to reinforce the character's shared story-origins -- eg speaking patterns, or facial expressions -- and then to overlay the subtle changes introduced by the fanfic's author.
I'm a visual thinker and more precisely an architectural-engineering thinker, so the best analogy I could come up with for understanding this is to use the idea of renovation a house. (No surprise, eh.) Let's say you want your guest bath and laundry room a bit more efficiently laid-out. This image is a before-and-after, but if all you saw was the second (right-hand) image, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be completely baffled.
There are few landmarks remaining to tell you how you got from where-you-are to where-you'll-be. That's what the gray outlines are doing in the left-hand image; they're acting as "before reminders" so you can see how things have been rearranged. This is exactly how fanfiction works (and especially AU fanfiction): the character's original/canonical state becomes those "shadow lines", which a good fanfic author must reference in some way, to give readers a starting point before the author begins character or story renovation.
Contrast this with looking at the plan for an entirely new-to-you house. It doesn't need to give you a Before, or tell you how this relates to that, because it can exist independently; this applies so long as you were unfamiliar with the original structure and only seeing it now for the first time. In contrast, if you looked at the above plan of a new-to-you house and saw shadow-outlines of the toilet, the bathtub, and the front door in different locations, it would probably throw you off. It would seem out-of-place, and more importantly, unnecessary information. Against the main set of information (black outlines) that you don't know well enough yet anyway, it's nearly impossible to appreciate the changes.
The reviewer called this "blowing the load" but I think it's more that the shadow-lines of past renovations, or the piano playing, are info-dumps that come with intended emotional overtones, and that is the neon sign bonking the reader in the head with: "you should fancy this character now." Or, "you should hate this character" -- but even those two are just the opposite sides of a coin that says, "you should recognize this character." Those shadow-lines allow you to say, "oh, I seeeeeee, that was there, and this is now gone, and this is here when it was originally over there, I see what you did there." But if you've never bloody well seen the house before, and don't have an intrinsic, visceral understanding of the house from living in it and walking through it, then the moment of "I see what you did there" means little, if anything at all. You won't really get any additional meaning you don't already get just from the basic, unshadowed, black-lined, floorplan.
What fanfiction readers look for, and one of the main rules of good fanfiction (especially AU), is to create that moment of walking through a familiar house, looking at someone's suggested renovation, and making that leap from "what was" to "what it'll be" (when renovation is complete, when story is done). That's where we find the familiarity in fiction (in fanfiction and in ofic sequels), such as when an author intends to shift your perception of a familiar character. This technique is often used in sequels where a former alleged-bad-guy gets his turn at being reformed (or is to be revealed to have not been all that bad in the first place). The author must first lay out the original as shadow-lines, and then write over with the new character-plan.
Again to quote the reviewer:
By definition, those floorplan shadow-lines get written with a certain amount of "this is important!" from the author, because that's part of the gearing-up prior to the renovation, to get everyone on the same spot on the "before" floorplan. I don't mean a build-up before the scene (to give us a logical introduction to it), but the amount of words given to the scene/moment itself. That's where the "seems less purple" comes into play in fanfiction, because that excessive attention paid to this specific moment acts as both black-outline and shadow-outlines at the same time. It's a movement that requires your fiction to do temporary double-duty, and is a useful skill when you're writing a sequel and want to tweak the reader's memory without going into a massive info-dump. It's also a hallmark of fanfiction, to tweak the readers on a point (or moment) of original canon, even as you shift the lens a bit to reveal a fuller image.
The problem is if it's the first time you've ever met a character or story, in which case you're getting "this is important!" clanging bells, but you have no basis for what this contrasts with. Now you have two sets of contradictory or near-contradictory information in your head and haven't yet gained the familiarity to distinguish what-was from what-is, let alone to assess the emotional import of either. And that's where the revelation -- because that's really what that moment is, that I see what you did there -- falls completely flat in original fiction.
followup: horsehair plaster and engineering a story structure and some thoughts on juxtaposition (part1 and part2) ... and I ain't done yet.
Now, the disclaimer here is that I've not read it, and had no interest in reading it, and that for the most part, whether or not Clare's fiction is any good -- as an objective value -- is pretty much irrelevant to what I'm about to say here. She's getting mentioned only because that review discussed her work, and more specifically highlights a pattern found in a broader scope of works. The reviewer seems to me to be pretty fair about the fact that the work is ostensibly a rewrite of a Harry Potter AU, observing that:
...there are three possible attitudes, or at the very least a spectrum with some definable stopping points on it:
1) Fanfic is art, man, art and there is ultimately no difference between If You Are Prepared and Bleak House. They're both pretty damn long for starters.
2) Fanfic is like original fiction but not as good, and is basically written by people who can't get their own stuff published
3) Fanfic is entirely different from original fiction
Since the first one is clearly non-viable, and the second is actively rude, I subscribe to the third. Writing for fans and writing for publication is vastly different, and to assume that the one aspires to the other is rather to miss the point (and, arguably, the pleasures) of fanfic. Even so, I would have thought the gulf between fanfic and original fiction to be eminently jumpable. I mean, the ability to string a decent sentence together is a transferable skill, right. Right?
From there the reviewer considers the specific story, the characters, per the usual review. What crystalized things for me was the reviewer's explanation about where she stopped reading. Thus far, the basic plot has been protagonist meets demon-hunter, hijinks ensue, and shortly after that (maybe 60 pages into the story overall), the protagonist happens upon this young demon-hunter while he's alone in a music room, playing the piano. Up to this point, the demon hunter has been
...rude and snippy, so it's clear that this little scene is meant to show us a different side of him but character revelation scenes only function when you know the character well enough to experience it as a revelation. This is just ... information, excessively presented. It's like being hit over the head with a neon sign saying: "you should fancy this character now." And for the record, he's a demon hunter, not a concert pianist so there really is no reason to have that scene there except as drool-footage.
[...]
What the scene did for me ... was exemplify the subtle sense of wrongness I'd been getting throughout the previous 62 pages. Essentially [the book] reads like fanfic - and I don't mean that as kneejerk indicator of poor quality, I mean that it reads like something constructed for a different purpose, functioning on a different ruleset... The scene of Jace/grand piano has utterly no resonance for the reader because, well, partly because it's rubbish and partly because no time has been given to properly establishing the character so it's essentially meaningless, but mainly because it has no real sense of its place in a connected, developing narrative.
The reviewer goes on to suggest that fanfiction works on a basis of potential plausibility, that is, giving the reader a situation or behavior not seen in canon that, when argued/presented by a skillful fanfic writer, become plausible (believable) extrapolations of the original character. But this also means paying more attention to the character's actions, mindsets, mannerisms, whatever, both to reinforce the character's shared story-origins -- eg speaking patterns, or facial expressions -- and then to overlay the subtle changes introduced by the fanfic's author.
I'm a visual thinker and more precisely an architectural-engineering thinker, so the best analogy I could come up with for understanding this is to use the idea of renovation a house. (No surprise, eh.) Let's say you want your guest bath and laundry room a bit more efficiently laid-out. This image is a before-and-after, but if all you saw was the second (right-hand) image, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be completely baffled.
There are few landmarks remaining to tell you how you got from where-you-are to where-you'll-be. That's what the gray outlines are doing in the left-hand image; they're acting as "before reminders" so you can see how things have been rearranged. This is exactly how fanfiction works (and especially AU fanfiction): the character's original/canonical state becomes those "shadow lines", which a good fanfic author must reference in some way, to give readers a starting point before the author begins character or story renovation.
Contrast this with looking at the plan for an entirely new-to-you house. It doesn't need to give you a Before, or tell you how this relates to that, because it can exist independently; this applies so long as you were unfamiliar with the original structure and only seeing it now for the first time. In contrast, if you looked at the above plan of a new-to-you house and saw shadow-outlines of the toilet, the bathtub, and the front door in different locations, it would probably throw you off. It would seem out-of-place, and more importantly, unnecessary information. Against the main set of information (black outlines) that you don't know well enough yet anyway, it's nearly impossible to appreciate the changes.
The reviewer called this "blowing the load" but I think it's more that the shadow-lines of past renovations, or the piano playing, are info-dumps that come with intended emotional overtones, and that is the neon sign bonking the reader in the head with: "you should fancy this character now." Or, "you should hate this character" -- but even those two are just the opposite sides of a coin that says, "you should recognize this character." Those shadow-lines allow you to say, "oh, I seeeeeee, that was there, and this is now gone, and this is here when it was originally over there, I see what you did there." But if you've never bloody well seen the house before, and don't have an intrinsic, visceral understanding of the house from living in it and walking through it, then the moment of "I see what you did there" means little, if anything at all. You won't really get any additional meaning you don't already get just from the basic, unshadowed, black-lined, floorplan.
What fanfiction readers look for, and one of the main rules of good fanfiction (especially AU), is to create that moment of walking through a familiar house, looking at someone's suggested renovation, and making that leap from "what was" to "what it'll be" (when renovation is complete, when story is done). That's where we find the familiarity in fiction (in fanfiction and in ofic sequels), such as when an author intends to shift your perception of a familiar character. This technique is often used in sequels where a former alleged-bad-guy gets his turn at being reformed (or is to be revealed to have not been all that bad in the first place). The author must first lay out the original as shadow-lines, and then write over with the new character-plan.
Again to quote the reviewer:
Scenes of certain characters doing things they never explicitly did in the books (even if this is fucking each other) resonate with you because it feels both novel and familiar ... [Such] scenes require no build-up because the reader already knows the characters being written about. Equally, dwelling on the details, and presenting very visual, senusous scenes, seems less purple than it does when you do it in original fiction because it helps to establish a familiar character in what may be an unfamiliar setting ... Fan fiction, even if you're looking at a 100,000 word AU fic, seems to be all about the establishment of moments, which need not necessarily (and probably don't) exist as part of a continuum of moments. [The result is a book that's] original fiction without the necessary underpinnings, and fanfic without any of the characters you like. Worst of all possible worlds. [emph mine]
By definition, those floorplan shadow-lines get written with a certain amount of "this is important!" from the author, because that's part of the gearing-up prior to the renovation, to get everyone on the same spot on the "before" floorplan. I don't mean a build-up before the scene (to give us a logical introduction to it), but the amount of words given to the scene/moment itself. That's where the "seems less purple" comes into play in fanfiction, because that excessive attention paid to this specific moment acts as both black-outline and shadow-outlines at the same time. It's a movement that requires your fiction to do temporary double-duty, and is a useful skill when you're writing a sequel and want to tweak the reader's memory without going into a massive info-dump. It's also a hallmark of fanfiction, to tweak the readers on a point (or moment) of original canon, even as you shift the lens a bit to reveal a fuller image.
The problem is if it's the first time you've ever met a character or story, in which case you're getting "this is important!" clanging bells, but you have no basis for what this contrasts with. Now you have two sets of contradictory or near-contradictory information in your head and haven't yet gained the familiarity to distinguish what-was from what-is, let alone to assess the emotional import of either. And that's where the revelation -- because that's really what that moment is, that I see what you did there -- falls completely flat in original fiction.
followup: horsehair plaster and engineering a story structure and some thoughts on juxtaposition (part1 and part2) ... and I ain't done yet.
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 19 Nov 2009 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 19 Nov 2009 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:25 pm (UTC)And I should note that such skill or lack thereof is really independent of story-telling skill overall -- I've read plenty of stories where I can't see the IC of the canon cast in the least, but it's a damn good story in its own right. Although now that I think of it, I'm having trouble recalling stories where it's the opposite. I guess those would be the ones that cleave so closely to canon they're practically retelling the story in its entirety with little addition of their own.
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:31 pm (UTC)Also, there's the existence of fanon to consider - people can use this shared conscious of information to build further on. For example, if we were to look at Gundam Wing fanon, we see the "shadow" which is cast is almost larger than the actual canon. It's the assumptions of the fan that can be built upon - where a person who has only seen the actual series will flinch at the OOC of most of the characters in fanfic, a fanon fan will be looking for those distortions.
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:44 pm (UTC)That perfectly nails my irritation with the Regency sub-genre in romance, or at least what's been recommended to me. Some of the tropes in that sub-genre are pretty much fanon, and accepted as-is, even if they're historical nonsense. If you come from history-mindset, you'll flinch as I did, likely, at some of the genre's assumptions -- even as genre-fans were telling me that my dislike of those bits were obviously my problem, because the sub-genre's regulars think that stuff is great.
Distortions, too -- fits very well with the notion of seeing the same picture but through someone else's lens. That can distort the image, but the really amazing fanfiction authors use that lens instead to bring things into sharp clarity that had been fuzzy in the original.
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Date: 20 Nov 2009 12:01 am (UTC)A lot of my favorite fanfics are the ones that play on the fandom cliches, inverting them to show a different spin... there's nothing I like so much as reading something and saying, "of course, that makes sense now!" or "that is EXACTLY what should happen/how it is."
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 09:50 pm (UTC)So I read a lot of fic from that same perspective, and then I actually saw canon -- and I came back to find that some of the fics I'd loved were suddenly unreadably OOC. They were still well-written, but suddenly I had mental voices for the characters in more detail than "laconic" and "Southern, verbose," and the fanon ones didn't fit, and I could see where people had taken fanon exaggerations of canon throwaway traits or lines and built on them as a solid foundation, instead of making them be a "shadow" from the canon foundation.
(Oh, and I'm here via
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 10:22 pm (UTC)In fanfic, you can assume the reader's emotional involvement, and canon as a basic template the reader already has. In original fic, you need to start from zero on both of those.
Absolutely -- you pretty much summed up the entire post very neatly. Man, I need to start learning to do that myself, but I have too much fun wandering around and poking at different ideas to ever manage to get so concise. Le sigh.
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 10:04 pm (UTC)Which is TL;DR to say that I pretty much agree with what you're saying.
Tangentially related - part of the difficulty I'm finding with original fiction is that I can do almost anything, and so I don't know where to start, whereas with fan fiction I still have some boundaries, of varying degrees of firmness and clarity. One of the ways I've tried to work around this is to treat my first draft (usually written during NaNoWriMo) as a potentially-good-but-problematic source material, and my subsequent drafts are "fanfics" that "fix" the problems in the "canon". (Apologies for the abuse of air quotes.) Of course, here I run into the problem that I can't utilize the external referencing mechanism that goes on in real fanfic, but it's an interesting thought exercise.
And now I'm going to dig through the other TL;DR about CC's work on that site, 'cause I read the first book and was thoroughly unimpressed by it. I was also a bit miffed with some of the spoilers I found out about in the other two books, particularly the nature of Clary and Jace's relationship and the fate of Simon.
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:30 pm (UTC)But that's also one of the most powerful aspects of good fanfiction. It's like a type of retconning, where you take the source material and flip it on its head: it does require that readers also know the source material. Plus, the better you know that material, the better you'll be at flipping; I can tell when someone's trying to do that but doesn't have quite a solid enough grasp of the source material to manage.
One of the ways I've tried to work around this is to treat my first draft (usually written during NaNoWriMo) as a potentially-good-but-problematic source material, and my subsequent drafts are "fanfics" that "fix" the problems in the "canon".
Definitely an interesting exercise, and some serendipity there since that's what the follow-up to this post segues into, to some degree. I just had to run errands and whatnot, so decided I'd hit a good stopping place and posted what I had. More coming in a bit.
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:40 pm (UTC)True, but the issue here isn't the goal -- which for any type of art is really communication, plain and simple -- but the methods used, and the question of whether those methods are (1) "artistic", (2) "inferior", or (3) an entirely different toolbox than that used by original fiction.
Because really, the technique described here may not be useful at all in original fiction (except in the unusual case of sequels in which one plans to tweak earlier-established perspectives of one's own canon), but it's an integral and maybe even paramount skill to have in writing fanfiction. I'm not sure if this was the reviewer's intention, but when someone says "it's art, man," that usually implies (to me) that the person figures "it can't be analyzed", that is, "it just is, man." Deconstructing art usually does render it kinda flat, after all, if art is happening in the spaces between the plotted points -- but I don't agree.
I think all forms of writing can be art, but they can also be deconstructed to reveal their interior structures, just like we can reduce a poem to its rhyming scheme. That doesn't necessarily tell us why or how the poem is "artistic", only how the poem was constructed and then perhaps to gauge what impact this inner construction has on its artistic value (or perhaps to regard the two as separate enough that it doesn't matter anyway).
[As for KmO, actually, I meant literally the voice, as in the word choices. I've been writing a much stuffier set of characters over the past year, and I need a bit of practice to get back into such heavy slang and random obscenities. Heh.]
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:54 pm (UTC)Ah, gotcha! I know what you mean--once I'm finished working on a story, it sort of falls out of my head, and I forget large chunks of what I wrote and my voice for the POVs in that story.
I'm currently working on a new novel while doing PR for a book that was written about five years ago, and I've actually gone back and re-read portions of the published work to refresh my memory for the interviews I've been doing, and damned if I don't feel like someone else wrote large chunks of that book. The style and voice of the new novel are quite different from the deliberate echo of 17th-century prose rhythms I aimed for in the previous work.
Maybe I'm just weird.
(No worries about the screening--I'd actually intended to just post the first sentence, and then found myself rambling on...and on...and then about KmO... because I'm having a boring afternoon at work, but I'm too tired to open a Word file and tackle the next scene of my novel.)
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Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Nov 2009 05:19 pm (UTC)This is a great post, btw!
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 10:25 pm (UTC)used in fiction quite a lot and quite effectively. But it's got to be done diferently.
I think that's part of it, though -- fanfic writers who are really good (that is, get a strong reaction from fans) think, this can be translated into original fiction, and be equally enjoyed. And maybe it can... but then a lot of fanfic writers (myself included) discount the patterns we've learned in fanfic, and don't realize we're discarding what are very useful skills, if translated properly. Then there are fanfic writers who seek to write ofic (or rewrite fanfic as ofic), who retain all those styles/tropes and ways-of-writing, and don't get why they're being criticized. To go even more tangential to your comment, I think some fanfic writers get cranky about ofic'd-works because they say, "this is nothing like canon!" or at least the numbers are filed off so well that outside someone who read the fanfic version, no one would guess. And probably no one does -- except that the mode of telling the story retains those fanfic hallmarks.
I guess you could say, something gets lost in translation -- and what needed to be lost, didn't get lost. Heh.
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Date: 22 Nov 2009 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Nov 2009 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Dec 2009 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 10:29 pm (UTC)Though it does make me wonder -- because the number of stories I've read that are M/F and were originally fanfic, those I can count on one hand. The number that were M/M and ofic'd... I don't think I have enough fingers and toes for all of them. In some ways, the confluence of slash+internet really exploding the fenslash branch of every fandom, running concurrent with the growing M/M romance line ... it does seem as though it should be a logical movement, from writing fandom slash to writing original works but with the same basic dynamic.
Though the problem in there, for me, is when all I see of a writer's works are rewritten fanfic, and no new -- written distinct and outside of a fandom -- stories. I start wondering if all stories, perpetually, are going to be rehashed fandom-based works, and that's not fair to the author. But it's still something that gets into my assumptions and colors my reaction.
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Date: 15 Dec 2009 09:06 pm (UTC)How would you account for original fiction that is also a retelling? Particularly works are meant to stand on their own, but that they have added resonance if you are familiar with the source material?
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 10:36 pm (UTC)IOW, if you're retelling, then a lot of the story's original high-points and emotional movements, you're going to cover in your retelling, I'd think (unless you're a really lazy writer and do the "and then she went to the ball, la la la, but at midnight!" and I'm just supposed to know the rest, which pretty much fails as a story, if you think about it. If you're going to be subversive, though, you really do need an audience familiar with the original (or at least the tropes the original is built on), or else how is it obvious/apparent that you're subverting a particular paradigm?
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 04:22 am (UTC)Semi-OT, but it's also interesting to point out the "cookie-cutter" formulas of some fanfic, where you can pretty much replace the names of the characters in said fic, and maybe change the setting, time, etc, and you'd get a brand new fic for a different fandom (it could even be read as original fic!), and the entire thing would a waste because there is a lack of characterizations (speech pattern, mannerism, to use your examples) to whatever fandom's character you're using. I think it is definitely important for fanfic writers to keep in mind with the importances of also making the character whole in the writing too.
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 10:41 pm (UTC)OH IT HAS BEEN DONE. Has it ever! Though the most egregious was rereading a sex-scene and going, okay, I KNOW I've read this before, I KNOW I've read this before... why, yes, yes, I had! Amazing. Not. *snort*
I think, though, that fandom often polices itself (and has a quiet to noisy response to such stories, depending on the fandom and the extent its members overlap with other fandoms, or the extent to which the fandom is active and thus has learned to be picky about what it considers its 'greatest stories'). But that, though, is just one of the hallmarks of a lesser fanfic writer -- the cookie-cutter elements or lack thereof -- versus those fanfic writers we know and adore, who fill in all the blanks and flesh out the characterization so adroitly that we feel as though we're meeting the characters, fresh and new, all over again.
Even more OT than you: I think my favorite, personally, is when I finish a fanfic that has a writer-created detail of backstory, quirk, or sidestory, and I say, that makes perfect sense, and I'd never even thought of that before. Sure, the canon doesn't say X dropped out of school, but is ambiguous, and if X did drop out as writer Y is arguing here, then yeah, that reaction writer Y ascribes is one that fits perfectly with fandom. Woah! That is too cool. It's like a freaking easter egg, unplanned by canon, but hey -- another type of plausible potentiality, I suppose.
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 06:30 am (UTC)Tangentially: om nom nom, analysis chocolate cake. :)
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 10:46 pm (UTC)Exactly! That had me wondering (and when I wonder about stuff, I start writing, and then I get into trouble about 10K words later...) because I've read fanfic that has absolutely nothing of value against plenty of ofic -- it's flat, it's predictable, it's cliche-ridden, it's angst-festy, and yet I loved every minute of it. Then I read ofic that barely casts a glance in the direction of angst and I'm all, stop it, boring me, geeez! It's an irritant rather than a tension-builder, and that's part of why I started wondering whether fanfic can teach a writer anything, if so much of what it values detracts, not adds, to original fiction. I think my current tentative conclusion is that fanfic has story-telling styles that are relevant to ofic writing, but that it's a how, not a what, and most fanfic writers are bringing over the what instead.
Erm, which is very badly worded, but my brain is a bit preoccupied right now. Though I probably came up with a better way to put that in one of the follow-ups to this post -- I didn't have them linked at the end, but I edited post to add them, so if you scroll up, you'll see the links to further contemplations.
Because, cake!
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 07:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 11:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 11:13 pm (UTC)When I tried to return to original fic after a decade of fanfic-only, I quickly had to stop and rethink the way I was writing, because I was writing as if background and characterisation was self-evident.
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 11:29 pm (UTC)Heh, yeah! ...the lack of those can really highlight when someone's come from the fanfic world, and has absorbed the attitude of making those assumptions. On the other hand, if you can translate the skill with a deft hand (or just give yourself a lot of practice while NOT throwing out the story with the fanfic-water), I find fanfic authors are less likely to pile on the freaking backstory than a skilled fanfic writer, who's learned that some things can be left unsaid, so only needs to add a bit more. In contrast to the straight-up-ofic writer, who needs to learn to withhold stuff, let it be implied, and stop piling on a plethora of details as if to convince me by sheer word-count that I know this character and thus feel for him.
Part of that, too, is that in fanfic, we're already assuming you/the-reader at least recognize this character, so the fanfic-writer doesn't have to convince you all over again via big gestures. The best fanfic writers convince you that this character is recognizable via tiny things, little details, that make you recognize the character in the spaces between the plot/conflict -- and ofic writers don't always have that deft sense, not without a boatload of practice.
Then again, some former-fanfic-authors I've read throw out that deftness, and go overboard in the opposite direction, as if terrified that you won't like this character at all unless they spend a whole lotta word-count convincing you he's worth your time. It's like they're forgetting (willfully or thanks to crit-responses) that part of what makes fanfiction work, and all fiction IMO, is that we recognize not a character but the character's archetype. The greatest fandoms that I've seen are those that operate on and manipulate archetypes as the character-bases, which makes the characters both immediately recognizable in canon (even when brand-new to readers), and also infinitely manipulatable for fanfiction. That versatility with, and fluency in, archetypes, is a skill fanfiction really brings to the fore, and it's a pity when fanfic-gone-ofic writers forget that.
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 08:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 11:15 pm (UTC)Absolutely -- also my favorite. Nothing really makes a fanfic spectacular for me quite like the ones that take the canon and prod and push it just so, until it's both canon and something more, something that makes me stop and say, oi, I never even thought of that!, or, I never looked at it quite that way, omg, the author is so right! The kinds of things that make you wonder if some authors have direct pipelines into canon-creators' minds, or are just that good at seeing underneath the canon's presentation to see the potentials.
But that I went into more in the follow-up posts, if you've not found them already. The ideas in those are applicable to ofic as well (especially in the 2nd part), but it's just that fanfic really comes down hard on those particular skills, and that those skills really require the reader be able to participate in the author's ingenuity. Otherwise, it's kinda flat, like the piano-playing: you get that something's going on, but you don't have enough info to realize exactly what. As fans in a shared fandom, though, we do realize what else is going on, and that adds to our enjoyment even when the story is otherwise riddled with cliches, badly-written, flatly characterized, or otherwise pedestrian in some way.
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Date: 18 Dec 2009 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 11:21 pm (UTC)But from a writer's perspective, there may not be any new stories as a whole, but there are still distinct stories recognizable not by their individual features but by the way those elements come together. Certainly many people have written blond bimbos, and vampires, and high school life, and geeky friends, and whatnot, but only Whedon put those disparate elements together in this precise way to come up with this specific combination. I mean, you can take flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and baking soda and there's still no mistaking sugar cookies for sourdough biscuits.
The genre tropes are another facet of that mix, too: kinda like how cookies use one egg as a binder, but two if there's a rising/yeast-like action involved. Chemistry, as it were, and the same goes for tropes. Use this one to get this, use that one to get that, and a mix of tropes in this way will be subversive while in that way it'll be classic genre. Fanfiction doesn't have to build the house, I agree on that point, in that it's borrowing the genre-tropes likely already in existence via the original house's construction... but it's not like fanfiction can't radically redecorate, or even gut, the existing house, especially when you get into the more subversive forms of fanfiction -- and I include stand-on-its-head retellings like Wicked or Ash in that. Yes, I do see those as a type of fanfiction, if a bit more professionally delivered, but those stories do require one have some foreknowledge of the house prior to the crazy renovation-and-redecoration madness.
It can be a bind on professional writers that don't necessarily want to follow market forms, and ff gives opportunity for that kind of experiment without making unreasonable demands on the reader.
It also means the author is freed from certain requirements -- not necessarily beginning, middle, end, so much as the time spent to re-introduce you to this character or to describe that one or even to make you believe that these two are in luuuurve. But more than that, as long as a fandom is willing to read anything (as it usually is) so long as certain pairings or characters are in place, the author is freed up to mess around with the delivery over the content. I've read more second-person stories in fanfiction than I think I had in who-knows-how-many-years of published (and unpublished) ofic stories prior, and more wacky fusions of this fandom and that Shakespearean or this Austinian plot, and more strange and baffling short-stories that pivot on style or voice or some other gimmick. I mean, the entire notion of 'songfic' is one big honking gimmick, but it's one you can play with in fandom because you don't have the burden of building the house at the same time you're stapling the furniture to the ceiling.
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Date: 19 Dec 2009 12:53 pm (UTC)Oh there was a book about that. Claude-Levi Strauss, I think. A bit extreme, but his points are well taken.
"I do see those as a type of fanfiction, if a bit more professionally delivered, but those stories do require one have some foreknowledge of the house prior to the crazy renovation-and-redecoration madness."
I'm not so sure. For me, the main thing that separates fandom from pro-writing is the marketplace. (I'm actually doing my Phd on fanfiction, identity and politics). It's true that ff has, in some sense, a market - a readership that will judge it and reward or otherwise - but there's no pressure on the author to shape it accordingly, because the worst that can happen is not winning fan-acclaim. Once something becomes your livelihood, I think it's subject to structural pressures (to yet further continue the metapohor) than fandom isn't. Anyways great thread, looking forward to reading the continuations.
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Date: 19 Dec 2009 04:06 pm (UTC)In the subset of fanfiction in which there is no official permission -- the gray underbelly of other-story-reliant fiction -- then yes, the marketplace is a huge dividing line. Part of that is because of the legal issues, and part, as you mentioned, is because of the different market that demands and shapes the fiction itself. And I definitely agree, from what I can see, that fanfiction doesn't have pressures that pro-fiction has, seeing how there are now several writers who continue to write fanfiction even as their own work is published professionally. That says to me that there's something they get from (or can do with) fanfiction that they can't get/do in their original fiction.
My point (mostly, and I do have one!) in these posts was considering how fiction works, and trying to demonstrate that fanfiction -- so often treated as the red-headed step-child of fiction -- does have its own techniques and skills that are valuable in and of themselves. These skills may be translatable to pro-fic (to some degree), but I'm tired of seeing fanfic denigrated as unskilled when in fact it does some pretty amazing things given its pre-existing constraints.
from metafandom
Date: 21 Dec 2009 07:58 pm (UTC)This meta makes me think of Sarah Rees Brennan, and her debut novel... I think it was awesome, but wasn't quite as satisfying and perfect as I was expecting because I didn't instantly adore the characters the way I am used to instantly adoring her versions of HP characters... there was not the shared context. The sequel, I think, is going to be AMAZING, because she'll be writing as an amazingly experienced writer within a context she's now shared with her audience. But her first novels in a new universe might be less satisfying for a while, either because of my own higher expectations or the slightly less experience she's had in initially presenting her universes and characters.
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Date: 5 Jan 2013 03:35 am (UTC)