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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: 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.