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magibrainI occasionally feel kinda odd about maintaining two blogs – this one and magistrate – because I post so infrequently that it occasionally feels like I don't have enough content to reliably keep one blog interesting, let alone two. But I do feel like separating my fannish content stream from my more real-life stream is a good pragmatic decision; in how I conceptualize my own life, they represent different spheres of interest.
(I toyed briefly with the idea of separating my original fiction/professional writing into a third stream, but then I noticed that I never posted in it at all, so tomagistrate it went.)
Being someone who grew up as a writer in fannish spaces and is now also trying to get somewhere in the big, bad world of original fiction, I think a lot about how skills and paradigms do and don't translate. The different genre structures and conventions, the different skills each type of writing emphasizes or strengthens. (I notice that in my original writing, characterization is something people continually call out as one of my weakest skills. Which is still kind of a mindscrew for me, because in fanfic, a lot of people seem to enjoy my characterization. Then, with fanfic, I have something pre-existing to riff off; one of the consequences of growing into writing through fanfiction seems to be that I have less experience in how to establish and differentiate character in my own work.)
Anyway. Given the amount of time I spend musing about fannish vs. original spaces, I kinda have to raise an eyebrow at myself for needing to discover (and rediscover, and remind myself of, again and again) the fact that the criteria for success for fanfic and original stories are often wildly different.
I think it's something of the same way in which the criteria for success for a TED talk and an awesome discussion in a group of friends is different.
In original fiction, I have to spend a lot of time thinking about arcs and structure and pacing, and how the plot and the story inform each other, and how themes are deployed, and how to create a polished and technically competent work. And, I mean, don't get me wrong, those things are great to pay attention to in fanfiction, but I find that fanfic rises or falls on something more like, broadly oversimplified, its ability to be an efficient delivery mechanism for squee.
I think the fanfics I'm personally most proud of manage to hit both notes; they extend and expand beloved aspects of canon, but they also work as well-structured, polished and tuned-up technical works. But I also find myself, a lot of times, flailing over posting something because its pacing is a mess, the structure is lopsided, there's that one horribly awkward phrasing at the beginning that I can't think of a good way to get rid off, the theme is a contortionist, and the arc thinks about arcing and then veers sideways into a wall, and I have this horrible urge to apologize to everyone for punting it out into the world, and then no one seems to care. Which is reassuring, at times, and then at other times it's just a boatload of cognitive dissonance and the vague suspicion that everyone's just being nice because... some... nefarious purpose of their own? I think a lot of writers share this anxiety. I think this anxiety enjoys the fact that it doesn't have to make sense.
I used to produce a lot more fiction. I mean, that was something like a decade ago, when I was bouncing all around my million FFVIII fics, but I remember being significantly more prolific than I am right now. I think a major factor in my slowdown is the fact that I started turning my attention to craft, and really struggling a lot with the places where I could see something wrong but I didn't know how to fix it.
(Or where there wasn't a plausible way to fix it. If I go back through my braintics scraps collection, for example, there's a ton of stuff which flat-out does not work on a logical level, but which amused me enough to put scenes down. There's also stuff where the tone is too wildly self-indulgent for my sense of propriety, or where it's clearly just me working out my beef with a certain character, or where I looked at it and just went "Nope, not going to write that, because I'm not going to typecast myself as that author who only writes stories where horrible things happen to Sam Carter and the boys go D: and then the whole rest of the fic is only there to showcase how tough and embattled Sam is." (Yes, I have enough of those braintics to make it its own genre. I'm not proud. I also regret nothing.))
This is, of course, not entirely a bad thing: it lets me continually improve my writing, even if I'm not aware of the improvements as they're happening. (But I can go back and look at works from a few years ago – works that represented the best I could do at those times – and see immediately how I could improve them, and that's a humbling and kinda nifty feeling.) But it is, I think, something I also need to become more aware of. Because the other great thing about fanfiction is that it provides a space for me to play around with ways of telling stories in this fantastically open and engaging and forgiving environment, and that's also a fantastic resource for growth. Letting my internal editor set up roadblocks there isn't actually helping me.
(Besides, you people don't mind if I completely shed my dignity now and again, right? Maybe I'll clean up the ridiculous angstcrack scene where Neal is vaguely suicidal circa As You Were and discovers that Peter has an invisible dragon living in his house. Or the wtfery of the braintic where Sam Carter's consciousness gets transposed across a universal boundary and put into a partially-uplifted mountain lion who's a working animal with the USAF. I once heard the Pern books described as "tapping into the 'I want a PONY!' instinct, except for people who liked fantasy." You can probably tell which kind of kid I was.)
magistrate – because I post so infrequently that it occasionally feels like I don't have enough content to reliably keep one blog interesting, let alone two. But I do feel like separating my fannish content stream from my more real-life stream is a good pragmatic decision; in how I conceptualize my own life, they represent different spheres of interest.(I toyed briefly with the idea of separating my original fiction/professional writing into a third stream, but then I noticed that I never posted in it at all, so to
magistrate it went.)Being someone who grew up as a writer in fannish spaces and is now also trying to get somewhere in the big, bad world of original fiction, I think a lot about how skills and paradigms do and don't translate. The different genre structures and conventions, the different skills each type of writing emphasizes or strengthens. (I notice that in my original writing, characterization is something people continually call out as one of my weakest skills. Which is still kind of a mindscrew for me, because in fanfic, a lot of people seem to enjoy my characterization. Then, with fanfic, I have something pre-existing to riff off; one of the consequences of growing into writing through fanfiction seems to be that I have less experience in how to establish and differentiate character in my own work.)
Anyway. Given the amount of time I spend musing about fannish vs. original spaces, I kinda have to raise an eyebrow at myself for needing to discover (and rediscover, and remind myself of, again and again) the fact that the criteria for success for fanfic and original stories are often wildly different.
I think it's something of the same way in which the criteria for success for a TED talk and an awesome discussion in a group of friends is different.
In original fiction, I have to spend a lot of time thinking about arcs and structure and pacing, and how the plot and the story inform each other, and how themes are deployed, and how to create a polished and technically competent work. And, I mean, don't get me wrong, those things are great to pay attention to in fanfiction, but I find that fanfic rises or falls on something more like, broadly oversimplified, its ability to be an efficient delivery mechanism for squee.
I think the fanfics I'm personally most proud of manage to hit both notes; they extend and expand beloved aspects of canon, but they also work as well-structured, polished and tuned-up technical works. But I also find myself, a lot of times, flailing over posting something because its pacing is a mess, the structure is lopsided, there's that one horribly awkward phrasing at the beginning that I can't think of a good way to get rid off, the theme is a contortionist, and the arc thinks about arcing and then veers sideways into a wall, and I have this horrible urge to apologize to everyone for punting it out into the world, and then no one seems to care. Which is reassuring, at times, and then at other times it's just a boatload of cognitive dissonance and the vague suspicion that everyone's just being nice because... some... nefarious purpose of their own? I think a lot of writers share this anxiety. I think this anxiety enjoys the fact that it doesn't have to make sense.
I used to produce a lot more fiction. I mean, that was something like a decade ago, when I was bouncing all around my million FFVIII fics, but I remember being significantly more prolific than I am right now. I think a major factor in my slowdown is the fact that I started turning my attention to craft, and really struggling a lot with the places where I could see something wrong but I didn't know how to fix it.
(Or where there wasn't a plausible way to fix it. If I go back through my braintics scraps collection, for example, there's a ton of stuff which flat-out does not work on a logical level, but which amused me enough to put scenes down. There's also stuff where the tone is too wildly self-indulgent for my sense of propriety, or where it's clearly just me working out my beef with a certain character, or where I looked at it and just went "Nope, not going to write that, because I'm not going to typecast myself as that author who only writes stories where horrible things happen to Sam Carter and the boys go D: and then the whole rest of the fic is only there to showcase how tough and embattled Sam is." (Yes, I have enough of those braintics to make it its own genre. I'm not proud. I also regret nothing.))
This is, of course, not entirely a bad thing: it lets me continually improve my writing, even if I'm not aware of the improvements as they're happening. (But I can go back and look at works from a few years ago – works that represented the best I could do at those times – and see immediately how I could improve them, and that's a humbling and kinda nifty feeling.) But it is, I think, something I also need to become more aware of. Because the other great thing about fanfiction is that it provides a space for me to play around with ways of telling stories in this fantastically open and engaging and forgiving environment, and that's also a fantastic resource for growth. Letting my internal editor set up roadblocks there isn't actually helping me.
(Besides, you people don't mind if I completely shed my dignity now and again, right? Maybe I'll clean up the ridiculous angstcrack scene where Neal is vaguely suicidal circa As You Were and discovers that Peter has an invisible dragon living in his house. Or the wtfery of the braintic where Sam Carter's consciousness gets transposed across a universal boundary and put into a partially-uplifted mountain lion who's a working animal with the USAF. I once heard the Pern books described as "tapping into the 'I want a PONY!' instinct, except for people who liked fantasy." You can probably tell which kind of kid I was.)
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Date: 2014-03-10 07:47 am (UTC)I would still read the hell out of it, btw.
In fanfic, a good chunk of the "why do I care" is built-in: you care because you already have an emotional investment with these characters and/or this world. Granted, that's usually not the only criteria; most of the people I know don't want to read every single story in a fandom. It's usually "I cate about this world/these characters, plus the genre of the fic and the basic predicament promised in the summary, possibly also plus I care about this author's stuff." It's not "I like White Collar fic!" so much as "I want a White Collar fix in the form of some gen Neal angst!" But the genres of fanfic – hurt/comfort, character study, episode fic, whatever – and the pre-existing engagement with the canon material gives you a really convenient framework to hook people with. And it's the sort of thing that only really works when you have a canon to riff off.
*nods a bunch*
There's a great post by Jo Walton about the long spear, where all the buildup is leading you to the emotion-packed moment (the pointy end of the spear), but you need that buildup in order for the spearpoint to penetrate. But fanfic is all spearpoints; the buildup is canon itself, which means you can write the pointy bit and people already care about it so the spear goes in. I think some people go from fanfic to original fic and can make great spearpoints, but don't know how to construct the spear itself. (I can totally relate to this. I think my spearpoints are pretty good -- god knows I've made enough of 'em -- but my shafts are warped, weird, and either too short or way too long. I sometimes notice when I'm editing my original fic that there is a noticeable style shift about halfway through, where it stops being a slog and takes off, and I think this is exactly why. I've had plenty of practice at writing emotional resolutions for characters we already care about, but not so much at doing the buildup that makes people care in the first place ...)
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Date: 2014-03-10 08:21 am (UTC)...and there was this older fic I wrote, which was basically finding a way to turn Dr. Chase of House M.D. into James Sunderland of Silent Hill II. (It's so AU that there are pretty much no spoilers.) Because they have the same hair. (It... yeah.) There's one moment in particular, where Chase has been trying to get away from his old life for a really long time in the fic, and someone from his old life has just shown up, and you get the line:
"Dr. Robert," a cheerful voice calls, and he turns and wishes he had a mask or a gun or an Ebola culture or just a good thick board with a nail through it.
Which totally got the reaction of a spearpoint, but not because of any work the fic put into it. It relies entirely on the reader recognizing the nail board as the first weapon James gets in the game.
And you can do some really neat things with fanfic and spearpoints! Like, the nail board was not a spearshaft in SH2. (There were plenty of spearshafts. The nail board was almost wholly utilitarian.) But you can take stuff that wasn't intended to carry a lot of emotional heft and repurpose it, imbuing it with additional significance. But yeah; it's a different skillset from knowing how to construct the shafts from scratch.
MAN. ...let's study how characters become established and emotional engagement is fostered. That seems like a good next step.
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Date: 2014-03-10 08:33 am (UTC)I actually got that just today when I was (finally) reading Bujold's latest Vorkosigan book. I'm not sure if you've read those, so I don't know if describing the exact character/situation would make any difference. But it was a neat little "click!" moment when I finally got something she'd been doing with one of the characters, going back 20 years. It's all there, but was never spelled out, and I never got it until I finally hit just the right clue to make me realize that it had been obvious all along.
And yeah, there are many different kinds of spearpoints -- not just from the stories leading up to them, but also from various sorts of knowledge that the readers bring with them. Of course, then it's a matter of guessing what your readers know and what they don't ...
MAN. ...let's study how characters become established and emotional engagement is fostered. That seems like a good next step.
I LOVE SPECULATING ON THAT STUFF. :D
One thing I've noticed is how much I love characters to sneak up on me and surprise me. Loving a character at first sight can happen, but some of my best reading experiences have been the ones where it's taken most of a book, or even most of a series, for a character to evolve slowly from an apparent throwaway supporting character to protagonist, or to reveal enough facets that it finally makes me go, "All right, you little bastard, I actually kind of love you now." It's SO much fun to have characters sneak up on me all unexpected, so that I have to go back and reread the books to figure out how the sneaky little jerks managed to get into my heart. It seems to be a good way to get me to let my guard down, whereas having the author throw ~authorial love sparkles~ all over a character is a turnoff.
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Date: 2014-03-10 09:29 am (UTC)I haven't read the Vorkosigan books, though I probably will at some point, as they keep getting recommended to me.
[And yeah, there are many different kinds of spearpoints -- not just from the stories leading up to them, but also from various sorts of knowledge that the readers bring with them.]
Which is an interesting direction to come from; in some cases, the applicable skillset really isn't creating things whole-cloth, it's manipulating the ambient information. Which isn't without its pitfalls; you have to take a gamble on what people know, as well as how they feel about it. Like, with a few exceptions, fairytale retellings don't do much for me because I don't have the right emotional resonances. But for others, playing within those forms and doing new twists on them can be a way to establish character. And even if it's not something as specific as a fairytale character or an archetype... yeah.
[whereas having the author throw ~authorial love sparkles~ all over a character is a turnoff.]
Hahahaaa, WELL, YOU KNOW MY THOUGHTS ON THIS ONE. XD Having characters who get away with things by authorial fiat is another peeve of mine; I often point back to the adage that a really good way to drive up reader sympathy is to dial down the sympathy of the narration. I feel like dialling down the sympathy in the plotting helps, too.
I'm not actually sure what makes me fall for a character. I know I definitely have types – certain archetypes and character roles tend to show up a lot in my lists of favorite characters – but I also know that characters have to be rounded and surprising and contradictory and flawed and such, beyond those. Rich inner lives, a contrast between inner and outer lives...
There was an exercise I ran into, a while ago, that had you thinking about circumstances in which your character would lie. I kinda want to dig that up again.
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Date: 2014-03-12 07:03 am (UTC)I'm not actually sure what makes me fall for a character. I know I definitely have types – certain archetypes and character roles tend to show up a lot in my lists of favorite characters – but I also know that characters have to be rounded and surprising and contradictory and flawed and such, beyond those.
*nodnod* I think this is also true of me. I can point to particular archetypes that I like, but I can also point to instances of those archetypes that should have pushed every button and didn't, as well as characters who really aren't my type that I fell for anyway. But I think the things you mentioned here are a big part of it -- they have to surprise me and interest me, like real people do.
Aha, it was you who made the point about reader sympathy and narrative sympathy being directly inverse to each other. XD I think it's an excellent point and something I am going to try very hard to keep in mind when I'm writing ...
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Date: 2014-03-12 09:53 am (UTC)Ahahahaaa. NEW LIFE (AND CAREER) GOAL. Though, knowing me, it'll be endless AU fanfic, and then I'll end up crossing over my own stuff, and then retreating to AO3 and crossing over my own stuff with SG-1.
I have joked about how if I ever find myself in a position where my works have somehow spawned a fandom, I'm just going to troll the fandom and get into the sorts of arguments where people argue with me about what the author really intended. And then I'll laugh, quietly, to myself. A lot.
[Aha, it was you who made the point about reader sympathy and narrative sympathy being directly inverse to each other. XD]
XD I do enjoy that piece of narrative advice! I'm sure it's not 100% applicable across all circumstances, but I tent to have a very low threshold for works that are grabbing after my heartstrings, so I find that it's pretty effective where I'm concerned.
And situational stuff, as well. I feel like, often, the less goes the character's way, the more I root for them. Which is one of the reasons I spent so much of White Collar S3 really detesting Neal, because it felt like logic was twisting itself into pretzels to make sure everything worked out for him. (Which isn't an issue restricted to S3, but it sure stood out in that season.
There's a boatload of related tricks I have a gripe with, too. Like, the "showing your character is smart by having them outsmart a clearly incompetent person." (BBC Sherlock pulled this twice in one season by having Sherlock deduce passwords which were proper names. From people who should ostensibly be highly security conscious. I had to have stronger passwords than that when I worked at a public university, and I had to change them every 90 days.) Or "Showing that the situation is dire by having everyone look at it and give up right away." (That One Doctor Who Season Finale, I am looking hard at you.) I think, really, when you're trying to engineer audience reaction, you have to be really really careful, because most of the shortcuts aren't actually good ones.
Though it would be interesting to look at the shortcuts (or shorthands) which are effective, which is something I really want to make a story of, especially in original shortfic. One example that was brought up to me a while ago was that you could make a villain more sympathetic by having them be nice to a dog, or something. I'm not sure how many people would call that out as a tropey thing (and thus roll their eyes), but you can imagine how it could be deployed effectively...
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Date: 2014-03-12 11:58 pm (UTC)I ... may have crossed over my own worlds with any number of things. XD Though I haven't posted it anywhere ...
tbh, there are times when I see a particularly insightful fic set in a universe created by an author that I know writes fanfic, or has written it in the past, and I can't help wondering if they're sockpuppeting their own fandom. I doubt if it's true in most cases, but there's always that possibility ...
I think, really, when you're trying to engineer audience reaction, you have to be really really careful, because most of the shortcuts aren't actually good ones.
Ha, yeah; I think the harder (and more overtly) the writer loads down the narrative with This Is How You're Supposed To Be Feeling, the more I knee-jerk against it. So these characters' love is meant to be, huh? I think I'll root for one of them to fall into a pit of angry bees instead! So I'm supposed to feel sorry for the tortured angsty hero's torturous angst? I think there's still room in the bee-pit ...
Which is probably why a lot of my character relationships are the ones that just snuck up on me, rather than being at the forefront of the narrative where I could see them coming a mile away.
Though it would be interesting to look at the shortcuts (or shorthands) which are effective, which is something I really want to make a story of, especially in original shortfic.
*nods* I have been trying to keep an eye on the specific things that engage me with a character, especially in an "affection at first sight" kind of way, but it's hard to pin down. One thing I've noticed that often gets me is incongruity -- a character who is supposed to be [x], but is actually [y] instead. The "pet the dog" example is one version; you could also have things like the mook who quotes 18th-century poetry, or the one person in a room full of suits and ties who's wearing a leather jacket. (Or the one person in the room full of leather jackets who's wearing a suit and tie ...) I guess like anything else you can obviously overdo this -- waving the character's ~quirkiness~ like a flag, for example. But I've noticed a lot of times getting snared by something like this. The other thing that tends to get me is characters caring about other people, friendship or loyalty or even (in fact, maybe especially) kindness to strangers .... "pet the dog" again, except not contrasted against overall villainy. The example that always comes to mind is from a romance novel that I tried to read some years back. The heroine meets a playboy type with a flashy car, and while he's showing off his flashy car, he knocks over a fruit stand and spills all the fruit ... and then stops and helps the old lady pick it up again. And I thought, awwww! I like this guy! -- and then the next chapter it turned out he's the murder victim and the "hero" is actually some jerkass who is a dick to the heroine, and I metaphorically threw the book across the room and swore never to read anything else by that author. XD But the principle stands ...
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Date: 2014-03-13 07:05 am (UTC)Yes! That, I think, is a really good point – especially because incongruity is more conceptually interesting than congruity. It's like those tests that people did with object permanence, how if you show someone – a child old enough to have the concept ingrained, an animal smart enough to – an object, then obscure it, then remove the obscuring object, sooner or later they'll stop paying attention. But if you remove the object while it's hidden, suddenly the interest skyrockets.
...there was a piece of advice Chuck Palahniuk brought up, at one point, which contrasted two conversations something like this:
Compared to:
The point he was making had to do specifically with dialogue; that you can ramp up interest and tension by not having the topic tennisball back and forth predictably but rather by interrupting it and sending it off in another direction by not answering each line explicitly. But I think it hits on that broader pattern, too: unexpected things generate more interest.
•ponders•
[The heroine meets a playboy type with a flashy car, and while he's showing off his flashy car, he knocks over a fruit stand and spills all the fruit ... and then stops and helps the old lady pick it up again. And I thought, awwww! I like this guy! -- and then the next chapter it turned out he's the murder victim and the "hero" is actually some jerkass who is a dick to the heroine, and I metaphorically threw the book across the room and swore never to read anything else by that author. XD]
XD Awww. I feel your frustration. I feel it a lot.
...I am not really in Teen Wolf fandom, but from what I've seen of the series, and from what I've seen of the fandom, I feel like the most wildly popular character isn't the main character, but his best friend Stiles. Which makes a lot of sense to me. Because Stiles has this fantastically odd relationship with pretty much everyone, and he and his father are adorable and a little breaky and brilliant, and he's so mush less trope than Romantic Angst Plot Scott.