Anecdote time.

When I was a kid I used to have this friend – let's call her 'X' to protect the lulz – who was really into Dean Cain.¹ I mean, she was really into Dean Cain. The notion of crushing on actors (he was, like, a million years old! Gross!) was novel to me at the time so I used to always feel somewhat baffled upon entering her room to find her walls plastered by with posters torn from issues of TV Hits magazine, all featuring her hero in various wholesome, all-American poses.

Now, one day I noticed that one of X's posters was kinda, well, oddly defaced. Poor Dean was covered in multiple, random pinkish-red dots about an inch across and, even weirder, he appeared to be having a major problem with sweat stains; very unusual in someone primarily made of inanimate paper.

So I asked X about his affliction. The "sweat stains" were quickly revealed to be from where X would liberally apply perfume to the armpits of her poster. Hygiene is very important so I guess I could kind of 'get' that, but… what about the dots?

Right. The dots.

Now, this particular poster happened to be stuck to the door of X's cupboard, which was about a foot and a half or so away from the end of her bed. What she used to do was take off her shoes and socks, put lipstick on her big toe, lie on her back on the bed with her legs dangling off the end and kinda… jab her foot at the poster. The red marks were from where her lipstick-coated toe had collided with the paper. It was kinda like some demented mix of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and, like, putting on lipstick and just kissing Dean's papery visage.²

Now just… think about that for a moment. Imagine the scene in your mind.

Anyway, I guess this was my first real exposure to fandom. Nowadays, I can't see Dean Cain without remembering my friend and her red-speckled, perfume smelling poster. In some ways, I think that's how I see all of us, every last fan; we're all jabbing our lipstick-covered toes at our heroes and idols and crushes, all in our own demented ways.

And, really, after X and her relationship with Dean, nothing in the fandom ever seemed strange again.

1. For those of you too young to know what I'm talking about (and, gods, there's a scary thought), Dean Cain was Tom Welling before Tom Welling was Clark Kent. ^
2. Which, IIRC, she also did but that's practically de rigueur for tweenage girls and hardly merits its own story. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Good ol' metafandom. I think goodnightsong's entry on the problems with slash pretty much sums up a whole bunch of my current feelings.

It's not that I'm bored with my delicious slashy goodness; far from it. With the exception of Loriah, fandom het just doesn't do much for me.¹ I can get that sort of thing in real life, man; I don't need fandom to fill it in for me.

I just don't like PWPs. Well, okay, not all PWPs but for the main part what I really crave in my perusal of fandom are epics. Long is good, of course, but I'm also talking about what I suppose I'm going to call the "condensed epic". That is, short- to mid-length stories that cover the same sort of emotional and plotish ground as an epic. Because, me? I've always been about the characterisation. I don't much care if your plot is completely off the wall – I read DCU and Smallville for godssakes – so long as you can feed me some characters that 'work'.

And, thinking about it, this is a kind of porn, too; like the Identity Porn we talk about in the DCU fandom (and that I assume permeates all hidden-identity fandoms, as well as amnesia fic). Unless you're a really talented erotica writer – most people aren't, and that's okay, seriously, some of my favourite writers write crap porn – sex!porn can get, well, dull. People admitting that they "skim sex scenes" in fics is surprisingly common. Hell, I do it too; especially if it's getting in the way of some other type of porn.

Identity Porn is one of my favourites, but it's only one of many (and excuse me while I use the word 'porn' extremely loosely for a moment).

There's Emotional Hurt/Comfort Porn; it's the sort of Cindarella trope where one character (or, occasionally, both characters) think that they're not "good enough" for the object of their affections. Character B is almost always a) completely unaware of this, and/or b) thinks Character A is the best thing since Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.² It's sort of a trope subversion in fandom; a re-writing of the more mainstream Character A loves Character B but Character B doesn't know they exist thing, which has always sat a bit uncomfortably close to stalking for a lot of people ("I'll make them fall in love with me!"). I call this "Emotional H/C", incidentally, since the primary function of Character B is to reassure Character A that they're worthy of love; Character As are almost always people with deeply divisive personality flaws, often to the point of outright villainy (leading to "soft" FoeYay). A and B almost always have an existing friendship or one-sided antagonism (Character A towards B), and A will spend at least a few paragraphs fretting over B's reaction to A's love. I'm sure it will come as a surprise to approximately no-one – since this is, in fact, the story I write every time – that this is my favourite type of porn. I sure do love my Character As.

It's not my cup of tea, but you've also got the ol' Physical H/C Porn. I don't really 'get' this type of story. I do like H/C, but it's the emotional H/C that goes along with the physical injuries that I'm reacting to.

Then there's Family Porn; the hit here coming from watching a strong family interaction, almost always between parents and children (see, I told you I was using the word loosely). Half this genre is kidfic, and I'm especially partial to that one where the person you think would make the worst parent actually ends up doing well. Which is kinda odd considering how anti-children I am in real life but, well, I'm a sucker for a good single father story; what can I say? The other half of this genre involves the Prodigal Son's (probably the Character A in an E-H/C story) experiences being accepted – or not, or grudgingly – into the family of their lover.

And the other one I can think of off the top of my head is Buddy Porn. You get this one in, a) pre-slash, b) when-they-were-kids fic and c) canon. This is just a hard hit of good old fashioned non-erotic love. It's not quite platonic, either, but these stories tend to focus on the non-sexual-non-romantic aspects of relationships. Maybe your characters are going to the movies. Or are stuck in a lift. Or meet each other as young children in order to become BFF. Or fighting a monster. Expect quips, lulz and HoYay, and combine liberally with the other porn-types mentioned above.

Hell, it's Friday afternoon and I'm sure I'm missing heaps here. In fact, why don't you tell me about them.

So: What's your fandom porn? Or are you all about the PWPs?

1. Interestingly enough, neither do relationships between characters who are canonically gay. Apollo and Midnighter excepted. ^
2. … what? ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

I've already stuck this into my del.icio.us list, but yanno what? I think it's so special it needs its own announcements post.

So, everyone, I insist that you go right now to read fandom: it is all coming together in my head! Even if you're only mildly interested in fandom or gender issues, go now; it's some of the best meta I've read for a long time.¹

Endless wanks about OOC aside, it is not only cool but celebrated for women who make fandom to assume men are open to any sexual experience that piques the author's interest. This is way more important than the original canon story […]

And fandom porn isn't just sexual. Fandom is full of emotional pornography. A male character is open to any emotional experience that is convenient (and pleasurable) to the writer. When people talk about fandom aesthetics, or slash aesthetics, it's emotional porn rather than sexual porn that's the litmus test. Fandom takes the idea of arousal and pulls it past the line marked sex, and drags sex along with it.

Quoted From: fandom: it is all coming together in my head

I'm just lamenting the post's not on LiveJournal so I can't pimp it out to metafandom, because, yeah. Needs more exposure IMO.

1. And I'm not just saying that because UIP gets a mention. No, seriously. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

So here's the deal: I was reading fic recently and in my irritation at bad writing came up with the following list of four things that really annoy me. Watch in awe as I attempt to explain why, as well as offer potentially helpful exercises for you (and me) to train yourselves (and myself) out of these terrible habits. Hooray.

(Note that these are specifically targeted at fanfic authors, though some of them at least can apply in a more limited sense to writing in general. Maybe.)

#1. Show, Don't Tell (Unless You Want To)

This is probably the biggest 'rule' in creative writing, and if you can master this one then you've pretty well got it made. In a nutshell, showing is about allowing your readers to experience a story from the headspace of your characters, rather than by being dictated to by an omnipotent god-figure (i.e. you). How to do this? Well, my advice is to simply not assume your readers are stupid (they might be, but let's pretend they aren't). Saying, Sigmund was scared. is assuming stupidity, it's telling. When you're showing, instead of describing the thing itself, you're attempting to describe the surrounding phenomena which demonstrate the thing. Maybe Sigmund's palms are sweaty, or he keeps trying to push his glasses up his nose, or is constantly trying to stand with his back to a wall. You don't need to tell your audience directly that he's scared because your readers can reasonably extrapolate out from his actions that he is.

Showing can be used for pretty much anything, but in (non gen) fanfic its primary function is to describe the emotive reactions of characters. Because by describing the character's reaction you're hoping to elicit empathy in your readers; hope that they will substitute themselves in place of your protagonist, mentally imagining themselves to be having the same reactions and therefore 'feeling' the emotions. You're essentially taking advantage of the capacity for empathy here; humans have this weird brain-quirk where if we're told about emotional stimuli happening to people we care for, our brains start behaving as if we ourselves were experiencing the same thing. Of course, making your readers care for your characters in the first place is another skill all together…

All that being said, there are situations were telling is better than showing. Tolkein was a great shower which has a habit of making his books tediously unreadable for some people, including yours truly. So there's a bit of a balance here. If your characters walk into a room with yellow walls, it's perfectly fine to say so if the yellow walls aren't supposed to be interesting in and of themselves (but remember Chekhov's Gun). If you've been doing a lot of showing, suddenly switching to a tell can also serve as a kind of literary slap to the face; this is the He was totally fucked. 'shock-sentence'.

So it's a bit of a balance, the only way to learn is practice and experience.

Exercises

1. Re-read through a fic you connect with emotionally. Take notes about where the author is showing and where they are telling. How are they using each of these things for effect?
2. Think of a character and an emotion (e.g. Loki was angry.). Now write a drabble¹ describing that without actually ever explicitly stating what the emotion is supposed to be. Focus instead on your character's reactions; thoughts, actions, dialogue. Get someone else to read it and guess the emotion; make sure they tell you why they came to this conclusion.
3. Pick a season. Now write another drabble, set in that season (with or without characters; up to you), without actually outright stating what season you're writing for. Get your helpful friend to guess this one, too.

#2. Listen to Your Dialogue

Dialogue is the other big killer. The thing you have to remember here is that dialogue isn't just narrative that you've assigned to a character. Dialogue is that character speaking, and a quintessential part of characterisation is getting a feel for your character's 'voice'; what they would and would not say. Showing rather than telling comes into play here, too. So, okay, you've been building the UST for the last n thousand words and finally, finally, you're at a resolution. Character A and Character B are gazing wistfully into each others' eyes and the sunset looks like a nice place for a ride and someone opens his mouth to speak and—

Stop.

Before you write anything, before anyone says anything, stop. Imagine that character in your head; if he or she is from a live action source, imagine the voice, too. Now, carefully imagine your character saying the lines you've written out loud. Does it 'work'? Be honest here; can you honest-to-gods imagine your character saying your lines, in all seriousness, without cracking up?

The reason I'm using a romantic example here is because it's the number one place for bad dialogue to creep in. Because, seriously, it's nice that your characters are in love and so forth but unless it's in character for them to be making flowery, vocal declarations of that fact for godssakes don't have them doing it! The other major gotcha here is dialogue that's thrown in to try and explain an action from the canon that the author doesn't like by infodumping reasons the audience understands onto another character ("I never told you because…"). Be careful with that, too. Sure, resolve as many conflicts as you want, but in most cases having two characters just sit down and spew long sentences at each other is not the best way to do it.

Exercises

1. Take a character-defining block of dialogue from your book/movie/TV show/comic/whatever of choice. Strip out all narrative, visual and auditory clues and stage notes until you're only reading the dialogue. How can you identify which character is saying what? Is there a certain way they speak? Certain things they avoid saying? Note your findings.
2. Take a fic you've written in the past and a couple of good friends. Assign your friends a character each and get them to read a segment of your story aloud to each other (you can read the narrative bits). Does it work or sound silly? Do they start cracking up unintentionally?
3. Pick two characters. Write a conversation between them using only dialogue; you can think the narrative to yourself, but don't write it down. Get some friends to guess the characters you've used, and tell you why.

#3. Beware Unadulterated Wish Fulfillment

I know this seems an odd thing to say, since fanfic can pretty much be summed up as wish fulfillment, but there are wishes and there are wishes, if you get my drift.

Sure, it's great that you want to write a different ending for the sixth episode of series three or think that character x and y should get together. There are probably other people out there who agree with you. But your story still needs to work as a story; you still need to pay attention to the canon, no matter how outrageous your idea. Remember also that while your readers might share the same overall idea as you, they're going to vary in their opinions on how it should be executed; what you're trying to do with your story is provide them with something that will make them believe that their desires are actually possible. I've always thought that the greatest praise a fanfic author can get is, This could be a real episode/issue/sequel! Because what that means is that you've not only managed to convey your 'wish' to the readers but have also managed to recreate the feel of the source material. So it's a double whammy; they're seeing their wishes fulfilled in a way that Could Be Real if it weren't for network censors/practical concerns/the government/whatever. That's what you're aiming for.

Exercises

1. Re-read a fic whose idea you've liked, from an author who's competent but whose execution has let you down. I'm sure you can think of one. Why didn't you 'connect' like you wanted to?
2. Re-read a crackfic you've thought was done well. Why do you think it works?
3. Think of the crackiest plot you've wanted to see in your fandom; time travel, mpreg, gender-swap, weird non-human sexual habits, crack pairings, weirder things I can't think of right now. Now write it. Seriously. Even if the end result is supposed to be humorous, pay attention to your characters and try to make the story work. Get feedback. Alternately, for even more of a challenge, try writing the most cliched plot in your chosen fandom. Again, take it seriously; try and produce the definitive story.

#4. You Don't Need Character Assassination

Hate shrines. Death fics. Fics where the formerly sweet and loyal character cheats on the heroine with her two best friends and proceeds to murder her teammates, just so she can be with the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold, or the Stalker With A Crush, or her brother, or whomever else the fan prefers. They're all over the place. People who know nothing about the show or even the genre have heard just how much of the fandom hates the rival love interest.

The writer often claims some other justification for treating the character this way. But it's for a very clear reason. He or she dared to get in the way of their OTP.

Quoted From: Die For Our Ship @ TV Tropes

I don't care how much you hate a character; either write them in character or don't write them at all. No-one is impressed when you deliberately exaggerate a character's bad points purely to turn her (and it's almost always a her) into an object of ridicule for your fic.

The truth of the matter is that you simply don't have to do this. Firstly because the character was obviously annoying enough to start with, since she's managed to put you off-side. Note that I'm not really talking about villains here, but rather protagonist characters to whom you have taken a dislike, generally because they are interfering with your OTP in some way. Character assassination is the cheap and easy way of getting out of a canon love interest, but honestly it's not a good way. Simply not mentioning the character at all is a better option, and one most of your readers are likely to forgive you for. If you absolutely feel you have to dissolve the canon relationship in-fic, then find a way to work that one believably and ave the melodrama for the canon. Relationships in the Really Real World dissolve in mundane and amicable ways all the time.

Again it boils down to a characterisation thing. Bad characterisation is bad characterisation, whether you like the character or not, and your readers will pick up on it.

Exercises

1. Pick a character you loathe from your fandom of choice. Write down all the reasons you hate him or her. Now, the hard part; sit down and write out a list of that character's positive qualities. Anyone writing 'none' automatically fails at writing. If you really can't think of any, look down your list of negative traits and see if any of these qualify as positive (is she clingy, or loyal?).
2. Someone out there likes your hated character. Find them and ask them why; don't judge or argue with their response, just listen.
3. The fun part; write a short vignette from the point of view of your hated character, portraying them in a sympathetic (but in-character) light. Do detractors of the character like it in spite of themselves?

1. Strictly speaking, a drabble is a fic of exactly 100 words. But because the function here is more important than the form, don't worry about going over or under for the purpose of this exercise. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

I decided yesterday that my bugbear in fanfic is a simple thing. There are a lot of things that I don't like – everything from bad writing to RPS – but there's only one thing that really gets my back up enough for me to bother to sit down and write a vehement log post about it. It's a common beast, popping up in every fandom and on even ship, in badfic and in good. A simple thing, yet one so fundamentally disbelief-shattering that once I find it I can't help my fingers twitching over Ctrl+W. What's this scourge, you wonder? This destroyer of fic? This apocalypse of disbelief?

Milky Romantic Nonsense.

If you've read fic, you know what I'm talking about. It's that part of the story – usually halfway through or just before the end – when the UST has been resolved and the obligatory sex scene is looming or just passed. When our two protagonists are gazing dreamily into each others' eyes and the curtains are about to go down on a lifetime of shippy bliss and then, quite suddenly, it hits.

Milky Romantic Monsense.

Don't get me wrong; I loves me a good romance fic. I devour sap like some starving, sap-eating beast. But that's not what I'm talking about. A fic can be romantic and touching without MRN and really, it's all down to the delivery. Because MRN is spoken – it's a symptom of dialogue (albeit occasionally internal dialogue) – and it only affects a very specific sub-set of characters.

It's not just about the words. It's not just about loudly and frequently profession undying love or making queasy statements about how Character X has "always loved" Character Y but been too terrified to admit it. You can do all those things, and on some characters that's completely, well, in-character. But on others it isn't, and there always seems to be an inverse ratio, here; the less likely a character is to start sprouting MRN in canon, the more likely they are to do it in fic.

I was thinking about this when I came to the realisation that MRN isn't simply a symptom of bad writing. It's a product of the whole slash (fandom?) aesthetic. Even when MRN doesn't crop up, the resulting scenarios are quite often functionally similar; boy meets boy, boy secretly lusts after boy, boy is convinced some personality trait of his makes him unlovable and angsts about it, boy discovers boy does love him after all, everyone lives happily ever after. It's only the competence of the execution that softens the realisation. It's so prevalent and so under-the-radar that I didn't even consciously realise it until I read this post the other day. In a nutshell, giandujakiss is talking about the difference between fanfic romance and mainstream romance. Fanfic, she says – whether het or slash – fetishises not only the power of the sexually 'submissive' partner but the whole concept of male vulnerability.

When you think about it like that, the distinction is so obvious.

Don't take my word for it? Go back and re-read almost any fanfic and I swear to you this will be true to the point that the exceptions to it only emphasise the rule. It's the whole point of UST, which is often the most emphasised element of fic, even over and above the resolution (the Japanese are the most acutely aware of this, which is why most shoujo stories end when the hookup finally happens).

And this is where we get back to MRN, because the more controlled and powerful a (usually male) character is, the more enjoyment is derived from displaying his inner vulnerabilities. Most of these stories unfold by having that character initially regard his affections for another as a 'weakness'; at the end of the story the perception morphs into a realisation that this emotional vulnerability is actually a strength when shared with the object of his reciprocal desire. This might not be a particularly revolutionary revelation apart from this one statement:

Fandom is a female space.

That's not to say there are no guys in fandom, only that the momentum behind the fen is female-driven. Most of the authors, artists and creators are women and they produce content for female audiences. The reviewers are women. The editors are women. The fanzine publishers are – you guessed it – women. More than that, for a lot of women the fandom is their 'safe place'; somewhere they can express themselves without fear of (male) ridicule. Of being branded a freak or a slut. And maybe that's why so much of the fen revolves around sex and relationships, because there are so few places where women can discuss these issues without male interference. The guys that are around learn not to ridicule their female fellows for their desires, and in return they're usually tolerated.

So, I ask myself, what makes the fen's aesthetic different from that of other 'female spaces' like, say, your aforementioned romance novels or Dolly magazine? Interesting question, not sure if I have a decent answer for it other than a gut feeling (after all, I read one and not the other and there's gotta be a reason for that). Maybe it's that 'traditional' female spaces in literature are those which have been given to us by men; they're dictated by what men 'expect' us to like, the bits men don't want (q.v. non-existence of a gaming magazine targeted at women, for example). The fen is different because it steals something from a male-dominated space and remakes it in a female image. It's the thrill of, "If we ruled the world, this is how it would be."

And it's interesting that a genre that is almost universally defined by its rejection of male expectations for women has essentially produced from itself a female expectation of men. Or at least a model of masculinity that is idealised by women, and it's a glass darkly compared to the male-idealised model of the same thing; prizing emotional and physical strength, independence, desire, vulnerability and confidence. It's assertive… but it's not aggressive.

Because my challenge for the month is to relate everything back to Superman, I'm going to do that here. Remember when Superman Returns came out and there was that kerfuffle when Bryan Singer made some comment about the titular character being seen through the eyes of a woman? I always found this comment extremely odd, and more than a little bit patronizing. Sure, the film was packed with mancandy but anyone who thinks this is the exclusive product of a gay director obviously hasn't read the comics recently. No matter what angle I look at the Superman-Lois-Clark non-euclidean love triangle from, there's no way I can interpret this as being "from a woman's perspective" and, honestly, the main reason why I – and a lot of female fen – find the whole relationship distasteful is because it paints women in such a bad light. It reminds me of that 70's Superman story where said character is under the impression that he has to chose one persona to live in. He spends a week as "only Superman" and a week as "only Clark" in order to sort the problem out; during Clarkweek, he drops his Clark Kenting¹ and, well, quite frankly acts like a dick. The net result of this is that Lois is infatuated, as expressed by her sudden desire to drop around randomly and cook him dinner. Not only does this story, I think, pretty much encapsulate everything I don't like about 'traditional' Clois but quite frankly scares me because, obviously, there are men out there who think that this is the kind of behavior that women find appealing.

And this is where the fen is interesting, because the male characterisations it produces – ones we assume by default are appealing to women because that's who they're both by and for – are worlds away from this. Sure, we're not in the 1970's any more but I'm not at all convinced that – middle-class intellectuals aside – common perceptions of masculinity, and therefore by default what women find desirable, have moved on very much.

So this is what the fen being a 'female space' means to me. The ubiquitous nature of MRN is nothing more than a backlash against 'manly man' stereotypes which women find inadequate. And while I'd never be so hypocritical to assert that men should be validating their identities based on female expectations any more than the reverse should be true…

It's still an interesting observation.

1. This is back in the days where Superman is assumed to be the 'real' personality and Clark is a disguise. How vogue this interpretation is at any one time tends to depend on the author, and is currently somewhat out of fashion (or at least de-emphasised, since Lois and Clark have been married in the comics since the 90s). ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

So the other day I was cruising around Fandom Wank, lookin' for lulz, when I came across this post. In a nutshell, it's someone lulzing over a 'professional' author's diatribe against fanfiction. I should just point out before we begin that this guy's main claim to fame is writing Monk and Diagnosis Murder tie-in books. Note that he's not the guy who created either of these shows, he just writes books based on them. And he rails against fanfic.

I'm just gonna let that one settle in your mind for a moment. Okay? Okay.

I don't really have such an issue with the guy's hard-on for ripping into the OTW. Don't get me wrong, I write fanfic and I support it as far as my own work (original or fannish; and I love the way fanfic eats its parents) is concerned, but as a legal entity it's on shaky ground at best and I'm not convinced I think that the 'right' to produce fanfic should be enshrined in law or anything. If an author really objects to it (or, worse; it's RPS and the individual objects to it), they should retain the right to take action against it's publication. That being said, the one thing JKR (if not the WB) gets right is the realisation that the fen is the equivalent of your own foot; shooting it is a comparably bad idea and if you have to take it off, a gentle amputation is the best way. I can say this, incidentally, with the supreme confidence of someone who loathes the Harry Potter books with all of my being and yet owns copies of them. Why? Because I had to read the canon to keep up with the pr0n. I can hand-on-my-heart say that if I hadn't been a deckhand on the HMS Snarry then there's no way in hell you'd be getting me to read that trash. As my interest in the fandom waned, so did my inclination to spend money on the canon. More recently, the fen has brought coin into the purses of DC by getting me interested in The Authority, and through that the wider DCU. Fanfic is not the written equivalent of movie piracy; it's a supplement to the source material, not a replacement for it. And this brings me back to one of the complaints against fanfic that rears its head in the comments (though not by the OP), namely:

fan fiction is usually devoid of character description, including each character's idiosyncrasies and each character's unique way of talking and dealing with others, because its writers assume that fanfic readers already know the characters. In typical fan fiction there is not even a physical description of the characters. That means that the work is incomplete and cannot stand on its own, and therefore it has limited artistic merit.

Quoted From: Richard S. Wheeler

I find this comment interesting in that it's both right and wrong, and also completely misses the point. As a world-be author of original fiction I can tell you that one of the hardest barriers to break is getting your readers interested in your characters. And character development itself is hard; it's a skill many professional writers struggle vainly with, let alone amateurs and would-be professionals like yours truly. But character development is not the only skill in writing, and the thing I love about fanfic is that it gives me an medium to flex my other writing muscles. Maybe I want to work on evocative prose. Or action. Or smut. Or Xanatos Gambit-style plot construction. Sure, I can do all of these things with original characters but the edge that fanfic gives me is that I can do it on the sly. My non-fen writing experiments will invariably raise little comment, but I can throw a piece of fanfic out into the wild and reel it back with a string of reader comments attached. It's called feedback for a reason, and learning to read it – even just the "OMG THIS ROCKS WRITE MORE!" type – is part of the art of the experienced fanficcer.¹

Think of it outside a fic for a minute. If I'm in conversation with someone and I happen to mention that recently I have been "kicking more ass than Batman", I have a reasonable expectation that whomever I'm talking to will have enough of a mental image of Batman in their head to understand that he is an experienced kicker of ass, and by saying I am kicking more I mean I am kicking a lot. Thus this analogy works, whereas "kicking more ass than Lusiphur" does not, on account of the target of comparison being relatively obscure.

Fanfic takes this idea to the nth degree, primarily due to the fact that it is targeted at the fen. The writer doesn't have to worry about explaining what a boom tube is, because the readers are expected to know. This means that when fandom-specific concepts pop up, unexplained, they do not derail suspension of disbelief in the way they would do in a standalone work. Actually, the emphasis is on the reader to understand² and what this all means for an author is that they are liberated from the onus of describing setting and instead freed up to concentrate on developing other aspects of the story. Ironically, the skill generally developed is creating an emotional connection to the reader (since common wisdom is that gen just doesn't happen) and this is arguably the most difficult thing of all.

I'm not saying that fanfiction authors never do work developing characters and settings outside the box – they do and it's called fanon – on that they don't have to because the genre itself dictates that such things are non-essential. Saying that this trait means that the work is incomplete and cannot stand on its own, and therefore it has limited artistic merit is a bit like saying the dada manifesto fails because there's a picture of the Mona Lisa with a mustache on the cover and you require a background in art history to understand what the fuss is all about. Whether you like dada or not is a moot point; it was influential, it's displayed in galleries and it makes people money. So too is fanfic.

Sure, okay, I'd be surprised if Music of the Spheres – for all that I love it and inadvertently copy it – wound up preserved in the Library of Congress, or wherever posh old books are kept, but that's not really the point either. As far as I'm concerned, the 'point' of fanfic can pretty much be summed up as:

• Escapism for the author. Don't like the love interest? Don't like the ending to the story? Think the canon glossed over something really interesting? Then change it.
• Escapism for the reader. As above, but vicariously.
• Writing practice. Not all authors do it deliberately, but it usually happens by osmosis at the very least thanks to…
• Chasing e-Fame.The best writers (or, at least, the writers with the most enjoyable stories; and the two things are often not the same) tend to float to the top. It's a relatively enjoyable way to get known if you can pull it off.

And without getting into some vast and terrible debate over modernist versus postmodernist interpretations of what 'art' is, exactly, I'm personally quite happy to ascribe artistic merit to anything that works on the above levels.

Think of it this way, kids: What would you rather read? Fanfic (of your choice), or Diagnosis Murder novels.

Yeah. Thought so.

1. One of the things I love about the Blark community on LJ is the amazingly detailed feedback left by some of the key players; generally all skilled authors themselves. I'm hopeless at feedback so always feel like a heel, but those long comments? The ones where you've quoted every line in the fic that 'works' for you, even if your only comment on it is *squee!*? Even if it's not my own fic? Those are invaluable, because it tells me the points that people make an emotional connection to the story, and to an author that shit is gold man. You guys rock. ^
2. This left me in the very surreal experience the other day of accidentally finding myself reading Smallville fic (it snuck up on me I swear!) without ever really paying attention to the series. I spent most of the plot thinking, "Wait… they did what to Lex now?" It's like tuning into the middle of a TV series and having to fill in the gaps as you go. Confusing, but not in a way that interferes with the enjoyment of the story itself. ^
3. Note: I don't ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.