Hey check it out; a "Fanfiction" category.

Anyway. About a month ago now I got attacked by a plot bunny spurred on by a combination of California's decision on same sex marriage, a show I watched on genetically modified food and too much listening to "Modern Love" by David Bowie and "The Fool" by Call and Response. I whipped out the first two thousand-odd words fairly easily, but then kinda got hit by writer's block and didn't finish it… until today!

Well, last night, actually.

So here it is, "Modern Love (Never Gonna Fall For)". Who doesn't love a time-jumbled, schmoopy, off-canon Clex futurefic? I certainly do, and you should too!

I'm not entirely convinced this is the best I could've written this story; it gets lost in a few points, dialogue-heavy in a few others and is generally a bit over-condensed… but whatever! It's done now and that's really what counts in fanfic, right? Right.

ML(NGFF) (there's a mental space left over for me to write the flip-side fic, "Modern Love (Don't Believe In)", hence the extended title) is also one of the fics I actually sat down and wrote a plot summation for before I started with the typey-typey. For lulz and posterity, I include it here:

( ZOMG SPOILERS! )

It's interesting re-reading this now to note the details that didn't make it into the final cut. The location of the climax moved, for example, and I think the summary actually does a better job of conveying the "point" of the story better than the story itself does (durr ir gud riter).

Hrm.

And, yeah; I'm way behind on The Internets. Blame my stupid training course.

Back to our regularly scheduled program next week, people.

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

If there's one thing that Corner and the DCU conspired to teach me, it was that canon really doesn't matter. I'm still trying to decide whether that's a good thing or not.

See, I was reading some more responses to Moffat's latest Doctor Who run, and the following line slapped me in the face:

I find RTD brilliant in his own right; he's written my favorite eps of the series and he's got a great gift for characterization and dialogue. He's pretty weak with plot, though, which is a major flaw in this sort of scifi writing, and I'd like to see him return to more character-focused drama like Queer as Folk. Or else he can come write for SGA, since plot is hardly their selling point anyway!

Quoted From: xparrot: Who-ing it up

Some more background: About six months or so ago now I was sitting in the foodcourt at Woden with my mum, talking about me-as-a-writer. One of the things mum said to me was that she thought I had a strong grasp of dialogue and characterisation. I thought about it, and after a few self-involved moments agreed that she was probably correct. My grasp of plot has always been tenuous at best; to me, the plot is something that happens in the background to give the characters something to react to. It's not a 'thing' in and of itself. The reason I love Terry Pratchett is because I adore his characters; think they have depth and nuance and feel alive to me. The reason I can't stand J.K. Rowling is because I loathe hers; think they're thin, flimsy and unreal.

Corner really hammered this home for me. The plot there is about characterisation; it's all about Loki's identity crisis. Chainbreaker is more directly plot-driven but you can blame randomredux for that one; anything that moves the story is probably his. That was the other thing working with randomredux taught me; he's scoped the plotlines for Urban Mythica out to a degree that just makes my jaw drop. Corner's plot is pretty much: "Book One: Loki fights Baldr, meets Sigmund, has identity crisis, possibly with end-of-the-world. Book Two: Loki fights Ed. Ed is or is not Odin. Book Three: Profit!" The chain of set-pieces is there, but the filler tends to change every time I think about it. The canon is mutable, in other words (which causes all sorts of fun with Chainbreaker, let me assure you); the point is more about the characters' experiences than the actual events that happen.

And when I read fanfic, it's the same deal. I like some plot, but only inasmuch as it gives the characters something to rail against. One of my favourite fic series right now is The Identical Series (and I will link this as soon as I get home, honest). It's very plot heavy, but the plot itself isn't what makes the fic worth reading. Actually, the plot is kinda, well… silly. Which isn't to denigrate the fic at all (like I said, I think the damn thing's brilliant), only to say that the premise – Lionel clones Lex's more-eviller replacement, disinherits real Lex – has been done so often that it was old in the Silver Age.¹ The thing that makes this fic great is the characterisation.

I think this is probably where my extremely high tolerance for off-canon, AU² and crackfic comes from. So long as you can write my characters in a way I can believe in, I don't care how crackish or clichéd your plot is. In fact, I think the main reason I like clichéd fics (I have a regrettably serious kink for "fake boyfriends" style stories) is because it all-but forces the author to concentrate on the characterisation in order to pull them off. Because, seriously, you plot is not your drawcard.

To be honest, I think the vast bulk of slashfic is written this way.

But people still cling to the idea of canon. I used to, as well; I remember sitting next to reams and reams of printed FFVII background for Untitled 5. I made the newbie mistake of writing Rinoa out of Futureloop in the very first chapter. But my time in the DCU taught me that, well, it's just really not that important. The DCU's canon is a twisty and treacherous thing at the best of times, and it's not at all uncommon to see what I suppose you could think of as "combined canons"; the most common is the "Smallville-to-movieverse" setting. And, sure, this makes no sense whatsoever (the relationships between Clark, Lois, Lex and Jor-El are too all over the place) but the stories written here still work because they take liberties and gloss over the rough bits. And I like that. I like that fic writers in the DCU feel free to pick-and-choose; the fanon of one individual story is more important than a strict adherence to canon because, let's face it, half the time not even the canon knows what it's doing (or, occasionally, is so criminally stupid that you wish it didn't).

And somewhere between then and now, I've found myself writing more-and-more off-canon fic. When I construct a fanon to write against, I go through a process of picking out major canon events. Mostly these are things that are in some fashion character-defining and, yeah, when I take canon I try to take canon as accurately as I can (Wikipedia, Google, damo-in-japan and randomredux are my very good allies in this endeavour). M[y sins against canon are almost exclusively sins of omission; events that didn't happen, characters that never showed up, words that were never said.

I admit that this laissez-faire approach probably bothers some people. I mean, I know the standard procedure is to follow canon religiously up to a point then deviate off from that but… meh. I don't necessarily want to write my story from that first deviation; maybe I want to skip lightly across canon and write my story twenty years from that now (as is the case with, for example, Déjà Vu). Fics like this are really common in any serialised canon, of course, but most of them were written years ago and their discrepancies are the result of having been jossed in the interim. I figure that if people can manage to still enjoy those fics that they can still enjoy "faux-jossed" stories that were written later but as if they came from earlier.

So maybe this is a broad-stroked disclaimer. I'm not writing "DCU!movieverse" or "Authority" or "Smallville" fic; I'm writing "movieverse-ish" or "Authority-ish" or "SV-esque" fic. What I mean is that I'm taking approximations those characters and doing my own thing with them; if I don't like something, consider it retconned. If you're lucky, I might even tell you about it. The enjoyment is not so much playing in someone else's sandpit as it is stealing their sand and making my own.

And I'm good with that.

Long live the derivative work.

1. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, DCU canon!Lex Luthor is – or at least was, at some point, for a while – his own clone. I believe the story in question was called something cheerful like "They Saved Lex Luthor's Brain!". Oh comic-book brain transplants, never change okay? ^
2. The difference? Well, I'd think of a "Clark isn't married to Lois" fic as being off-canon, while "Bruce is a dashing space pirate" as an AU. ^

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

You know what would make today better? Some pr0n.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pr0n, but I do have some WiPs. I've been a bit hurrtarded with the writing lately; bashing out maybe ten words before getting distracted with other people's porn. So instead of giving you anything finished, here are three fragments from my current projects; Corner, "Jamais Vu" and (yes) UIP.

So.

Untitled Sigki Fragment

First up, we've got the start of a Sigmund/Loki PWP smutlet. For the lulz, I decided to pay around with second-person present tense narration. This is mostly inspired by a brilliant CLex fic I read and have since promptly lost the link for (it got eaten when Google Notebook failed to inform me of its byte limit on notes). That sentence would have so much more impact if I could find the link to the fic, hey?

( The feeling hits you half-way through your Psych lecture; a sort of low, humming pressure. )

Jamais Vu: How (SV!Clex)

Next up we've got the first part of "Jamais Vu", called 'How'. This ends far too abruptly for it to be considered 'finished' but I've lost the mental trail of what else I want to use it to say. Hrm. Stupid uncooperative Clark! Narrate better you alien bastard!

( He'd been dead the first time they met. )

Untitled Identity Porn: Gotham, From the Ground

I feel like a bit of a cock-tease with this, since it got stuck on 573 words and didn't want to go anywhere else. It's supposedly one of the longer chapters in the story, too. What a pain.

Still, since I know so many of you are waiting for it…

( Clark hated flying. )

And there you go. Your quotient of pr0n for the week. Don't say I never gave y'all nothing.

… I use too many goddamn italics.

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.