Exactly; well articulated, Puel. I couldn't agree more.
(That is also why attempting to write original things tends to tie me in knots; I tend to have considerable difficulty without that basic structure to build upon. :S)
(It's taken me YEARS to figure out how to build that structure, which mostly consisted of me realizing that I really need a lot of structure to write, because when I don't know the shape of the thing I'm working on, I have no idea how to even start it, let alone finish it.)
It also explains why I adore Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky and Haruki Murakami and the entire eighteenth century--because although original fiction doesn't require the writer to tell side stories and backstories that don't advance the plot, or to explore and develop the world for the sheer joy of that development, readers do exist who find that narrative mode delightful and compelling.
It doesn't make anyone a failed writer of fiction, to approach original fiction as more like building a comet than building an arrow. Both move forward, but one is stripped to its essentials, and the other vents nonessentials at the least provocation. An arrow is self-contained, secure, moves forward as a tidy little unit to strike the heart of something living--and although a comet trails dust and ice and light behind it as it makes a circuit of the solar system, although that tail diminishes the self-contained substance of the comet, it still has the capacity to shake one's world to its foundations.
I've been having a hard time pulling my thoughts together on this one. I see what you're saying about the authors you mention (though it's interesting that most of them aren't considered "genre," even if that entire term is kind of vague and permeable, and I definitely had genre in mind when writing this), and I love Neal Stephenson enough that I'd be a hypocrite to condemn that mode of storytelling. But a comet still moves forward, even if it also expands outward -- and in fact has to move faster than it expands if it's going to hit its target, to continue the analogy further. I guess the true inverse of an arrow might be a web: it expands intricately in all directions and it can snare you, but it doesn't actually have momentum.
I've been thinking about this subject for a while since last I posted, and it occurs to me that this is part of why I so seldom read YA, and why you enjoy it so much--the doorstopper fantasy that I enjoy tends to be more expansive, although it does moving forward at an appreciable clip (certainly more than, say, Dostoevsky), and YA is much more direct and arrowlike. When I do get into YA, I favor multi-book stories where the worldbuilding develops with every new addition (see: why I still care about Animorphs, or what I was looking for when I kept going in Hunger Games). But then Octavian Nothing is marketed as YA, and it's structurally a comet. Predictably, I adore it
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I think you've kinda hit the nail on the head of why I do so well on memes and character building things for Sidhe, but not so well on the actual writing of the plot.
I know so much about my OCs. I have many of them and many little stories to tell, but they're all focussed on the characters. When I was writing some of it for NaNo, most of the 15000 words I got was just Brendan and Max chatting and not a lot of plot :|a I like writing about characters.
I've noticed it with what I enjoy watching and reading too. I will forgive an awful lot if something has good characters (hence my adoration of Weiss Kreuz even if in all other ways it sucks). But as fascinating plot is unlikely to keep me motivated if I don't care for them.
I'm actually a lot like you in regards to my reading and viewing preferences, at least when it comes to what I get actively fannish about. For example, I think China Mieville writes fucking gorgeous prose and I wish I could bring a quarter of the inventiveness and sensuality and depth to my worldbuilding that he does to his -- but it takes me a while to get through his books because my opinions on his characters tend to range from kind-of-cool-I-guess to abject dislike. Doesn't make him a bad writer, doesn't make me a bad reader. It just means his hooks aren't usually the ones I grab onto.
And I think that attachment primarily to character (no matter which character) is common in fandom. Not universal, but common. And sometimes you get all the satisfaction you need from reading about two of your favorite characters shooting the shit and having all those conversations you wish you'd gotten to see in canon. But first there has to be a canon in which they didn't have those conversations, I think.
Yeah, that sounds about right ^^ Something can be pretty as hell, but if the characters don't grab me, I'll have a much more difficult time becoming involved with it and it's doubtful that I'll ever love it in the right way to become fannish about it.
I definitely agree that the canon has to not contain those moments. For example, you rarely find large yaoi fandoms growing up around series with canonically yaoi pairings. It's already done so there's no need to make it happen. It often tends to be fandoms with the most flaws or gaps in canon that become the most popular fandoms and produce the most fanfic.
This is an interesting distinction, but I think making it the distinction between fanfic and original fic is a poor labeling job. We talk all the time of fic that doesn't require canon knowledge to enjoy. Most if not all of that fic subverts your labels. My "The Effluence Engine" fic, "The Petro Dynamo", crosses over with Frankenstein. And as a Frankenstein fic, it fills in the spaces, doesn't move the plot forward, does all the things you ascribe to fanfiction. But as "Effluence Engine" fic, it barely acknowledges the canon. It uses the same world and the same characters, but the characters move linearly through a plot that is carefully determined and entirely separate from the original canon. In thinking about it, many of my crossover-heavy fics similarly fail your schema. My hopefully soon to be posted Avengers/West Wing crossroles fic builds outward on one of the fandoms, but builds forward on the other, using it only as a setting to tell a basic story. (It offers secret history to the West Wing verse, but it's just a
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I know a lot of people who enjoy certain fics without being familiar with the source material, but that actually rarely works for me. I have a really hard time connecting with unfamiliar characters, even when they're placed in settings and situations that are almost entirely divorced from the original one. I feel like I'm missing a necessary piece of emotional context, more than anything else -- an understanding of the nuances and in-jokes and nods to the canon, a pre-existing investment in the outcome (or expectation/hope of what that outcome will be). Sometimes I have the same problem with crossovers when I'm not familiar with both the source canons, though there are exceptions. I think a lot -- not all, maybe, but a lot -- of fanfic is written with the expectation that the reader already cares about something in the story. The characters, the setting, heck, even the tropes. The reader might later decide that they don't really care about your story, but they probably still care about what it was that drew them to the story in the
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Yeah, I agree that they're useful in thinking about fiction generally, but it ends up coming off to me like an attempt to police the boundaries of fanfiction, which I'm always wary about because my interaction with fanfiction is nonstandard in many ways.
My point isn't that everyone can read fanfiction sans canon, but that some fanfiction works that way and some people read it, and that I don't think that trying to frame that as "fanfiction written like original fiction" is fair or appropriate.
When you’re used to building and looking outward, it’s easy to come up with rich and fascinating characters and incredibly detailed worlds, and find yourself completely unable to tell the core story
Yeah, that's why I have a folder of characters(300ish) with complete backstories, but only 2 pages full of characters who actually have a core story. One of the core stories, I literally spent six years building because it's so goddamn hard. The other was easier to build because I had two friends helping me. When I have other people playing characters I easily slip into the GM-Mode, where my characters are sort of NPCs to the cast and I can help plot out a story to write
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I know exactly what you mean about the plot tumors -- one of Mith's and my original projects grew out of out attachment to a tertiary-turned-secondary character in another original project, because we couldn't leave the guy alone. It's hard to turn off the "I want to write EVERYTHING ABOUT THESE GUYS" thing in your head, I've noticed, especially when it comes to secondary cast members. My fannish impulse to build on what the canon hasn't shown collides smack into my desire for origfic with a clean, well-paced plot. (Also, I can't build on what the canon hasn't shown if I haven't written the damn canon yet...)
The hardest part for me -- and maybe for you, too? -- really is committing myself to telling one particular story, but I'm getting better at it. Slowly.
Also, I can't build on what the canon hasn't shown if I haven't written the damn canon yet
Yeah. That is exactly my problem too. (It's related to the plot tumors. They're like conjoined twins.) Commiting to one story and remembering that, oh right the canon ISN'T already written! So I flit about and get no real "progress" done.
It's like writing a story about WWII and getting sidetracked by a Jewish family that runs to America and their hardships with an addition of quasai-magical hijinks, then their decendents years later that found an orffical magical version of the FBI, and the head of that's old college roomate is, meanwhile, traveling through time in a newly discovered "time closet" due to his evil twin brother he never knew existed attempting to usurp his place, while his(the roomate's) daughter and her friends attempt to de-rail a cult...
At that point I go: Oh. Right. WWII. How about that...
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(That is also why attempting to write original things tends to tie me in knots; I tend to have considerable difficulty without that basic structure to build upon. :S)
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(It's taken me YEARS to figure out how to build that structure, which mostly consisted of me realizing that I really need a lot of structure to write, because when I don't know the shape of the thing I'm working on, I have no idea how to even start it, let alone finish it.)
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It doesn't make anyone a failed writer of fiction, to approach original fiction as more like building a comet than building an arrow. Both move forward, but one is stripped to its essentials, and the other vents nonessentials at the least provocation. An arrow is self-contained, secure, moves forward as a tidy little unit to strike the heart of something living--and although a comet trails dust and ice and light behind it as it makes a circuit of the solar system, although that tail diminishes the self-contained substance of the comet, it still has the capacity to shake one's world to its foundations.
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I know so much about my OCs. I have many of them and many little stories to tell, but they're all focussed on the characters. When I was writing some of it for NaNo, most of the 15000 words I got was just Brendan and Max chatting and not a lot of plot :|a I like writing about characters.
I've noticed it with what I enjoy watching and reading too. I will forgive an awful lot if something has good characters (hence my adoration of Weiss Kreuz even if in all other ways it sucks). But as fascinating plot is unlikely to keep me motivated if I don't care for them.
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And I think that attachment primarily to character (no matter which character) is common in fandom. Not universal, but common. And sometimes you get all the satisfaction you need from reading about two of your favorite characters shooting the shit and having all those conversations you wish you'd gotten to see in canon. But first there has to be a canon in which they didn't have those conversations, I think.
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I definitely agree that the canon has to not contain those moments. For example, you rarely find large yaoi fandoms growing up around series with canonically yaoi pairings. It's already done so there's no need to make it happen. It often tends to be fandoms with the most flaws or gaps in canon that become the most popular fandoms and produce the most fanfic.
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My point isn't that everyone can read fanfiction sans canon, but that some fanfiction works that way and some people read it, and that I don't think that trying to frame that as "fanfiction written like original fiction" is fair or appropriate.
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Yeah, that's why I have a folder of characters(300ish) with complete backstories, but only 2 pages full of characters who actually have a core story. One of the core stories, I literally spent six years building because it's so goddamn hard. The other was easier to build because I had two friends helping me. When I have other people playing characters I easily slip into the GM-Mode, where my characters are sort of NPCs to the cast and I can help plot out a story to write ( ... )
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The hardest part for me -- and maybe for you, too? -- really is committing myself to telling one particular story, but I'm getting better at it. Slowly.
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Yeah. That is exactly my problem too. (It's related to the plot tumors. They're like conjoined twins.) Commiting to one story and remembering that, oh right the canon ISN'T already written! So I flit about and get no real "progress" done.
It's like writing a story about WWII and getting sidetracked by a Jewish family that runs to America and their hardships with an addition of quasai-magical hijinks, then their decendents years later that found an orffical magical version of the FBI, and the head of that's old college roomate is, meanwhile, traveling through time in a newly discovered "time closet" due to his evil twin brother he never knew existed attempting to usurp his place, while his(the roomate's) daughter and her friends attempt to de-rail a cult...
At that point I go: Oh. Right. WWII. How about that...
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