Workshop: Writing casefile stories.
How to Build a Casefile
Hi there! I’m Hans, and I’m here to talk about casefile!fics.
The theme of this workshop is pretty simple, and I’ll say it right now so that anybody wants to skip to the end totally can:
Casefile stories should advance characterization.
Easy, right? In a lot of ways, I feel perfectly positioned to follow the last two workshops, which were themed on using an outline to sustain a novel-length story and writing brotherly banter and American dialogue. These roundtable mods have got it together.
I’m going to copy big_pink and admit right off that these are methods that work for me, not necessarily for other people. I see casefile fics as having two sides, or plots, of the same coin. There’s the plot or myth-based part of the story, and there’s the personal side. Each side should reveal things about the other side. They may not necessarily be obvious - in fact, they shouldn’t be too obvious. Allow your plot and characters to compliment each other in the same way that a sweet dessert wine compliments a bold blue cheese. If I may quote:
On the other hand, we rarely need to think about how a wine may affect a cheese. The cheese is the dominant partner in this pairing, and your perception of it is probably not going to change, no matter what wine you are drinking. (Cheese & Wine, by Janet Fletcher)
All of which is a complicated way to say, scary shit aside, we’re watching the show for the brotherly action (platonic or otherwise), and the best casefiles (and episodes) reflect that.
Why Write a Casefile?
We, as a fandom, are lucky as hell. Essentially, we’re working with open source programming; the mythology and legends of the last hundred-some-odd years are completely open to us. We have fifty states and every country in the world, if you view immigrant or international traditions in the same way that canon does (that is, as totally yankable). The whole world is fictionally ripe for our use.
Casefile stories have a bit of a bad reputation. Research is exhausting. Research is a big fat pain in the ass. Let’s just get to the porn, already. Right?
Research is important. Vitally, vitally important. There is no excuse for sloppy research. No matter how well you can bullshit, there are enough people on the internet that someone out there will know exactly what sort of thread would’ve been used in 1765 to line the waistcoat of a Flemish businessman, and they’ll know you got it wrong. And that, in itself, might be why a lot of people are reluctant to write casefile: because it’s easy to get it wrong. Is the case engaging enough to carry a story? How closely should it tie into the location? How closely should it tie into the local culture? Is this thing scary?
To write a casefile is to embrace canon in a way that’s completely different than writing any other sort of fanfiction. We have a standard to live up to, and casefile fics are, by nature, going to be held closer to the standard than most.
So why do it?
It’s an irrelevant sort of question, but I’ll ask it anyway. Why write casefile? There’s no real answer to it. The satisfaction, maybe. Local pride. Hooking into something that is part of the core of our identities (those of us who are Americans): as the case reflects the Winchester family, the Winchester family reflects Americana. They’re a part of a vast spirit, and that spirit is pretty cool.
Getting Started.
Inspiration is easy. Yeah, you heard me. It’s easy. Cruise any ghost or urban legend website, and inspiration is right there. Translating that into a workable story idea is something else entirely.
Inspiration is a starting point. I’ll use one of my favorite inspirational ghost stories, one that has yet to find a real home in anything of mine: Bella in the Wych Elm. Body in a tree - how cool is that? Picking a character theme from a story idea like that is easy: someone is keeping a secret. But what’s the secret and why? And how and where? And again ... Why?
To continue with the theme of wine and cheese, sometimes your flavors compliment each other and sometimes they contrast. It’s important to know which aspect of a casefile will be more important, overall, in your story. Compare Born Under A Bad Sign to Nightshifter. Both are casefile stories, and both have strong plots. They’re some of Supernatural’s best episodes, in my opinion, which makes them good examples to use: they are solidly characterized, tightly plotted and tightly written. The former focuses on the myth arc, while the latter focuses on the plot arc. Both, in my opinion, are at heart all about the character arc. Nightshifter says very little about what’s happening in the boys’ interior landscapes, but we know immediately and intimately what they must be feeling. Good casefiles and good stories are this way. It’s a perfect example of showing vs. telling. BUaBS is more telling - we know this event is upsetting because both of the characters tell us so, but we experience Dean and Sam’s emotional struggles far more intimately because we know the context that the episode occurs in. We’re aware of their history, and so we understand that for Sam, losing control is the worst thing imaginable - and for Dean, the worst imaginable is losing Sam.
Either approach is the right one, for the story that each episode tells. The story that your casefile will tell will be an individual one. There’s no magical formula for representing the brotherly struggle amidst the physical one. Picking a myth is a good place to start, but so is picking a timeframe - Stanford era? Pre-Stanford? Season one, two or three? Or beyond? - or a geographical location. Each choice will narrow down your context and focus, and make it easier to tell that tightly written casefile that you know you have stored away.
If you’ll permit, I’ll use a story of mine as an example, Beach Blanket Poltergeist. It’s a casefile fic in the same way that Nightshifter is. The plot comes before the emotional story, but in the end, the emotional connection is what actually matters. It was, comparatively, an easy story to write. It’s set in my hometown. I grew up there; I know the local culture, I get the context. I come from an area that is particularly rich in urban legends and I had my pick of ghost stories and real events in which to frame a Supernatural story. The plot events mirror what is happening between the characters, and it’s easily summed up this way: there’s something deeper going on here.
That’s it. That’s all you need as far as a theme goes. The personal theme that is carried throughout BBP isn’t particularly original - Dean is afraid that Sam will leave him. Sam doesn’t understand this. It’s a theme that’s more or less carried out in every episode. My point is this: your themes are starting points, same as your ghost stories. What you do with it is up to you. There’s no yard stick to measure what sort of ghost story will better carry a casefile, because the ghosts are just the beginning. It’s simultaneously freeing and scary at the same time.
So, to go back and borrow the body in a tree. It’s easy to see a body in a tree, reach for a theme and say, my secret is that Dean is in love with Sam. And that’s a fine and dandy theme. But that doesn’t have to be the end of it. Don’t be afraid to be subtle. Your secret, such as it is, could simply be that the boys keep things from each other. That they’re not always on the same wave length. To work with a broader theme gives you a lot more freedom to maneuver, especially when you get down to that pesky research and end up having to throw away half of your plot because the logics don’t work out.
Research!
It’s important! Don’t slack! This will sound like cheating because it totally is, but one of the biggest pieces of advice I can impart is this: have smart friends. Cultivate people who know more about stuff than you do. The best thing you can do, when you don’t know something, is admit that you’re wrong. (I think there’s a Disney movie out there about that) You can try to fake it, but if you can get the advice from someone who knows (via a personal friend, an interview online, or some sort of database) you might also get context with it: the language that someone who knows would use, the particular phrasing, the respect or lack there-of. Kripke originally wanted to put the boys in a wannabe car, and when he asked his neighbor about his choice, he got a car that you could hide a body in.
I keep track of people who know more than I do. I’m a good go-to if you have a question about fashion - I couldn’t tell you what you’d use to line the waistcoat of a Flemish businessman, but I can debate the existential meaning of Yves Saint Laurent’s design sense and tell you what a button placket is. I don’t know shit about guns, so when I have a gun question - or a question about the FBI, the police, or legal matters - I run crying to clex_monkie89. When I have a question about living under the grid, I ask my sister, essenceofmeanin. The only shame about asking someone who knows, is if you don’t. Details will make your story.
As far as the rest of researching goes … there’s no real getting beyond it, but research can be intensely rewarding and damn useful to you. While writing Beach Blanket Poltergeist, I spent at least an hour trying to figure out, based on rough floor plans of a building that not only didn’t exist anymore, but had been built over several times, where the grave of a missionary priest would currently reside. It was only after reading through an incredibly tedious paper on church practices that I discovered that my priest’s grave hadn’t been moved along with the rest of the graveyard - he’d been buried underneath the new church, and was there to this day. After another hour of debating with fatale (who was my go-to for all things that blow up, among other things) how best to blow a hole in a church floor, I realized that my knowledge of local history gave me a far easier answer: there’s already a potential hole in the floor, from the 1989 earthquake that had its epicenter only miles away from where I currently live. None of this was planned in advance, but it gave me the hook into the entire rest of the story, in the form of another earthquake that only occurred in a series of catacombs that shouldn’t exist. Again, there’s something deeper going on here.
There’s also something to be said for learning for the sake of learning. Writers, when properly tuned, are sponges, and the best way to learn about something is just to absorb everything. You never know when you’ll need to know what a button placket is.
Plotting that mofo.
This will come down to what works best for you, as an author. The last workshop centered around the outline, which I wish was useful for me. The way that I personally work is to start with an idea of a beginning and to have an idea of the end, and see where the story takes you. It either takes a whole lot of confidence in one’s ability or a whole lot of laziness. I trust the story to take me where it will, which is why I end up with non-existent catacombs and hellmouths and surprise Daddy!cest (as per last year’s spn_j2_bigbang story). It doesn’t always work out. I’ve written stories that were intended to reveal deep messages about the characters via the hunt, and had them fall completely on their face in an unintelligible mess (see One More Cup of Coffee (For the Road). So experiment if you want to - stick with what works for you if you don’t.
One thing that I find useful is a tip that my mother gave to me, a while back. Each scene that you write should advance either the characters or the plot. If you don’t know which it is, then chuck the scene or figure it out. With casefile fics, there’s a purpose that PWPs or relationship fics don’t necessarily have, and it could be mostly plot-related and it could be mostly character-related (or both). You have a destination, a resolution, and somehow, you gotta get there, whether it’s through characters or plot. You have two goals: how your action will end, and what journey you want the characters to take. Know where you’re driving towards; the route is up to you.
To Sum Up.
I said it in the beginning, and I’ll say it again. Casefiles should serve the characters. Your plot should serve the characters. Don’t skimp on research. And don’t be afraid to take chances.
Thanks a lot for reading, and I hope that you can find something that will help you, either in the post or in the comments. Also, thanks to the mods at spnroundtable for letting me host such a great topic.
Hi there! I’m Hans, and I’m here to talk about casefile!fics.
The theme of this workshop is pretty simple, and I’ll say it right now so that anybody wants to skip to the end totally can:
Casefile stories should advance characterization.
Easy, right? In a lot of ways, I feel perfectly positioned to follow the last two workshops, which were themed on using an outline to sustain a novel-length story and writing brotherly banter and American dialogue. These roundtable mods have got it together.
I’m going to copy big_pink and admit right off that these are methods that work for me, not necessarily for other people. I see casefile fics as having two sides, or plots, of the same coin. There’s the plot or myth-based part of the story, and there’s the personal side. Each side should reveal things about the other side. They may not necessarily be obvious - in fact, they shouldn’t be too obvious. Allow your plot and characters to compliment each other in the same way that a sweet dessert wine compliments a bold blue cheese. If I may quote:
On the other hand, we rarely need to think about how a wine may affect a cheese. The cheese is the dominant partner in this pairing, and your perception of it is probably not going to change, no matter what wine you are drinking. (Cheese & Wine, by Janet Fletcher)
All of which is a complicated way to say, scary shit aside, we’re watching the show for the brotherly action (platonic or otherwise), and the best casefiles (and episodes) reflect that.
Why Write a Casefile?
We, as a fandom, are lucky as hell. Essentially, we’re working with open source programming; the mythology and legends of the last hundred-some-odd years are completely open to us. We have fifty states and every country in the world, if you view immigrant or international traditions in the same way that canon does (that is, as totally yankable). The whole world is fictionally ripe for our use.
Casefile stories have a bit of a bad reputation. Research is exhausting. Research is a big fat pain in the ass. Let’s just get to the porn, already. Right?
Research is important. Vitally, vitally important. There is no excuse for sloppy research. No matter how well you can bullshit, there are enough people on the internet that someone out there will know exactly what sort of thread would’ve been used in 1765 to line the waistcoat of a Flemish businessman, and they’ll know you got it wrong. And that, in itself, might be why a lot of people are reluctant to write casefile: because it’s easy to get it wrong. Is the case engaging enough to carry a story? How closely should it tie into the location? How closely should it tie into the local culture? Is this thing scary?
To write a casefile is to embrace canon in a way that’s completely different than writing any other sort of fanfiction. We have a standard to live up to, and casefile fics are, by nature, going to be held closer to the standard than most.
So why do it?
It’s an irrelevant sort of question, but I’ll ask it anyway. Why write casefile? There’s no real answer to it. The satisfaction, maybe. Local pride. Hooking into something that is part of the core of our identities (those of us who are Americans): as the case reflects the Winchester family, the Winchester family reflects Americana. They’re a part of a vast spirit, and that spirit is pretty cool.
Getting Started.
Inspiration is easy. Yeah, you heard me. It’s easy. Cruise any ghost or urban legend website, and inspiration is right there. Translating that into a workable story idea is something else entirely.
Inspiration is a starting point. I’ll use one of my favorite inspirational ghost stories, one that has yet to find a real home in anything of mine: Bella in the Wych Elm. Body in a tree - how cool is that? Picking a character theme from a story idea like that is easy: someone is keeping a secret. But what’s the secret and why? And how and where? And again ... Why?
To continue with the theme of wine and cheese, sometimes your flavors compliment each other and sometimes they contrast. It’s important to know which aspect of a casefile will be more important, overall, in your story. Compare Born Under A Bad Sign to Nightshifter. Both are casefile stories, and both have strong plots. They’re some of Supernatural’s best episodes, in my opinion, which makes them good examples to use: they are solidly characterized, tightly plotted and tightly written. The former focuses on the myth arc, while the latter focuses on the plot arc. Both, in my opinion, are at heart all about the character arc. Nightshifter says very little about what’s happening in the boys’ interior landscapes, but we know immediately and intimately what they must be feeling. Good casefiles and good stories are this way. It’s a perfect example of showing vs. telling. BUaBS is more telling - we know this event is upsetting because both of the characters tell us so, but we experience Dean and Sam’s emotional struggles far more intimately because we know the context that the episode occurs in. We’re aware of their history, and so we understand that for Sam, losing control is the worst thing imaginable - and for Dean, the worst imaginable is losing Sam.
Either approach is the right one, for the story that each episode tells. The story that your casefile will tell will be an individual one. There’s no magical formula for representing the brotherly struggle amidst the physical one. Picking a myth is a good place to start, but so is picking a timeframe - Stanford era? Pre-Stanford? Season one, two or three? Or beyond? - or a geographical location. Each choice will narrow down your context and focus, and make it easier to tell that tightly written casefile that you know you have stored away.
If you’ll permit, I’ll use a story of mine as an example, Beach Blanket Poltergeist. It’s a casefile fic in the same way that Nightshifter is. The plot comes before the emotional story, but in the end, the emotional connection is what actually matters. It was, comparatively, an easy story to write. It’s set in my hometown. I grew up there; I know the local culture, I get the context. I come from an area that is particularly rich in urban legends and I had my pick of ghost stories and real events in which to frame a Supernatural story. The plot events mirror what is happening between the characters, and it’s easily summed up this way: there’s something deeper going on here.
That’s it. That’s all you need as far as a theme goes. The personal theme that is carried throughout BBP isn’t particularly original - Dean is afraid that Sam will leave him. Sam doesn’t understand this. It’s a theme that’s more or less carried out in every episode. My point is this: your themes are starting points, same as your ghost stories. What you do with it is up to you. There’s no yard stick to measure what sort of ghost story will better carry a casefile, because the ghosts are just the beginning. It’s simultaneously freeing and scary at the same time.
So, to go back and borrow the body in a tree. It’s easy to see a body in a tree, reach for a theme and say, my secret is that Dean is in love with Sam. And that’s a fine and dandy theme. But that doesn’t have to be the end of it. Don’t be afraid to be subtle. Your secret, such as it is, could simply be that the boys keep things from each other. That they’re not always on the same wave length. To work with a broader theme gives you a lot more freedom to maneuver, especially when you get down to that pesky research and end up having to throw away half of your plot because the logics don’t work out.
Research!
It’s important! Don’t slack! This will sound like cheating because it totally is, but one of the biggest pieces of advice I can impart is this: have smart friends. Cultivate people who know more about stuff than you do. The best thing you can do, when you don’t know something, is admit that you’re wrong. (I think there’s a Disney movie out there about that) You can try to fake it, but if you can get the advice from someone who knows (via a personal friend, an interview online, or some sort of database) you might also get context with it: the language that someone who knows would use, the particular phrasing, the respect or lack there-of. Kripke originally wanted to put the boys in a wannabe car, and when he asked his neighbor about his choice, he got a car that you could hide a body in.
I keep track of people who know more than I do. I’m a good go-to if you have a question about fashion - I couldn’t tell you what you’d use to line the waistcoat of a Flemish businessman, but I can debate the existential meaning of Yves Saint Laurent’s design sense and tell you what a button placket is. I don’t know shit about guns, so when I have a gun question - or a question about the FBI, the police, or legal matters - I run crying to clex_monkie89. When I have a question about living under the grid, I ask my sister, essenceofmeanin. The only shame about asking someone who knows, is if you don’t. Details will make your story.
As far as the rest of researching goes … there’s no real getting beyond it, but research can be intensely rewarding and damn useful to you. While writing Beach Blanket Poltergeist, I spent at least an hour trying to figure out, based on rough floor plans of a building that not only didn’t exist anymore, but had been built over several times, where the grave of a missionary priest would currently reside. It was only after reading through an incredibly tedious paper on church practices that I discovered that my priest’s grave hadn’t been moved along with the rest of the graveyard - he’d been buried underneath the new church, and was there to this day. After another hour of debating with fatale (who was my go-to for all things that blow up, among other things) how best to blow a hole in a church floor, I realized that my knowledge of local history gave me a far easier answer: there’s already a potential hole in the floor, from the 1989 earthquake that had its epicenter only miles away from where I currently live. None of this was planned in advance, but it gave me the hook into the entire rest of the story, in the form of another earthquake that only occurred in a series of catacombs that shouldn’t exist. Again, there’s something deeper going on here.
There’s also something to be said for learning for the sake of learning. Writers, when properly tuned, are sponges, and the best way to learn about something is just to absorb everything. You never know when you’ll need to know what a button placket is.
Plotting that mofo.
This will come down to what works best for you, as an author. The last workshop centered around the outline, which I wish was useful for me. The way that I personally work is to start with an idea of a beginning and to have an idea of the end, and see where the story takes you. It either takes a whole lot of confidence in one’s ability or a whole lot of laziness. I trust the story to take me where it will, which is why I end up with non-existent catacombs and hellmouths and surprise Daddy!cest (as per last year’s spn_j2_bigbang story). It doesn’t always work out. I’ve written stories that were intended to reveal deep messages about the characters via the hunt, and had them fall completely on their face in an unintelligible mess (see One More Cup of Coffee (For the Road). So experiment if you want to - stick with what works for you if you don’t.
One thing that I find useful is a tip that my mother gave to me, a while back. Each scene that you write should advance either the characters or the plot. If you don’t know which it is, then chuck the scene or figure it out. With casefile fics, there’s a purpose that PWPs or relationship fics don’t necessarily have, and it could be mostly plot-related and it could be mostly character-related (or both). You have a destination, a resolution, and somehow, you gotta get there, whether it’s through characters or plot. You have two goals: how your action will end, and what journey you want the characters to take. Know where you’re driving towards; the route is up to you.
To Sum Up.
I said it in the beginning, and I’ll say it again. Casefiles should serve the characters. Your plot should serve the characters. Don’t skimp on research. And don’t be afraid to take chances.
Thanks a lot for reading, and I hope that you can find something that will help you, either in the post or in the comments. Also, thanks to the mods at spnroundtable for letting me host such a great topic.