A completely different Harry Potter Mary Sue, because, well, they're fun and easy to write, and I'm behind already.

I did not *intend* for this to be femmeslash-really-but once I brought in the Fritz Lieber crossover they refused to behave.

First part here

( Rated R for three naked girls in a tub, language, and, um, mpreg. )

So as part of my heroic, gruelling efforts this month to not write a novel, I've been re-reading some of my favorite how-to-write books. Yes, yes, I know that's bad; in my defense I plead that they're all written by full-time sf writers whom I like.

Today's is Orson Scott Card's How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, from the Writer's Digest genre series. The business section is completely out of date, of course, pre-dating the internet, but he does the best advice for story construction I've come across-- that is, now that you've got the idea, what do you do with it? And, being the strange little person I am, it's got me thinking about fanfiction, and why some properties spawn lots and lots of fanfic, and others -- some with equally large fandoms-- don't.

In particular, he describes four basic elements of story: Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event; and emphasizes the importance of knowing which of these will dominate your story, because that will determine the vital question of what needs to be in the story that goes down on the page-- as opposed to the story in the author's head, which is much larger. It determines where the beginning and end of the story are.

( So let me oversimplify an already simplified classification system )

( And then attempt to use it to explain why I write HP fanfic instead of Enchanted Forest. )