So I am still in the process of trying to get all of my attempts at fiction-writing in one place and at least moderately organized (I have found everything that was computerized from ~2003-~2006 and from ~2009 to present, and I didn't write a huge amount in those missing years, but there's a bunch of unfinished Stargate and Highlander fanfic still hiding *somewhere*.... including a stargate/highlander fanfic that was the longest thing I'd written up to that point. Oh well.)

Anyway, so part of this was pulling out all the abortive starts of original short stories that were mixed up in it, and I was reading over them, and I noticed a pattern, which is something that didn't surprise me exactly - when I thought about it, it made perfect sense, but: when I start and original story, my first couple paragraphs are about establishing, not a character or a plot, but a community.

I mean, in these scattered beginnings, I have (in super-paraphrase):
We moved to a new neighborhood that was very different from our old one and felt like we didn't fit in

I went to college and loved the college community but I couldn't help notice my roommate was holding herself apart from all that

There were eight princesses who were part of a royal family that had a strange relationship with the land and people

We lived alone in the forest, the whole family, with our animals, and stayed separate from the world, but a dragon lived next door

I failed out of college but I loved the college town and stayed even when it all went wrong

I work in the library and that lets me see all sorts of interesting things about the people in this community (x2 because screw it, write what you know)

My niece who I live with woke me up to say the princess needs me on duty because the town is under threat

I'm not a native of this town and therefore when a strange thing happened I didn't know enough to pretend I hadn't seen it, the way all the locals did

The department chair stopped by my office and I moaned because I was so not interested in dealing with more intradepartmental politics


And I wondered if it was just something I was noticing in the original stuff because I was looking at it. But while some of my fanfic starts similarly, but it doesn't stand out nearly as much as a pattern. Most of the fanfic starts with strong character moments, or relationship-establishing interactions between two characters. Even the stories I thought of as about community - like, say, the Pac Rim remix - I start with strong character interactions. When I do open with something about place, it's much more about establishing setting, atmospheric description shots - "it was foggy in Toulon that night", "the parking lot was deserted and lonely" - where the ones in original fic are about setting up a character's relationship with an entire community, place and people together.

I am not sure what I think about this. If it's something that's a problem with my original fic openings, or it's something I'm doing well, or it's showing me what I'm interested in when I can make a story with no constraints. Maybe it's that having to establish a character from scratch in as few strokes as possible, the best way I know to do it is to show how they fit into their community (and vice-versa, when it comes to establishing a world in few strokes), and that with fanfic I don't have to do that. Or maybe I'm still too nervous about all that in original fic and just don't have the courage to open with strong imagery/action/dialogue the way in do in fanfic, and these are unnecessary intro bits I should cut. Maybe I'm just trying to tell fundamentally different kinds of stories in fic than in original stuff (although at least three of those original fics were supposed to be short romances....) Or maybe I don't do the community-based openings in fanfic because the canons I'm working from are generally not that good at community.

I don't know, I haven't concluded anything. But I'm finding it interesting to think about. Any thoughts? Anything similar that y'all have noticed?