(no subject)

[melannen]

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?

Comments

[zlabya]

I don't think it's a problem at all. I think it's a good way to draw a reader in--give them the basics on the community in which the story takes place, and the main character's (characters') relationship within it.

[melannen]

Maybe! I mean I clearly don't have a problem with it personally because I keep doing it over and over. It does worry me a little bit that I appear to be doing it every time, though. And writing common wisdom is all about the Establish Characterization Dynamically opening. I'm going to try to start paying more attention to how community is established in the stuff I read, I think.

(I mean, in a lot of stories it isn't at all - which is something I'd already noticed? That sometimes you can have stories where you have these four or five characters who don't seem to have any real connections outside of each other or any sense that they're part of a larger social system. But then some stories do it really really well.)

[recessional]

Writing common wisdom is like all common wisdom: far more common than wise. It's all just tools, and I think what's good for openings reeeally depends on what the story is.

Like the line up there about the person living with their niece: that one seems like a candidate for a more in medias res opening. Whereas the one about the dragon living next door is neat as it is - the very mundanity of the rest of the sentence makes the "oh and by the way DRAGON" pop.

So I think it all depends.

[melannen]

Yeah, but I am writing these with "submit them to the online fiction markets" in the back of my head, so "convince the slush reader you know your stuff" is a thing....

A couple of those that are less medias res were, I think, supposed to be the sort of openings that say, stylistically, 'this is a fairy tale story in a fairy tale mode'. I am not convinced I am capable of pulling that off with those stories, though, so... dunno.

i am not procrastinating on reading the french lieutenant's woman shhhhh

[recessional]

I suspect it's a case of "all of the above". As to the openings themselves, several of them are nicely confident, but several of them I'd probably rewrite if it were me personally. It also occurs to me to wonder: how well do you know your original chars before you start writing them? (aka: are YOU learning the basics about them as you write, as well as telling everyone else). I tend to find that personally, in the cases where I Just Start Writing I end up doing a lot more intro and expository stuff than if I'm writing someone I know well.

The biggest thing I've noticed . . .well, okay, no there are two big things I've noticed that are different between my original and my fan writing:

1. How much really-fucking-awful stuff is actually in the text itself.

2. How many lesbians. (*cough* That is, f/f couples; it just sounds funnier to say it that way because I am twelve.)


In terms of f/f couples in fandom, I can count those I ship on one hand and, I think, still have fingers left over. In terms of original stuff, they're EVERYWHERE.

My lack of f/f fandom couples bothered me for a while until I noticed that no, really: hit the original fiction and it's full of sapphist relationships EVERYWHERE. After that on examination I realized that I really do have some very, very specific shipping fic-kinks and mainstream stuff rarely hits them with two women.

I mean, a couple they literally CAN'T, because they're explicitly het. I ship ST:AOS Spock/Uhura like burning because one of those is a specifically heterosexual relationship wherein the male half of it publicly and without hesitation respects and believes in the female half's competence and expertise. Likewise ones where she's the killer and he plays with the babies. (One of the reasons I dislike "War Stories" as a firefly ep so much is that in that episode, Whedon utterly ruined that dynamic with Zoe and Wash, for me.)

And then a lot of them they just DON'T, mostly because they always have one half of the relationship (or a third, or whatever) being what Female Characters Aren't Allowed To Be. I don't really care how much ~*chemistry*~ two chars have if I find that dynamic dead boring.

(Girls I do ship: Kelly Jones/Annabelle Fritton of St Trinians [movie], Rose Hathaway/Lissa Dragomir of Vampire Academy [movie], Astrid/Eilir from SM Stirling's Emberverse . . . I mean a lot of them boil down to "make Steve/Bucky or Holmes/Watson with girls - no seriously just flip the genders and run with it - and I will ship it like burning.") (Except female characters aren't allowed to be the kind of clusterfuck that Holmes is, especially not without adding timidity, and neither are they allowed to have the swaggering confidence that pre-War Bucky has, nor the total assurance and authority that post-Ice Steve has.)

i am not procrastinating on actually writing stories shh nope

[melannen]

Well, like I said above, they are super-paraphrased, so some are probably more confident (and less confident!) in the original files than they seem here. But yeah, I'd probably kill some of them on rewrite already, or at least redo them to switch the emphasis to something else.

...and it depends? About half of these stories are "I have spent way too long working on these original characters and have about nine novels worth of story for them so let's just goddamn write something short already" and about half of them are "if you think about it too long you'll come up with nine novels of plot and you want a short story so just goddamn write something before you learn too much about the characters".

I actually think the ones where I don't know the characters as well have less expository stuff, though: when I have a whole binder of backstory and worldbuilding I don't really know where to start and I want to tell you EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT THIS CHARACTER AREN'T THEY COOL, whereas the more off-the-cuff ones I may only know what they did in this particular exciting moment so I start with that moment.

...and uh. Yeah. There are other more obvious differences between my original and fan writing, one of them being that I tend to forget to include male characters in the original stuff unless I purposely remind myself to...(I should probably get better about that but. ehhh. it's not like there's a shortage of male characters in sff overall.) Which sort of leads by default to having a lot of f/f (and genderqueer) romance. And strong independent ace ladies who live with their niece and defend the kingdom. (and much much less m/m than in fanfic, but then it's hard to have m/m when you constantly fail reverse bechdel-wallace. and pretty much all your male characters were created to be womens' love interests because you're like oh right, should probably acknowledge het is a thing.)

Re: i am not procrastinating on actually writing stories shh nope

[recessional]

Pfft, boys. Who needs them. Tho I admit I'm continually doing the thing where I'm like "wow there are an overwhelming number of women in this story" and then ACTUALLY COUNTING THEM and discovering that no, I'm exactly at par.

I mean I was never going to change the number of women, mind. Just had that sense.

That's interesting, re: where expository stuff gets. I mean, the other thing is I think in drafts you open however is going to make you-the-writer be able to keep going, because you can always go back and edit later. I end up with the opposite problem; the better I know my people the more I forget that other people might NOT know them so well so this thing that they're doing that's totally reasonable if you know what happened ten years ago looks utterly bizarre so I miiiight want to find a way to tell the readers about ten years ago. (Or maybe not. But I should at least be AWARE. >.>)

Re: i am not procrastinating on actually writing stories shh nope

[melannen]

Yeah, with me it's more like "there are 14 named and/or speaking characters in this story so far and only two of them are male, and the male ones don't get to do anything". But then I'm like, pffft, I've read plenty of stories with the reverse, let's keep that up and see what it does to the worldbuilding. (usually interesting stuff.)

...having accidentally trained myself to have all npcs default to female is probably part of it.

And yeah, I am extensively brainweasel-y about "NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR OCs, MEL, NOBODY BUT YOU" so I go in the opposite direction, I think

Re: i am not procrastinating on actually writing stories shh nope

[recessional]

I have that with OCs in fanfic, but I skip it with original stuff mostly because I am like, look if someone bothered to come LOOK at the original stuff, they are here for my OCs, so screw it. But I am often very good at making strong partitions in my head, which I understand other people aren’t.

And entirely yes, re numbers of boys to girls.

Re: i am not procrastinating...

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I have to remark that I did change Steve's "total assurance and authority" somewhat in my series where the Serum in addition to all the canon 'level up' made Rogers a woman. It comes from the world-building, actors in the publicity reels and photos, keeping it quiet that Steve is the original deal.

Oh, to have a female character oozing with pre-Traumatized Bucky's charisma.

Re: i am not procrastinating...

[recessional]

Rose Hathaway (to my mind) manages it. And I adore her totally and absolutely. (And Lissa gets to eventually have total assurance and authority. And also there is a scene where they literally physically struggle with one another over who gets to stand in front of whom in order to protect them from a bullet.)

And yeah I mean I was a bit imprecise: if you ACTUALLY just gender-swap Bucky and Steve they become totally different people, because worldbuilding (basically). You have to have a different setup in order to GET female characters with those qualities, because patriarchy. (Le sigh.)

Re: i am not procrastinating on reading the french lieutenant's woman shhhhh

[melannen]

...I will also note that in my "read the recent SF that your DW list is excited about" adventure this year, I keep ending up with f/f ships that I ship like anything and dammit there is no fic for them yet augh.

...'recent SF my DW list is excited about' seems to way disproportionately have strong trope-y relationships between interesting female characters centered. And yeah, I just don't see that in the stuff that's mainstream enough to hit critical mass for a fic community to be self-sustaining. :/

Re: i am not procrastinating on reading the french lieutenant's woman shhhhh

[recessional]

HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN AMY SANTIAGO AND ROSA DIAZ. Ahem. /done. But like both of them (hell, b99 entirely sometimes) are kind of exceptions that prove rules. And I have difficulty writing fic for them because I do not want them to have conflict! I want them to be adorable and happy! And because they are in a comedy show, they do not have agonizing conflict I need to fix.

But yeah. Even that: B99 is still small enough to be a Yuletide fandom. So.