Okay it looks like I'm catching up on several months of discussion here so bear with me. A day later I've finally made my way through all of this thread.
how do you guys deal with the boring bits? Like scene setting and description? I prefer character interaction and dialogue and really struggle with the other stuff - which is no less important of course, i just find it hard.
I don’t know if my methods are advisable by any means, but I usually start with writing the parts that excite me to write. It may not be the beginning. Then I go back and fill in what needs to be filled in from there.
I guess it’s kind of like sketching a person. You don’t start at the top of the head and work your way down; you start with the most important parts, like the eyes or overall shape of the person, then as you start to fill in the details it becomes obvious via Gestalt where the lines should be drawn in between.
As for how much/how little description, I also don’t know if this is advisable but I tend to base how much description I give a thing based on how important the thing is to the character’s current state of mind and how it affects the pacing in relationship to the mood I want the reader to be feeling at the moment. Like, if shit is nice and calm, sure, let’s spend lots of time describing things nicely because we have the time to do so and i think it gives that sense of non-urgency. (e.g. It was a lovely autumn day and the tree that stood before her was impressive, with its wide trunk and bright red leaves. As she ran her fingertips over the rough bark, she estimated it must have been hundreds of years old.) But if I want the reader to feel frantic or detached or something, then descriptions might be abrupt or absent, and sentence structure may get repetitive and/or reduced to fragments. (e.g., The tree was hard. Cold. Unyielding. A single red leaf drifted in front of her face.) But my stuff tends to be very character driven, so often my descriptions are only as important as their relevance to the characters. That tree’s probably not important at all, but I just want the reader to know there’s a tree there and it’s autumn, and anything else I’m telling about the tree is probably just filler so that we can have the feeling of taking our time talking about it.
Also, I do most of my writing in my head, when I’m away from the piece. That’s when the scene plays out for me, and I go back and write about it later.
The most common tropes encountered while writing and how you handle them
Excessive badassery, I suppose. Or, you know, Mary Sue-ism. I guess there’s a lot of stuff that defines Mary Sue, but it’s the excessive badassery that tends to be my problem. That said, I either don’t really have much of a problem with tropes, or don’t spend as much time considering them as I should.
You know what’s hard? Not writing Lucrecia as a Mary Sue. She’s the love interest of a popular main character AND
the villain’s fucking mother. Also, she’s super smart, pretty, and never ages. If anyone ever wrote her as an OC with all that Special Snowflakiness, I’d slap them.
Actually, I have trouble writing Lucrecia as a likable character in general. I mean, *I* like her. She has justified herself to me. But I guess I often have trouble articulating exactly how that came to be in a way that will make other people see her as a flawed, tragic hero instead of just a dumb bitch. Or maybe I just relate to dumb bitches.
Honestly, everything is a trope including flashbacks and airships, so I’m not going to tiptoe around using any trope whatsoever because sometimes the try-hard effort to avoid and subvert tropes can come across as more obnoxious than the tropes themselves. I have toyed with the idea of going through TV Tropes someday and picking out all the tropes that apply to my story, just for fun.
Hours spent reading vs writing vs reading/writing about writing (research, writing meta, etc)
As far as Redemption goes, oh God. Probably 3 hours of plan work to every hour of drawing. But to be fair, since it’s a comic, most of the writing happens in the plan work.
Favourite subjects when writing (both consciously and subconsciously) vs the subjects you want to be interested in writing
I write fan fiction almost exclusively. I CAN write original work, and used to, but frankly I am more interested in writing things that other people are interested in reading, and I don’t see the point in reinventing the wheel to tell a story when I can do it just as well using existent wheels that people already enjoy riding.
As for particular genres within fan fiction, I suppose romance and psychology are the subjects I hover around. If I had to pick someone that I’m not interested in but wish I was more interested in, maybe political stuff? Not real-world politics, but just the aptitude and level of interest necessary for writing convincing fictional political intrigue, because I know people are into that sort of thing. And I like when I come across it in other works, but I just find it all too boring and myself too unknowledgable about the workings of politics for me to know what the hell I’m talking about or where to start.
I also second the thing about action scenes. I am not a combat person. I do not care about the combat going on. I want action to happen, because I want heroes to win fights, but I live in fear of the day that I actually have to start drawing action scenes in Redemption because idkwtf.
Stories/ scenes you struggled the most with, and why
I’ve been writing Redemption off and on for probably about ten years now if you count the fan fiction that I started to write then scrapped and replaced with Redemption when DoC came out, so I’d say that’s an answer.
Why do I struggle with it? Well, time constraints, mostly. Graphic novels are a huge undertaking. I also struggle with learning more and more about the canon as time goes on, realizing little details I’d never noticed or misinterpreted before, (or when they were actually still releasing more content,) and having parts of the story I’ve created being contradicted as I’m working on it. It’s like the target is constantly moving. Also, when I went to college and shelved it for a few years, I lost pretty much all of my readership and it’s been difficult and disparaging trying to get them back/build one again as the compilation is aging and it seems there is overall less interest in FF7 fan fiction as there was before I went to school.
Thoughts on self insert (imagining yourself (too much) in your character's place): Do you do it? Consciously? Sub-consciously?
I do it to the extent that I try to use my personal experiences with aspects of the characters that I feel I can relate to in order to connect with them and elaborate on what they’re feeling. For example, Vincent’s obsessive love or Lucrecia’s unwillingness to identify and confront her own feelings. But I actively make sure not to turn the characters into me, because I don’t like when people do that. At least not to the point where they become "too personal," as my sophomore year design teacher would say, and end up only having meaning to the author/artist and not to the audience.
I feel like relating with certain aspects of characters’ personalities can help me write them realistically as not just an ideal, but an actual person who also faces all of the flaws and challenges that come with that particular characteristic. I also don’t only do this with myself; I spend a fair amount of time drawing parallels between fictional characters and other real people I have known. I spend a lot of time analyzing people in general, real and fictional alike, and trying to understand them, and then I suppose retelling that interpretation.
Thoughts on feedback. What kind do you want, what kind do you leave, what kind do you useful, what kind do you find useless
I love all feedback. Honestly, I even love the relatively useless empty pleasantries like “Nice!” or "Can't wait for more!" because at least they tell me someone read it. But what I’d really love is for someone to really get into a deep analysis of what I wrote and share with me all their thoughts about it. I suppose the only kind of feedback I don’t like is trolling, but I haven’t gotten any of that.
Drabbles, do you do them, and do you benefit from them? If so, what?
…Drabbles as in a fanfic consisting of exactly 100 words, or 1000 words, or whatever it is? No. I don’t like specific restrictions like that.
I do write some one shots, though. But I don’t restrict myself to a word count. Usually my one shots are a complement to the world I’m building for Redemption—my additional headcanon stuff that doesn’t really fit directly into the story, I suppose.
Do you outline carefully, or do you jump straight into it?
For a long story I would outline carefully. For a short story, I just straight into it. For Redemption, which is a long story, I actually approach it in a way that is different from how I would usually approach a long story in that I do not have the entire thing planned out ahead of time. I do this because it’s such a long term project that I want to leave myself the room to be able to guide it into something that reflects what I think would make it a good story as my perceptions of a good story changes. If it was already completely written in 2006 when I started drawing the first pages, I would probably be bored with it by now because I was less mature in 2006.
What wip/ work in progress do you currently have in store, how long have they been there and if you're having problems with some of them, why
Answered by all the other questions, I think!
What are everybody's thoughts on the ethics of pinching someone else's head canon?
I tend to pick up ideas here or there but I try not to do it so obviously unless I let them know I’m doing it. But for the most part I don’t agree with anyone else’s head canon enough to want to adopt it verbatim.
I just get inspired by other people’s headcanons. And of course I love to take into consideration the way that other fans who have possibly been considering certain characters longer and more thoroughly than I have been view and interpret those characters. Unfortunately I get turned off by this when it ends up being that their “headcanon” version of the character is so far off the mark of the canon character that their thoughts on the character aren’t useful to me at all.
But frankly I’d love if people started pilfering my headcanon. Half the reason why I even write fanfiction is the selfish desire to get my interpretation of characters into the brains of others.
lot of fanfics have Reno's surname being Sinclair.
That's funny, I’ve never heard that, but I did read a fanfic last week in which that was Elena’s last name. Years ago it seemed to be a popular fanon thing that President ShinRa’s first nam was Richard and that’s just kind of always been in my head forever. But that’s when a thing goes from being headcanon to fanon—when multiple people start ubiquitously adopting it.
There's nothing really interesting about romance (or shipping) than can add anything to a character - or is there? I think there is (usually not enough to carry a story in itself, though, but that's a whole different rant) but it has to be tightly knitted with character and psychology while still subverting most of the common tropes.
I think the problem here is more that “There’s nothing interesting about a relationship with no problems” because it’s entirely unrealistic. That’s why it becomes interesting when you bring in the psychology and character development, because it starts to look at romantic and other interpersonal relationships in a more realistic way.
when a character dynamic already exists that's not romantic in the specific fandom, throwing in a romance may take away from that relationship rather than enhance it, or at least subordinate it when its already established to be other than a romantic relationship.
Ugh QFT. It’s really a pet peeve of mine when someone takes a lovely platonic canon relationship and reduces it to romance or fucking.
I have one. Basically its regarding pairings and my not so secret belief that interest in a pairing is down to having an attraction for one or both characters and/or an identfication for one or both characters.
Basically do you find it harder to write about characters youre not attracted to? This probably only applies to fanfic ofc.
Does this only pertain to pairing fan fiction, or general fan fiction as well?
As far as I can think of, I’ve only written pairing fan fiction that was either Vincent X Lucrecia or Hojo X Lucrecia. While Vincent is obviously a hottie and I’d like to have my very own less emo version, Hojo repulses me. Then again, I don’t write HxL fluff; it tends to be darker. I suppose in the HxL stuff I can still relate to Lucrecia, and to the act of enduring a man one is repulsed by.
I honestly can’t recall writing any fan fiction that didn’t include a pairing of some sort, but like I said, romance and psychology are my primary interests. But the current chapter I’m writing in Redemption could be thought of as a small fan fiction involving Tifa teaching Marlene an important lesson about life at the market and I’m not attracted to either of them.
(Well, not Tifa anyway.)
Do I identify with Tifa in this scene? It’s possible. But then how would anyone ever write any scene if they didn’t identify with one or more of its characters? I don’t particularly identify with Tifa in general if that’s the question.
The exception is Reno/Cissnei, because I feel like if you bred them you’d get Axel from KH but at that point I’m just treating them like chocobos and pairing by color.
I laughed way too hard at this.
——— DAY 2 BEGINS HERE
———
to create a convincing antagonist you'd have to select which values are not so good, and how do you make that believable? People are not randomly vile, vicious and rude...are they? What reasons could they have to be such? Maybe it's the altrustic side of my brain talking but to me that doesn't make a lick of sense.
How do you create someone who is both hate-inspring and believable?
Usually in my VinLu writings the “antagonist” is either themselves or Hojo. With Hojo, you can either go one of two (three?) ways: you can portray him as the flat archetype that his creators seem hellbent on making him, or you can try to find some human reasoning in his actions. (Or, thirdly, you can Draco In Leather Pants him, which it seems most Hojo fans do but I do not consider to be an option. For any villain, really.)
Archetypical Mad Scientist Hojo is easy. He’s evil and that’s all there is to it. Sadly this is seems to be the more canon Hojo.
But I like to try to reason what could make a person act in the way he does without changing how much of a bastard he is. I tap into a lot of real world personal villains, including my mentally ill grandmother, my childhood abuser, and myself. I find he is a more interesting and compelling character this way.
When I write VinLu with themselves being their own antagonists, it’s a lot more introspective on how they are—both and individually—their own worst enemies, punishing themselves and denying themselves happiness without anyone else needing to do that for them, and yet at the same time a natural part of any human is going to rebel against that and this is what causes their strife. I think they are both very similar in this way as individual characters, and then of course this self-denial is the antagonist of their relationship together.
Then in Redemption there is another antagonist. An invented antagonist. And I didn’t want to Snow-Fields-Davoren-ify this villain (i.e., a fan fiction author invents an OC to act as the new villain/conflict, and this OC villain is so cool and so bishie that he becomes one of the most important or at least fan-favorite characters, exceeding importance of the canon characters), so I have taken steps to downplay my antagonists’ relatability. At first, doing what I thought a good author should do, I sketched out the 3-4 characters on the villain’s team and wrote a whole bunch of notes next to them explaining who they are and where they come from and what their motivations are.
Then I crossed all of that out and replaced it with “IS A CRAZY FUCKER” and “BECAUSE THE LEADER TELLS HIM TO.”
The reason being that I *don’t* want my readers to empathize with the villain. And frankly, the heroes never entirely get to figure out the human motivations of these whack jobs, so it’s not important for the reader to do so. For this, I think of real world crazy political activists that I can’t empathize with at all. They could explain all of their motivations and I would just look at them with a bewildered expression all like, “Wat? You THINK that? You’re willing to KILL people because you think that?”
To be honest, they have more motivations than canon Hojo seems to. And I can always portray them with the original notes in mind. But I’m never going to make it clear why they’re doing what they’re doing or why the reader should empathize with them because I don’t want the reader to understand them. Because often, in the real world, we never get to find out why people do the crazy shit they do.
To be fair, if I were writing Redemption from the POV of the antagonists, I would reveal limited info on who the heroes are and why they do what they do. It’s very important in my story that neither side really understands the other.
Is it just me, or are authors that have gone through true suffering more likely to write happy endings?
How do you know the personal experiences of every author you read? You probably don’t, unless you’re only reading stories from your close friends.
Come to think of it, I think I aim for happy endings but by the time I get to the end, the story is driving itself and never quite ends up there. Not sure what that says about me psychologically, if psychology and happy endings are linked according to your theory here.
Really?
I thought I was the only one who hates Genesis. But maybe because I hang out on DA and that’s where the fangirly nonsense is.
He’s one dimensional and bratty. I dunno, I think I’d prefer to be subjected to watching SE just give Gackt a hand job directly than have to endure Genesis as a character.
Also, Loveless was one of my favorite little FF7 world-canon bits to reference until they actually wrote the godforsaken thing and had Genesis quote it ad nauseam. I wouldn’t even mind if the damn story was good and made sense.
Although FWIW I can’t ignore the unflatteringly accurate parallels between Genesis’ obsession with Loveless and the fandom’s obsession with the Compilation, my own included. Actually it would be really funny if someone portrayed Genesis as a fanboy who secretly wrote Loveless fan fiction in his spare time.
re: fanfic as fanfic vs. fanfic as fiction
I don’t entirely know what this means. But I took an art history class in Video Game Culture in which my final project was on fandom, so I have some mildly educated thoughts on this. And I’d like to introduce you guys to one of my pet arguments:
Most of the Renaissance was fan art and fan fiction.
The Last Supper? Fan art.
The Birth of Venus? Fan art.
The Divine Comedy? Fan fiction.
The Iliad, the Odyssey, the fucking
New Testament— all of these are derivative works of the tales of that day’s pop culture. But obviously, given the differences in how pop culture is propagated now and how pop culture was propagated then, it was necessary for a tale to be much more established before it reached the masses back then. Advances in printing techniques changed the situation so that established authors could write books and distribute them, and the internet changed the situation so that even an amateur who had a whim one afternoon could write stories and distribute them. But before either of these technologies, in Classical times and in the Renaissance, shit had to be talked about by pretty much everyone before anyone knew the story well enough to say, “Hey, I think I’ll write a story about that story.”
why would anyone pour so much effort and craft into writing fiction (as opposed to fan fiction) about somebody else's world and characters? Why not put all that skill and effort into your own world and characters? On one level, it's because those particular characters and world inspire us with something we want to say, with ideas we want to explore. But I also think that the best fanfiction becomes literature when it takes the existing canon and uses it to play on our feelings and evoke certain responses. When I read a fanfic in which, say, Tifa is killed off, it evokes a different response in me than when I read an original work of fiction in which an original character to whom i have become attached is killed off.
I think this hits the nail pretty hard on the head.
And also, for me at least, an important part of the reason why I write fan fiction is *because* of the economy of being able to spend less time introducing characters, worlds, and culture. I do not write for money. I do not seek to write for money. And because humans do require money in order to live, in order to keep themselves alive so that they may indulge in hobbies such as writing stories, I do not have the luxury of laboring extensively over the unnecessary parts that can be skipped by writing fan fiction. And a big part of those “unnecessary parts” is not only world-building, but also fandom-building. And fan fiction, by definition, already comes with a fandom of people who have been pre-convinced to invest themselves in your characters and world.
Economy and “I’m not getting paid for this” are the same reasons why I don’t try to perfect my art in Redemption, too, albeit in a slightly different way. But it’s all related.
somebody said:
why is fanfiction considered poor writing, even the good ones?
IMO, the same reason why anything pop is considered bad music, even the good songs. Because people are snobbish assholes who like to cast blanket assessments about what is unsophisticated and beneath them.
it's really interesting that so many fanfic writers, myself included, seem to feel the need to describe characters even though the readers already know what those characters look like.
I think because it feels detached from the scene if you don’t.
I actually catch myself skipping out on this stuff often. And one of my biggest sins is resorting to just using “he” and “she” pronouns in a scene that contains exactly two characters, one of which is male and the other of which is female. I figure, “Well, they know who I’m talking about. They know what color her hair is and what color his eyes are.” But then when you read it back and it’s all like:
“She sighed and he tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear and studied her face.”
...the reader starts to get disjointed from the sense of being with *these* characters specifically. Then you change it to:
“Lucrecia sighed and Vincent tucked a strand of her chestnut brown hair behind her ear, crimson eyes studying her face.”
...and it feels much more vivid as you’re actively reminded of the visuals and the identities of the characters.
Actually, when I want to convey the sense of being more in a character’s head, I’ll allow myself to fall back on pronouns instead of the character’s name, because I *want* the reader to slip away from the physical reality of the setting for a bit.
I thought it was bad saying 'orbs' instead of 'eyes'...... until I saw someone saying 'orbs' instead of 'balls'
In FF7 fan fiction, “orbs” should only describe materia.
(I also saw someone use “orbs” to describe breasts once and I was like, “Does this person not understand the anatomy of a breast?”
My story is 566 words. Not long. Posted it on Skype to my boyfriend. Saw he was reading it. Went back into the living room, closed the door. He enters.
Him: I'm getting hungry, was thinking of heating the pulled pork?
Me: ........
Gods yes. Like, “I just spent LITERALLY THREE COLLECTIVE DAYS of my real world life investing my soul into that. Can you spend twenty minutes acknowledging it, please?”
(</subtlety>
Ravynne Nevyrmore on AO3<subtlety>)
related:
LicoriceAllsorts said:
*clicks* …Sweet fucking God woman, it would take me a year to read this. How do you reasonably expect this of me?
The Divine Comedy was shorter.
...Regardless, I will, if you read mine.
The thing is, when you buy a book in a shop you don't go 'omg that book is so big/has soo many chapters' (unless you're a braindead moron ofc)
I do, actually. See: "relating to dumb bitches," referenced above.
But actually, it's not that I won't read long books/series; I love long books/series.
Harry Potter and
A Song of Ice and Fire are my two favorite. But I want to be assured that the investment will be worth my time, and if I don't know that in advance, I balk at the idea of delving into it.
somebody said:
I really dislike someone trying to complain about a death with 'Maybe he had a family!', whether in a story or in reality.The argument is either economic support or grief based, but the implication that it's more okay to murder people if they're, say, divorcees, bothers me quite a bit. If you kill someone, that is a bad thing, whether they have kids or not.
See also: “What a shame— she was so pretty!” and “Don't rape her; she could be someone’s daughter!”
"What is the history that allowed for this matriarchy to happen?" The question itself feels inappropriate, but in fantasy settings I usually expect that unless we are dealing with a version of the MUSCULAR EXTREME AMAZON TRIBE, females will be placed below males and thusly the extreme achievements of women will be seen as an astounding rarity.
It’s not inappropriate because it obviously defies the natural development of humanity, as evidenced by the fact that it didn't happen. The patriarchy came to be because men are physically stronger and used that strength to subdue women. It won’t be until we make a conscious effort as intelligent beings to correct for that physical discrepancy that it will be any other way, which we're starting to do now. Developing our societal superego, as it were.
If the society is egalitarian, then you can say, “Okay, the humans of this world somehow evolved with modern day intelligence when civilization was forming, so the intentional correction was always present.”
But if the society is matriarchal, it begs the question of how a civilization would develop in which women were able to overpower men into a lower class. I think that’s why civilizations like this tend to involve things like “All the women have magic powers” or “They use their sexuality” or even “They cull males and keep the living ones in submission from early on.” Actually, if you think about it, every weak, vulnerable male baby is born to a female adult capable of overpowering it, so that last one might hold the most feasibility. Granted, then you have to consider that your civilization has somehow developed without maternal instinct, but I suppose it’s another way that evolution could have gone.
Of course, I’m not talking about FF9 in particular—mostly because I don’t remember much of it—but any story that includes a matriarchy.
Some people say to stick to 'said', some people say to vary it, so I just tag with the character names, ie.
"What's going on?" Clement.
Solution:
“What’s going on?” Clement picked idly at the dried booger in his nose.
You don’t need to specify that he said it as long as Clement’s the only one named in that paragraph.
“What’s going on?” Clement had a fondness for cheese doodles.
Non sequitur as fuck, but still reads as Clement speaking the line.
[Alternating non-attributed dialogue for several lines] only works if only two people are talking, though, unless they have very distinctive speech patterns or the type of conversation leaves no room for doubt.
Has anyone else ever noticed that this is a huge problem in OTWTAS? Dialogue is hardly ever attributed to its speaker and I find it cry confusing. I wonder if it’s a Japanese thing. Maybe that’s why they place so much importance over who uses which first person pronouns and all that.
Y'know when you start to think your ideas for stories are shit and that wee feckin' voice in the back of your head starts trying to convince you that it's not worth writing about because it's going to be so catastrophically shit that the Gods themselves will intervene to make sure you never write again, and you spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with that voice in your head and trying to argue that the idea is worth pursuing and you're already started on it and you don't want to stop with it but that wee voice is just so damn feckin' relentless and you become so tired arguing with it that you really start to consider just saying 'Fuck this' and giving up on the story and going to have a wank to forget?
Yeah, I'm getting that now
That’s why i need the stupid one-liner throwaway responses like, “More!” and “Keep it coming!” Sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps it coming.
Writing an art can be a very masochistic endeavor. You pour all of this heart and soul and time into it and at the end of the day you sometimes turn around and realize you did all of that for nothing because no one is even bothering to enjoy what you created for them. So sometimes, if even one person is like, “I appreciate that you made this thing for me to enjoy!” it’s enough to have that one random stranger on the internet who deigned to acknowledge your labors with two words.
re: dialogue heavy scenes
If you lot think these are tough in writing, try it in a graphic novel.
Do I break it into multiple panels? Show the speaker speaking and gesticulating several different times in several different ways from several different angles? Do I illustrate what the speaker is speaking *about* rather than the person who is speaking? Do I just say fuck it and embrace the dialogue heaviness of this particular part and load a bunch of dialogue onto the page with limited illustration?
Ultimately, I guess, I’m going to end up using each of those strategies in different circumstances, but then I hope it doesn’t get redundant.
I suddenly really want somebody to write about a middle manager in a magic detective agency that has to deal with all these loose cannons that never listen to them and keep causing destruction. Is there anywhere I can commission this?
This webcomic is similar:
Extra, by StickFreeks
Writing sexy part of larger relationship scene, struggling to find the perfect middle ground between delicate euphemism (totally out of character) cold clinical terms (turn-off) and porn (which doesn't fit the tone of the piece). There are so many words for penis and none of them are right!!!!! Cock is probably the closest one can get to that middle ground, in the sense of it being the most common and therefore least likely to make readers think "funny choice of word" - but for some reason, I don't like it.
Oh my god yes all of this. I tend to stay in the area of “delicate euphemism” while still making it quite explicit what is happening, but not in a flowery way. (Speaking of flowers and smut, I absolutely refuse to use flower metaphors for vaginas.) Like I’ll tend to say things like “he thrust himself” or “he reached down and pressed his fingers against her” and hopefully that’s clear enough that most readers would infer from the context that it’s a sexual action that’s happening without having to specify penises and vaginas and all that. Just because I feel like if you get too explicit you start making your readers roll their eyes instead of having sexy feels. “She ran her fingertips along the length of him” is another favorite as opposed to like “SHE TOUCHED HIS PENIS.”
And then, of course, the last thing you want to do is make your readers
laugh at a sex scene by using silly euphemisms like “lady meat” and “dick-splosm.”
But every now and then I find myself having to specify body parts and faced with making a Sophie’s choice between unsatisfactory clinical terms and unsatisfactory euphemisms.
(…Cid’s Shinra Rocket No. 27. *dies*)
They say every author has one abandoned MS lying in their bottom drawer, and that's OK, but an ability to see a project through to its end and know when it's finished is vital, I think. I sometimes think fics are like relationships; when it hits a rocky patch it can be a lot easier to just abandon it than to work it out, but if you want the relationship to last you have to put the effort in.
And also, with some stories/relationships, there is more wisdom in knowing when this one just isn’t working out and you need to move on.
Like I have never looked at a fics reviews until after reading it.
Same. When reading fan fiction, I look at “reviews” hoping for comments more than reviews. I don’t care what other people think about the writing; I want to get involved in a discussion of the story. Which happens after I read it, not before.
I could do that thing where "if you want the next chapter you need to give me fifteen reviews telling me how awesome I am..." thing. It's a mindset that fascinates me. I guess they feel there's no point in wasting their time if other people are not enjoying it.
I dunno, I kind of feel that way about fan fiction but I would never hold the continuation of fan fiction hostage for ass pats. That’s beyond petty.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear by now that I have no shame in acknowledging that I write for the sake of others. One of my first art teachers in community college talked about this, actually. He said he was doing volunteer work for someone and stopped because they weren’t appreciating him enough. Now at first glance I think we have this conditioned reaction to go, “That’s immature and petty!” But, really, it’s about an investment of time and energy. Why would I invest my time and energy into writing a story if it wasn’t for the benefit of you, the reader? I could just as easily imagine it all in my head and not write it out. Why would I invest my time into completing a picture if it wasn’t for you, the viewer? I could just as easily leave it at a loose sketch and see enough completion in that image to satisfy me personally because the rest of it is in my head and I don’t need it to be in yours.
It takes time and labor to get a creation from the inside of your head into a form that will successfully communicate your ideas to others. It takes much less time and labor to get those ideas out of your head but only into a form that successfully communicates the ideas to yourself. (See previous “too personal” criticism from other art teacher mentioned previously.) We can write, draw, sketch, talk, and even think in shorthand that communicates ideas successfully to ourselves but not to others. It’s the whole concept of semiotics.
But pushing a work from “makes sense to me” to “makes sense to others” is a labor of love, and one that makes absolutely no sense for us to do unless our goal is to have the thing be ingested and properly understood by others. I’d go as far as to say that anyone who says they don’t invest that time and energy into being readable for the purpose of being read is either lying or not very intelligent.
And so, as was my art teacher’s point, there’s no shame in admitting that when we work for free we are working for that small bit of praise and appreciation, because it’s just a human truth.
I’m not saying this will necessarily color content, but it does color motivation.
But, very similar to relationships, it can’t be a thing that you hold hostage (like in the previous point). You don’t say to someone, “I’ll love you, but only if you give me this, this, and this.” You have to just dive into loving someone first and trust that they will be fair to you in return. If they’re not, you may act accordingly in light of that information, but you can’t dangle it over their heads like a carrot on a stick that they have to make an adequate show of reaching for before you’ll let them have it.
the whole "IT'S BADLY PORTRAYED BDSM!" outcry from fandom makes me scratch my head.
Well, it would be like if FF7 was your life as an underground subculture for years and then a very popular blockbuster film gets made that brings it to general culture understanding but instead of it being a portrayal of the OGC or Compilation in a way that does it any justice whatsoever, it’s a film adaptation of the shittiest fanfic you’ve ever read. So you’re like, “Great, the world at large finally learns what FF7 is, but they think it’s THAT. So now everyone who hears that I’m into FF7 will think I mean that shit.”
Barret has a lot of 99 problems but being the black isn't ain't one of them, not in their world.
fixed for racism.
Ok - AU fics. Where is the line drawn? Seemingly nowhere. I just....I guess I find it odd when it's like they have changed the setting, the relationships and even the characters personalities. Like the only constant seems to be the characters appearance.
For me, at the AU part. I don’t do it. I find enjoyment in neither reading nor writing them. Part of the appeal of fan fiction, for me, is the challenge of working within an existing paradigm of the world, characters, cultures, etc. that you have been given in the canon, and working with them or at least around them, but NOT throwing them out the window at will.
I feel the same about crossovers (which I suppose are necessarily AU).
The only kind of AU I suppose I’d be able to forgive is the kind in which only a certain part of the compilation is used. A lot of the original fan fiction written for OGC is now AU. If someone wanted to write an OGC fanfic now that completely disregards all aspects of the rest of the compilation, I’d forgive it. But that means no mention of Genesis, Deepground, etc., or else it just gets to be cherry picking.
——— new question! ———
So what’s your take on slightly inventing words? I’m not talking about like, “googligibliddy,” I’m talking, like, you have a root word, and you’re trying to make an adverb out of it because it’s exactly the root word that describes the manner in which this action is being performed, and then you type “rootwordably” into your document and the red line is all like, “UM LOL NO.” So you’re like, “Okay, well this is a common root word and there’s a corresponding adjective to it so I’m sure there’s a corresponding adverb; let me break out the dictionary and look up what it properly is.” And then you find that while there’s a “rootword,” “rootwordinate,” “rootwordable,” “rootwordiness,” “inrootwordination,” and “unrootwordibility,” the English speaking community at large apparently never got around to making the fucking adverb. You resort to the thesaurus but there also aren’t enough words in English to cover a suitable synonym for this thing you’re trying to convey.
I used to cry. But now I’m just like, “Fuck, I know English, I know Latin; Merriam Webster has no hold on me. I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING AND I AM HEREBY INVENTING ‘ROOTWORDABLY,’ MOTHERFUCKER.”
Logic being that if Shakespearre and Stephen Colbert can do it, then so can I. YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, MERRIAM WEBSTER.
———
OH, and also, a bonus question: I have recently discovered a fanfic that starts out very similarly to mine. A few chapters in, I have reason to suspect the premise may be the same. This fanfic was written long before mine and appears to be complete. It's unlikely that it will be the
exact same story, but I'm worried that if I keep reading it, I may find that it has already tackled many of the issues that my fanfic will tackle (and possibly do a better job of it?) and that might make me feel very foolish about continuing on with mine, possibly even killing my resolve. I do not want my resolve killed, nor do I want to be redundant at best or appear plagiaristic at worst.
Should I stop reading it and keep myself ignorant to how this other story unfolds, or read it so that I can consciously avoid making mine similar?
To me, Cloud/Reno is always going to be AU and therefore not something I am interested in. Besides, forcing a sexual orientation change upon a character who had no indication of having that orientation—or every indication of not having that orientation—is one of the worst kinds of this particular offense, to me. I don't care if you feel the same or not, but to me it just comes as desperately self-serving. Like if the given pairings, and sexual orientations, and all other aspects of the universe that you changed weren't good enough, why even bother writing this fanfiction, you know?
Never heard anything about that. Anyone else?
As in, like, my name + Darth Sith - Darth. And then they can count themselves lucky I even got on board the Yoo-fee train and Not Push Their Luck™. 