The Truth about Fanfiction

I’m here to talk to you today about a form of writing that has gone largely unrecognized by those who are not internet denizens: fanfiction.

Fanfiction, or fanfic, is writing created using material that is not original. The writer may have used another writer’s world and characters and done something different with them (for example, making Harry Potter fall in love with Hermione instead of Ginny), or they may have used the characters and taken them somewhere else (Harry, Ron, and Hermione in Middle Earth, or in normal high school. This is called Alternate Universe, or AU, fanfic), or they may have created their own characters and put them in someone else’s world.

Fanfic writers write fanfic for many reasons. Some think that the source material (called “canon”) has done something silly with the story and want to fix it, or they like the characters or world and want to play with them, or they explore the many what ifs in any given story. Some people simply lack the desire to create their own stories, and some use it to practice their writing skills without having to worry about the development of a world or characters.

I want to be clear: there is nothing wrong with fanfiction. You can find many arguments on the internet for and against it, everybody has their own opinion. Is it legal? Yes. Can you publish it? No, unless you change the story enough that it’s not recognizable as fanfic. Is it written only by people who are uncreative/lack imagination/are too lazy to create their own stuff? No, fanfic writers are very creative. If you think they aren’t, you haven’t read enough of it. But writing your own stuff is better, right? Absolutely not. There is no “better.”

I know authors who learned how to write using fanfic. Some of them return to it when their stories aren’t working, or when they just want to have fun in a familiar world. When writer’s block sets in, sometimes writing 2,000 words of Katniss Everdeen in the woods pre-Hunger Games is all it takes to get the words flowing again.

And honestly, nobody really acknowledges how hard writing is. Creating characters that feel alive and practically jump off the page and into your lap is hard. Creating worlds that feel real without being too far-fetched, or that feel realistic instead of feeling like a movie set, is hard. Writing words that flow together, mapping plots that are intriguing but also make sense, letting your characters grow and change as the story trucks along—all these things are HARD.

We tend to forget that part. We talk about how we sit in coffee shops or people-watch on the bus and ideas just COME TO US. We don’t acknowledge that after the idea happens, we have to do a lot of grunt work to turn it into a novel. We devote thousands of words to developing this creature before the writing of the novel itself even begins.

For those who don’t have the time to do all that behind-the-scenes work, for those that have no interest in it and just want to get writing, for those that have a million story ideas but no characters or no worldbuilding skill, fanfiction is a wonderful outlet.

My opinion is this: There is no greater compliment for an author than fanfiction (or fan art). It tells me that I have written something that affected you so deeply that you wanted to live in my world. You liked my characters enough to want to spend more time with them, or my work inspired you to write a similar story, or it made you think about it so much that you wanted to reinterpret it. I will never understand authors that feel insulted by fanfiction; I believe it’s a gift we are given by the people who enjoyed our work the most.

Red Queen and the Problem with Dystopias

Time for a book review!

The premise: In an indeterminate point in the future, the world is divided by the color of your blood: Reds and Silvers. Powerful blood flows in the veins of Silvers, giving them abilities not granted to the Reds. The Silvers live like gods, while lowly Reds are commoners.

In a small Red village lives Mare Barrow. She earns money and food for her family by being quite a prolific thief, while her sister Gisa does honorable work as an embroiderer. But when a simple plan to save Mare’s friend from being drafted into the army (a veritable death sentence for a Red) goes awry, Mare finds herself working as a servant in a Silver palace.

Here, she discovers that she has an ability of her own, deadly and very different from anything the Silvers have ever seen. Fearful of what her powers could mean, as the country balances carefully on the knife of war, the Silver royals declare her a long-lost princess and betroth her to a Silver prince, hoping to keep her under their thumb until they figure out what she is.

This summary, to me, fails to capture the best things about this book. I loved it. I’m very supportive of authors taking the current dystopic trend and running with it, which Victoria Aveyard has done beautifully here. The YA dystopia movement really kicked off with The Hunger Games and plenty of authors have written their own version, including things like The 100 (The Hunger Games meets Ender’s Game), Shatter Me (The Hunger Games meets the X-Men), and Selection (Hunger Games meets The Princess and the Pea). But Red Queen is one of the few (only? I don’t like absolutes) books I’ve seen that so seamlessly blends dystopia with medieval royalty, so that you hardly notice the dystopia aspect but it bursts in at just the right times.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I got a bit burned out on dystopia books in the last couple years. I read too many of them at once and got tired of the concept. Many were great books (Unwind, Delirium, Matched, Divergent, Uglies, Incarceron, Glitch, Under the Never Sky, wow what is it with one-word titles?) and I would absolutely recommend them, but I overdosed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of dystopia. I think it’s a great genre, I enjoy it immensely, and with that in mind I give myself permission to critique the heck out of it. The trouble with it at this point is that it has become formulaic.

In The Hunger Games, Katniss is an unknown citizen before she is picked at random to be placed in an arena on national TV, where she can defy the enemy in public. In Divergent, Tris is an unknown citizen before it is discovered that her brain is structured differently from everyone else’s and because of this she can mess with the enemy’s tech. Even in futuristic fiction, we haven’t outgrown the Chosen One trope. Whether they’re chosen because they’re BRAVER or STRONGER or JUST BLOODY LUCKY doesn’t matter, the end result is the same. They are chosen, they are different from everyone else, they tear down the government and change the world.

The other major problem with dystopias is the number of Strong Female Characters who don’t actually do anything. They are so guns-blazingly awesome that they don’t need to do anything in order to earn the respect of their fellow characters. You take the word of their compatriots that they are excellent leaders, highly skilled at whatever their thing is, and “really such a sweetheart on the inside.” In my opinion, Red Queen subverts this one nicely by having Mare take initiative and make her own decisions, but she’s one of the first.

I have read (and written) a lot of dystopia and I hope that we can turn it around. I want more creative worlds, not just the same old “everyone’s in poverty and it’s the government’s fault” (wait that’s real life), I want more realistic female characters who get shit done, I want a new plot formula that doesn’t revolve around a Chosen One. This genre is so new, I believe there is still time to save it.

Back to Red Queen: it totally blew me away. It was dystopic without being in-your-face about it (lookin’ at you, Matched), it had twisty royal politics made even more high-stakes by the fact that every royal has the equivalent of superpowers passed down through their family tree, it had a fantastic female protagonist who EXISTS WITHOUT A LOVE INTEREST CAN YOU BELIEVE IT. That is pretty much unheard of now, female characters who stand on their own without a male partner. In fact, at one point someone asks her which of two boys she’s going to choose and her response is, “I choose me.” Kickass.

From a writer’s perspective, it was well-paced and the character development had realistic timing (Mare wasn’t immediately proficient in her power after discovering she had it, et cetera). And the best part (without spoiling anything) is the completely unexpected twist at the end. I love an author who can pull off a good twist without it seeming campy.

I’m giving four and a half stars to Victoria Aveyard and her Silver-blooded royals.

(Red Queen is the first in what I believe is going to be a trilogy. The second book, Glass Sword, comes out in February)

Plotting and Other Necessary Evils

I’m going to preface this by telling you that some writers are actually Gods of Story sent down to earth from the heavens to make us mortal writers insecure about our work and provide unbelievably flawless books for those who read but don’t write. Okay?

This is intended to console the weeping writer who sees a perfect novel and entertains thoughts of becoming a bricklayer or a house painter or something that involves a lot of repetitive motion and not a whole lot of thinking.

If you’re a mortal writer, a thing you’re going to have to deal with at some point is plotting. I’m not talking like cunning, film noir plotting, i.e. “He rubbed his hands together, plotting his next move with a rarely-observed deftness of mind.”

(I can’t tell if that’s well-written or too purple prose-y. I leave it up to you. Side effect of staring at my own words for too long.)

No, I’m talking about the events that happen in your story. Event A happens, and because of this Event B happens, which causes Event C and so on. If the concept of plot is new or confusing for you, I’m going to break it down really quick.

Plot has two factors: Causation and emotion. These are incredibly broad terms and can get a little muddy sometimes, so I’m going to be very general in this description. Causation has to do with the laws of your world (not the literal don’t-steal-things laws, those are up to your fictional law enforcement), like the law of gravity, or the law that states that if you capture one of King Raffensnerk’s border towns he will conquer your country. You know. Stuff like that. Touch a trigger, something happens.

Those are the rules that you have made for yourself. Emotion, on the other hand, concerns your characters. These are rules dictated by how they are in the world, what their morals and ambitions are like. An emotion rule is “___ happens which makes Carrie feel ___,” and those feelings dictate how your character behaves. “Carrie feels _____ therefore she does _____.”

I’m going to quickly deconstruct the beginning of The Wizard of Oz to demonstrate.

Plot point 1: Tornado happens, which causes the house and Dorothy to go to Oz.

2: Dorothy wants to go home, which causes Glinda to tell her to follow the yellow brick road.

3: Dorothy’s following the yellow brick road causes her to meet the Scarecrow.

Et cetera. But there’s another plot. Remember what it is?

1: Tornado happens, which causes the house and Dorothy to go to Oz.

2: The house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East, which causes the Wicked Witch of the West to be very upset.

3: The witch’s anger causes her to pursue Dorothy.

And the Wizard of Oz revolves around these two plots and the two characters they are centered around. Both were started by what’s called the Inciting Incident, the tornado, and both are fueled by the characters’ desires: the witch’s to take revenge for her sister’s death, and Dorothy’s to get home alive. Some books have one plot or three plots or ten plots.

But usually you do need both kinds: if you have a causality plot without an emotion plot, you’re writing an action flick. If you have an emotion plot without a causality plot, you’re writing a romance novel. Which is great if that’s the goal, but if your objective is to come out with a readable story about rabbits in space, you’re going to need both kinds.

For this reason, character creation has to come before you chart out a detailed plot. If you don’t know your characters well enough to know exactly how they’ll react to your machinations, your plot will be a question mark until you figure that out. (There IS something to be said for making sure you create characters who fit the story you have in mind, but that gets into the blurry line between what is PLOT and what is STORY and I do not have the energy for that today)

If you’re building your story from scratch, start with your Inciting Incident. What’s your tornado? In my current novel the tornado happens when my protag, Radler, is six years old. He is a prince and when his father brings him into a noisy, crowded ballroom, little Radler panics and makes a scene. This causes his father to totally rationally decide to get another little boy to replace his son in public appearances and the rest of the plot unfolds from there. The Inciting Incident could also be called your premise, the foundation upon which your story is built.

Some writers get hung up on the idea that your Inciting Incident has to be TOTALLY UNIQUE or else it will be UTTERLY BORING. That is bullshit. Baum started his story with a tornado. I started mine with a panic attack. Tolkien started his with a wizard appearing where he shouldn’t (or you could argue that his incident was the dwarves losing their treasure, but I’m pretty sure at that point it’s backstory). Star Wars: The Force Awakens only happens because Poe gets himself caught in the first five minutes.

Super simple.

Once you have an incident, figure out how all your important characters react to it. And once you figure out how they react to it, figure out what happens because of their reactions. Repeat this process until your story looks like a story instead of a list of ingredients.

The thing most non-writer people don’t understand about writing is that mechanically, it’s very simple. Cause, effect, cause, effect, cause, effect, repeat ad infinitum or until satisfied. Mix well. Bake at 350° for eight minutes or until golden brown—aaaand now I’m thinking about cookies again.

Nobody cares how brilliant or innovative your Inciting Incident is. They only care about how you follow it and how well-crafted your characters are.

Hark, the first post!

I am a writer, and therefore I must write.

I write all the time. Constantly. Grocery lists, my name on attendance sheets, my friends’ addresses on packages to them, my height and weight and eye color on important-looking forms, essays for college, essays not for college, posts on Facebook, emails, notes to myself in my phone like “whatever you do don’t forget to wear shoes to class tomorrow you nerd.” Yeah, you know what I mean. You write notes to yourself like that too, don’t you?

What I’m saying is, I write a lot. But I don’t necessarily write important things. I’m not, at this point, going to get into the business of defining what an “important writing thing” is, but I think I can conclusively say that I do not write a lot of them. Or enough of them.

I write novels, but not as much as I would like. I write in a journal every day or every two days or once a week or sometimes I’ll skip a month by accident but nobody reads that and I don’t focus on doing quality work there, I just talk.

See? Not enough. Especially for someone (me) who has so many stories in his head that are just dying to get out and are driving me crazy, banging around up there among the cobwebs and dusty boxes of devices. Plot devices, mostly.

So what I’ve done here, with this blog, is make my not-writing EVEN MORE OBVIOUS to the larger world. You can watch me not-write from your UP-CLOSE AND PERSONAL, totally free, FRONT-ROW SEATS. I am now being held accountable for not-writing, and for posting my not-writing in a public forum.

And here I shall list the kinds of things one can expect from this, my VERY OWN corner of the internet:

1. Book reviews (and perhaps the occasional movie review)
2. Essays about writing: writing advice, stuff I’ve learned from being a muddle-your-way-through-it writer, resources, et cetera.
3. Pieces of stories, deleted scenes from my novels, short stories, the odd poem here and there.
4. Personal essays (also known as Too Much Information About Logan All The Time)
5. More stuff about writing. Probably lots of stuff about writing.
6. Stuff about acting and theatre, when I can get to it. Not sure how much stage content I’ll end up posting. Don’t follow this blog if you’re looking for all acting all the time.

 

If you comment on my posts, I will read them and respond to them. If you email me (carefulwordsmith@gmail.com), I will answer. If you email me with questions about writing or life or whatever and you want me to write a post about it, I probably will.

In any case, thank you for joining me on my not-writing adventures.