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lobelia321I want to write this novel. So how to move from fanfic into origfic?
These are some of my first thoughts on writing a novel. Not that I have written even part of one; I've just jotted down some paragraphs but I have let this thing grow in my head, and it's been an interesting experience so far, so I thought I'd share.
Over the past five years, I have become familiar with a) the short-story format and b) the canon/fanon relationship. A short story doesn't need as much plot as a novel; a nugget of bunny will do. And fanfic has characters and canon.
For me, the absence of canon was the most unfamiliar thing. I set about creating what I think of as 'my canon', and even 'my fanon'. In fanfic, the characters look like someone and they have a particular setting and set of people they interact with, even patterns of speech, personality traits, a history -- and if their history is sketchy, fanon will fill it in for you. So as a writer I can always fall back on all of that and use it, twist it, do whatever with it. And very importantly, fanfic characters have a pre-given name.
So I thought if I am going to write orig I will need to create these characters for myself. I will have to introduce into my head something resembling what I am used to having in writing fanfic. I used one character from a previous fic escapade from another fandom and renamed him, so his look stayed in my head plus the AU fanon I'd invented for him way back. This character had to interact with a man; this was the first pairing I invented and it was m/m because that's what I'm used to. After a while, this other character coagulated into an Indian playboy type. This is because I like Bollywood and I wanted some BW cheesiness in there, and some physical beauty (I do not find the AU guy attractive), and I liked the contrast between unattractive AU guy and flamboyant playboy guy.
T'h had suggested the genre to me: humour. And I found that less intimidating than drama; also, it might preserve me from some of the traps of über-angst which I am prone to and fond of but can indulge in with wraith and Draco. So the humour suggested various things that this initial pairing could be doing.
Then I thought, I need a McGuffin. I need plot. I remembered David Mitchell who said that it is good to invent someone your readers will like and then make bad things happen to him, and that crime is always a useful thing. I also like a theme to write around, to give me my lexicon, and I like particular locations (the beach, the desert, the office). So I invented a very vaguely sketched-in thriller plot with secret agents and spies and travels to far-flung places like the Middle East but also towns I had once lived in. I thought, combine what I 'know' with what I like to make up. So I put in an explosion and this complicated matters for AU guy / playboy guy.
Then I wanted some more people. And a secret agent type occurred to me, but one who's not particularly good at it and who wrangles overpay deals with head office and worries about his pension fund and is a slob and sits around with his shirt open, eating take-away pizza straight from the carton and looks like Steve Buscemi, only scrawnier and with crooked teeth. That's a pretty good canon. And then making it into a character means crawling inside his head and making him fall in love. Because in fanfic, the guys nearly always fall in love. And then they have sex. But this one I wanted to fall in love with a woman. Because origfic needs some het (or so I'm thinking right now).
So I invented this woman whom the scruffy agent spies on, and that is already such a fanon bunny-type, I have it all made for me and can run with it. The woman is busty and has a 'fuller figure' and wears prim lacey shirts. I fear the Mary Sue and I wanted to invent someone who is not like me physically, at least. And I like the weird pairings. And scrawny ugly / plump and prim is not like a standard OTP.
I thought about how the McGuffin could connect the AU/playboy pairing with the scrawny/prim woman pairing. This is still coagulating in my head but I am figuring that plot can be injected later. I have found that I like to invent scenes first, and rooms, and settings, and objects in the rooms, and details of first sexual encounters, and tones of voice.
Then I listened to some nice music on my ipod on the ferry and thought up another, unrelated scene set in a kind of fairty-tale Desert Prince setting, with a young heterosexual couple and eternal love and much longing and angst, and then I tied these to all the others with the McGuffin, and I thought up a really sexy scene involving a stone and a vagina.
None of this, mind you, has been written down yet.
How this compares with my fanfic writing experience
Much of my fanfic exists only in my head (alas), so that is similar.
Much of my fanfic involves thinking up sexy scenarios, so that is similar.
My fanfic always involves thinking about the canon character, linking him to the fanonisation of him, and then making him different or pulling out something about that character or pairing him with an unusual person to see how he reacts. What was interesting to me is how easily I could translate that to characters I'd made up.
About making up characters: I found that I'm not. I'm wondering if anybody ever invents a character from scratch. There is much canon just lying around; stereotypes abound. As soon as I thought the words 'secret agent', the loveliest stereotypisations crowded in, and if one chooses humour, every stereotype is a treasure trove. I do this in fanfic, and I read others' fanfics that do this all the time. I guess this is how canon gets invented to begin with. The creators of SGA didn't invent 'canon'; one could argue that they took some canonical stereotypes ('distracted scientist', 'capable woman leader') and injected them with a bit of individuality. Then fanon came along and rounded the individuality out even more, until these figures turned into rounded and complex characters.
This I found very interesting.
One thing that is different from fanfic is the issue of names. Origcharacters don't come with ready-made names. I've found that I quite like making up names. I've often written characters in fanfic because I've liked the 'k' sound in their names: Dominic, Karl, McKay, Draco. Part of the character for me is in the sound of their name. So I've made my names melodious, like miniature poems, and fitting the stereotype somehow, and some names just came to me and I glued them onto the character so now the character has to live up to the name. I used to do this as a child, when I first wrote origfic. Some characters still don't have names.
All of this is very in my head. But I'm just going with the flow on this one. I'm thinking, maybe this is how I write novels. Maybe for me they need to grow in the head for a while before they get fleshed out in words. Umberto Eco spent seven years constructing miniature models of ships and drawing cross-sections of his ship for The Island of the Day Before, so I figured I could allow myself some free-floating mindtime.
What is good and what is bad
What is bad is the lack of community and the non-existence of a ready-made audience.
What is good is the lack of pressure and the lack of time-pressure. Fanfics have a half-life. They fare best when a fandom is at the height of squeeing frenzy and when a particular pairing or bunny fits in with current obsessions (the latest ep, the latest premiere). Fanfics fall on dry ground when the fans have decamped and moved on to other pastures. (Who will read lotrips now? I wonder.) Origfic lasts 4 evah.
What is good is the total control over the characters. Nobody is going to come and whinge that 'Rodney doesn't talk like that' or that 'Cadman wouldn't use this word'. Origcharacters can be ugly and non-mainstream in ways that movie-based characters are only in Tarkovsky or Fellini (not very fandom-rife filmmakers) (and even book-based Snape gets prettied up in fanfic).
Anyway, these are just some thoughts, recorded for the sake of interest. I make no claims whatsoever about the efficacy of the way I've been going about this. More may follow anon as my novel progresses.
These are some of my first thoughts on writing a novel. Not that I have written even part of one; I've just jotted down some paragraphs but I have let this thing grow in my head, and it's been an interesting experience so far, so I thought I'd share.
Over the past five years, I have become familiar with a) the short-story format and b) the canon/fanon relationship. A short story doesn't need as much plot as a novel; a nugget of bunny will do. And fanfic has characters and canon.
For me, the absence of canon was the most unfamiliar thing. I set about creating what I think of as 'my canon', and even 'my fanon'. In fanfic, the characters look like someone and they have a particular setting and set of people they interact with, even patterns of speech, personality traits, a history -- and if their history is sketchy, fanon will fill it in for you. So as a writer I can always fall back on all of that and use it, twist it, do whatever with it. And very importantly, fanfic characters have a pre-given name.
So I thought if I am going to write orig I will need to create these characters for myself. I will have to introduce into my head something resembling what I am used to having in writing fanfic. I used one character from a previous fic escapade from another fandom and renamed him, so his look stayed in my head plus the AU fanon I'd invented for him way back. This character had to interact with a man; this was the first pairing I invented and it was m/m because that's what I'm used to. After a while, this other character coagulated into an Indian playboy type. This is because I like Bollywood and I wanted some BW cheesiness in there, and some physical beauty (I do not find the AU guy attractive), and I liked the contrast between unattractive AU guy and flamboyant playboy guy.
T'h had suggested the genre to me: humour. And I found that less intimidating than drama; also, it might preserve me from some of the traps of über-angst which I am prone to and fond of but can indulge in with wraith and Draco. So the humour suggested various things that this initial pairing could be doing.
Then I thought, I need a McGuffin. I need plot. I remembered David Mitchell who said that it is good to invent someone your readers will like and then make bad things happen to him, and that crime is always a useful thing. I also like a theme to write around, to give me my lexicon, and I like particular locations (the beach, the desert, the office). So I invented a very vaguely sketched-in thriller plot with secret agents and spies and travels to far-flung places like the Middle East but also towns I had once lived in. I thought, combine what I 'know' with what I like to make up. So I put in an explosion and this complicated matters for AU guy / playboy guy.
Then I wanted some more people. And a secret agent type occurred to me, but one who's not particularly good at it and who wrangles overpay deals with head office and worries about his pension fund and is a slob and sits around with his shirt open, eating take-away pizza straight from the carton and looks like Steve Buscemi, only scrawnier and with crooked teeth. That's a pretty good canon. And then making it into a character means crawling inside his head and making him fall in love. Because in fanfic, the guys nearly always fall in love. And then they have sex. But this one I wanted to fall in love with a woman. Because origfic needs some het (or so I'm thinking right now).
So I invented this woman whom the scruffy agent spies on, and that is already such a fanon bunny-type, I have it all made for me and can run with it. The woman is busty and has a 'fuller figure' and wears prim lacey shirts. I fear the Mary Sue and I wanted to invent someone who is not like me physically, at least. And I like the weird pairings. And scrawny ugly / plump and prim is not like a standard OTP.
I thought about how the McGuffin could connect the AU/playboy pairing with the scrawny/prim woman pairing. This is still coagulating in my head but I am figuring that plot can be injected later. I have found that I like to invent scenes first, and rooms, and settings, and objects in the rooms, and details of first sexual encounters, and tones of voice.
Then I listened to some nice music on my ipod on the ferry and thought up another, unrelated scene set in a kind of fairty-tale Desert Prince setting, with a young heterosexual couple and eternal love and much longing and angst, and then I tied these to all the others with the McGuffin, and I thought up a really sexy scene involving a stone and a vagina.
None of this, mind you, has been written down yet.
How this compares with my fanfic writing experience
Much of my fanfic exists only in my head (alas), so that is similar.
Much of my fanfic involves thinking up sexy scenarios, so that is similar.
My fanfic always involves thinking about the canon character, linking him to the fanonisation of him, and then making him different or pulling out something about that character or pairing him with an unusual person to see how he reacts. What was interesting to me is how easily I could translate that to characters I'd made up.
About making up characters: I found that I'm not. I'm wondering if anybody ever invents a character from scratch. There is much canon just lying around; stereotypes abound. As soon as I thought the words 'secret agent', the loveliest stereotypisations crowded in, and if one chooses humour, every stereotype is a treasure trove. I do this in fanfic, and I read others' fanfics that do this all the time. I guess this is how canon gets invented to begin with. The creators of SGA didn't invent 'canon'; one could argue that they took some canonical stereotypes ('distracted scientist', 'capable woman leader') and injected them with a bit of individuality. Then fanon came along and rounded the individuality out even more, until these figures turned into rounded and complex characters.
This I found very interesting.
One thing that is different from fanfic is the issue of names. Origcharacters don't come with ready-made names. I've found that I quite like making up names. I've often written characters in fanfic because I've liked the 'k' sound in their names: Dominic, Karl, McKay, Draco. Part of the character for me is in the sound of their name. So I've made my names melodious, like miniature poems, and fitting the stereotype somehow, and some names just came to me and I glued them onto the character so now the character has to live up to the name. I used to do this as a child, when I first wrote origfic. Some characters still don't have names.
All of this is very in my head. But I'm just going with the flow on this one. I'm thinking, maybe this is how I write novels. Maybe for me they need to grow in the head for a while before they get fleshed out in words. Umberto Eco spent seven years constructing miniature models of ships and drawing cross-sections of his ship for The Island of the Day Before, so I figured I could allow myself some free-floating mindtime.
What is good and what is bad
What is bad is the lack of community and the non-existence of a ready-made audience.
What is good is the lack of pressure and the lack of time-pressure. Fanfics have a half-life. They fare best when a fandom is at the height of squeeing frenzy and when a particular pairing or bunny fits in with current obsessions (the latest ep, the latest premiere). Fanfics fall on dry ground when the fans have decamped and moved on to other pastures. (Who will read lotrips now? I wonder.) Origfic lasts 4 evah.
What is good is the total control over the characters. Nobody is going to come and whinge that 'Rodney doesn't talk like that' or that 'Cadman wouldn't use this word'. Origcharacters can be ugly and non-mainstream in ways that movie-based characters are only in Tarkovsky or Fellini (not very fandom-rife filmmakers) (and even book-based Snape gets prettied up in fanfic).
Anyway, these are just some thoughts, recorded for the sake of interest. I make no claims whatsoever about the efficacy of the way I've been going about this. More may follow anon as my novel progresses.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 07:03 am (UTC)And I'm your ready-made audience! :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 12:58 pm (UTC)I'm finding with my novel that it's just coming together very very slowly. It's like it needs to percolate. When I sit down and think 'I must write up a plot plan now' I get stupid ideas. Months pass (not a word written) and then I have an epiphany. Then later I realise it's a stupid epiphany, but at least it's progress. At this rate my novel will be finished in 2023, but I'm not straining it.
In other words, you seem to be ahead of the game here, darling.
And yes, I agree with t'h: you are wonderful when you write humour, and it reads, at least, rather effortless. Play to your strong suits!
Keep posting about your thoughts. I reckon it's almost as good, writing about writing the novel, as writing the novel. It kills the moments wonderfully at least.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 01:22 pm (UTC)Very interesting you weighing up the pros and cons of both origfic anf fanfiction. Though the part with fandoms dying when canon stops. Not always the case, right? Like with Star Trek (the original series, I mean) or Highlander. Fanon ist still alive and kicking. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 01:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 10:12 pm (UTC)I'm glad you're doing this, 'tis encouraging - I'd already semi-decided this was going to be the year I Write the Novel. Only circumstances dictate it's now going to be the year I Move House and Live All On My Ownsome, so maybe one terrifying thing is enough. We shall see...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 11:27 pm (UTC)You are going to live on your own! This sounds promising but what prompted the decision?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-04 12:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-04 06:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-04 06:31 pm (UTC)