I keep seeing this sentiment around and I just have to say: this is the point. This is the point of telling stories. Stories make it personal for people who aren’t personally affected. Stories draw empathy out of people. Stories immerse people in situations they might never otherwise experience, show them the consequences of various actions, make them consider viewpoints they wouldn’t otherwise see as valid.
If you’re mocking people for coming to your side because of stories, you’ve lost them. And you can argue that you didn’t want them anyway, but frankly, with the world in the state it’s in, I’d rather have more allies than fewer. Even if they’re there because they know it’s what Harry Potter would do.
“Stories make it personal for people who aren’t personally affected”
you shouldn’t NEED stories to make it personal to you? you shouldn’t NEED something to affect you PERSONALLY for you to care about it? you don’t need to put some salad dressing on fascism for you to be able to rise against it just because it doesn’t affect you personally? using stories to mirror certain situations is good to explain them for children or young adults with little knowledge of politics, but NOBODY should have to be personally affected by something to be able to feel empathy for them. ESPECIALLY when so many of these stories like harry potter and star wars borrow those struggles from people, strip it down, sprinkle magic on top of it and then hand it back to a bunch of cishet white people so they become palatable.
you shouldn’t need harry potter’s goddamn seal of approval to know fascism is bad. jesus christ. it’ 2017.
It’s fine and well and good to say that people shouldn’t need to be educated. That people should just know. But you are living in a fantasyland if you honestly think that people always DO know. Someone taught you that microaggressions matter, that seemingly small injustices rack up, that obviously large injustices still happen, that those things are injustices in the first place. Maybe it was long enough ago that you don’t remember the teaching, but it happened. I don’t say this assuming you’re in a position of privilege – I don’t know anything about you, but I know that someone showed you there was injustice in the world, somehow.
For people in positions of privilege, often the only way to get them to consider the weight and impact of injustice, the only way to convince them it matters, is through showing them something that matters, personally, to them. Often it’s not even about ‘this is wrong and this is right’, it’s about things like ‘force is sometimes a necessary alternative to pacifism when your life and your people are in danger’. Or ‘fascism isn’t dead and buried forever just because the Allies won the war’. Or ‘it’s not just hair’. Stories are the way in. Stories are how you get people’s attention, how you get people to open up to something they hadn’t considered before. You can’t educate someone who doesn’t believe they need to know what you’re trying to teach them.
It’s 2017 and fascism has taken over most of the major democracies of the world. Don’t assume people don’t need to be taught, that you can neatly split the world into ‘good people who are woke’ and ‘bad people who are deliberately being cruel’. Maybe you can afford to turn your back on potential allies who are ignorant simply because they don’t know any better, but I sure as fuck can’t.
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
Sometimes writing is like having an enormous lake in your head, and you want to get it out of your head and into a proper place for a lake so other people can come and go swimming and ride jet skis and stuff, except all you have to move the lake is a teaspoon. So you’re just sitting there frantically flinging water out of the lake with your teaspoon and telling people, “Guys, this lake is going to be so cool when it’s done,” but it will never be done. There is so much lake.
So much of TV is way too concerned with being Clever™ right now. There’s this pervasive myth that audiences won’t enjoy a narrative climax unless it’s a total surprise. “Predictable” is always used as a pejorative term when it comes to storytelling, but I think that’s absolute crap, because here’s the thing:
Unpredictability is not, inherently, a virtue. Unpredictability can mean: a) you don’t have a clear grasp on who your characters are or what direction they’re growing. b) you don’t have a clear vision for the story you’re trying to tell. c) you don’t know how to tell the story (for example, you have a Point A and a Point B but the middle is a bunch of disjointed time-wasting filler.
“But,” the showrunners cry, “you never saw that twist coming! We kept you on your toes!” That does not make it good. Cleverness is often just smoke and mirrors designed to distract the audience from a lack of substance; it doesn’t guarantee a worthwhile story. I don’t want to be shocked for the sake of surprise – I want to feel like the experience was worth my time.
I want to be introduced to a character, and then I want to be taken on a journey with that character. I want every step of that journey to teach me who they are; what they believe, what they want, what they hate, what they fear, and what they love, so that when they are faced with a conflict or a critical moment of decision, I understand exactly why they do what they do. I’m hoping their choices in that moment will reveal something truthful and powerful and worth knowing about another person’s experience.
That’s what I want in a story. I genuinely don’t care whether it’s clever or predictable or whatever; I just want a worthwhile journey in which every moment of every episode means something – to the character(s), and to me. That’s what makes serial television satisfying. It has nothing to do with shock or intellect or reinventing the wheel, it’s just about telling the damn story in a way that makes you feel it.
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character – let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred – you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different – perhaps wildly so – story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity – not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit – the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters – and fic readers – the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse – or even the same ficwriter in different AUs – can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why – it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
This explains so much about myself to me! 😭 I’ve been a big reader all of my life. I knew at a young age I wanted to get an English degree and become an editor. But then I found fanfiction, a little over ten years ago, and suddenly most regular fiction was too dry for me? I ended up dropping my English schooling after a year because there weren’t the same connections happening for me as there were in fic.
I’m suuuper character driven. I’ll read the same character in a hundred different ships, in all of the different fic genres and tropes, aus or what have you, because I like to see how they adapt to those changes. Those “offscreen” moments are just as important, if not MORE important, to me.
This speaks to me so much!
I’m in grad school rn and have been thinking about the fact that I DEVOUR fic but cannot get into “traditional” fiction unless I’m on break and *sit down* to read a book. Yet I was able to pick up a new Sarah Waters book and read it in two days (during term time!) because I was so invested.
After reading this interesting post(s) I realized I like her writing so much because she is like fic! I’ve long recognized that she is one of the few published authors that write with character driven stories aka why I like her (and Emma Donoghue’s) writing.
It’s also interesting that they are both women and also include lesbian relationships within their writing.
The reason it’s so good tho (and how I try to sell her books to my friends) is that the gayness isn’t a THING it’s just incidental to being human female people. And that’s how fic bills it too –just being people and that’s why we read it and fall in love.
Lots of thoughts on this –thanks for the post @earlgreytea68!
You’re very welcome! Honestly, I wrote this because I was trying to think through things in my own brain, but I feel like it also helped *me* make this huge breakthrough! I’d been having this very unsettled relationship with original writing and my difficulty getting back into it and I realized it was because I was treating it like a completely different genre. It really made me aware of what switches I’m pulling in my writing brain to make me move back and forth and no wonder I’m so creatively exhausted!
Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s reactions to this post, they’ve been really interesting to hear about everyone else’s experiences and relationships to fic vs. “original” stories. I FEEL LIKE I FINALLY UNDERSTAND AFTER ALL THIS TIME WHAT @knackorcraft WAS TRYING TO TEACH ME, SORRY I’M SO SLOW!!
This is an incredible thread! We DEFINITELY need to talk more and finish that draft we started. ❤️
I’m starting to take issue with the popular line “I have no problem with characters doing bad things, as long as they’re explicitly condemned in-universe.”
Is it so awful to have to make that judgment for yourself? To be shown a morally gray or even totally black situation that isn’t presented like a sermon? You are allowed to come to your own conclusions about a character. An author’s failure to condemn problematic characters doesn’t mean they condone them. It means they’re asking you to make up your own damn mind.
Also, I feel like it’s much closer to real life to see casually bigoted characters going ignored than to have them ham-fistedly called out for it at every turn. Because sometimes people who are racist are good people in other ways. Sometimes people who are explicitly anti-racist are terrible people in other ways. Because people are whole people, and I’m sick of the idea that authors have to explicitly condemn or condone them. My job as a writer is to depict people. Not to judge them. To let the audience do that for their damn selves.
Real people aren’t fed to us on black or white platters. Why should fictional ones be?
I feel like these conversations would benefit tremendously from less prescriptive language. Like, imagine if instead of “I have no problem with characters doing bad things as long as they’re explicitly condemned”, that person went with “when a character is a bigot and faces no consequences in universe, that ruins the story for me”. That’s something that’s true for a lot of people, and something that it’s totally reasonable to complain about. It belongs in the same category as “relentless cynicism ruins a story for me” or “that weird thing where you have three male characters and three female characters and they’re very conspicuously Paired-Off Love Interests ruins a story for me” or “economics that seem implausible ruin a story for me”. People are allowed to have their dealbreakers!
But it’s a mistake to go from “this thing isn’t pleasant for me and I avoid it” to “it’s bigoted/ignorant/wrong/evil to write that thing”. There are hella competing needs in the world of fiction. There are people who need independent characters who scorn romance and people who need healthy supportive romantic relationships and people who need unhealthy manipulative disasters of romantic relationships. There are people who need honest narratives about bigotry that faces no consequences, there are people who need stories set in a world that feels a little more just. Sometimes the same person needs conflicting things at different times!
You cannot write a story that won’t make someone go “oh, ugh” and you shouldn’t feel obliged to try. And so we need space for peoples’ “oh ugh” to be valid and legitimate and yet not a veto.
“starts off goofy and funny but progressively gets darker as more about the characters is revealed” is my favorite type of storytelling
One thing to write a fanfic, another to deal with deadlines, formats, inputs. Fanfic writers cannot understand.
S.E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders (This tweet of hers has since been deleted otherwise I’d link it.)
My first thought was, clearly this woman has never participated in a big bang before. But it honestly goes so much deeper than that…
You know, I’m always proudest to call myself a fan fic writer when someone, especially someone like S.E., bashes on it. It’s like I’m harboring this little secret about what I actually do when I write fan fiction versus what they’re accusing me of. And while people who put us down about writing fan fic are trying to make us look like idiots, if you ask me, they’re the ones who end up looking stupid. It’s always apparent when someone who gives you crap for writing fan fic has no idea what they’re talking about other than what they’ve heard. They have no idea the amount of passion, dedication, or heart that goes into fan fiction. They have no idea how supportive (for the most part…) the community is. They don’t know the fear of putting oneself “out there” when sharing their work, or what it feels like to have someone admire your work even though you’re not a published author. They might never know what it feels like to have something that brings them so much joy laughed at, or mocked, or disregarded because it’s different. They cannot understand.
Yes, S.E. is a published author, she wrote her first novel as a teenager, and the book is still well known today. She knows about these grueling deadlines, and formats, and inputs she speaks of. But what she seems to be missing about us measly fan fic writers? So. Do. We.
The thing is, countless fan fic writers are writing because it’s an escape, because it’s something we’re passionate about, because it’s a way for our voices to be heard; a lot of us will stop at nothing to be able to write even just a little bit every single day. So many of us are full time students, parents, holding full time jobs, often times doing any combination of the three and so much more. Dead lines? Yeah. I have them. I get to write when the kiddos go down for a nap. Two hours. If I don’t get out what I have to say in those two hours the opportunity is gone unless I want to sacrifice something else (like sleep, for example). Many others are squeezing in words on their lunch breaks or in between classes, staying up late to get something put on a page because they worked all day or haven’t had time otherwise. Sure it’s not a “real” deadline. No publisher or editor is hanging a contract over our heads, threatening our jobs. But you know what comes with that publisher? What comes with that editor and that deadline? A paycheck. Compensation for the time you’ve spent writing. A paycheck just like you’d receive at any other job. So yeah, we may not have “real” deadlines, according to published authors such as the acclaimed S. E. Hinton, but that’s because no one’s forking over cash in exchange for a word count by Monday. We’re writing because we love it. Because we want to share a piece of ourselves whether it comes with money attached or not. We’re writing because we care about something so much, it spills out of our hearts and onto the page in the form of high school AU’s, and slow burns.
We may not understand deadlines according to the “real writing world”, but we sure as hell understand doing what we can when we can because otherwise we won’t get the chance. That does not lessen our skill in any way, shape, or form.
But input, oh. We don’t understand input. …Except for you know what comes along with all that fan fiction we’re not being paid to write? Input. In every single form imaginable. Kudos, and comments, and reblogs, and likes. That is our input. Reviews, recommendations, criticism most of us don’t ask for, thrown at us on our AO3 accounts and our tumblrs, our fanfiction.net accounts, our livejournals, and our wattpads — places most of us go to for solace. Whether we want to see said input or not, it’s there, glaringly apparent. And a lot of times it’s great input! A positive comment on one of my fics can make my day. But sometimes, just like input any published writer may receive, it is not kind. Often times it’s harsh, degrading, discouraging. And we don’t have editors, or assistants, or publishers to keep us going. We don’t have the buffer of “well I’m getting paid to do this so it doesn’t matter whether they like my work or not.” All we have is each other, and our own strength, strength a lot of us have garnered from both tough life experiences and you guessed it, being a lowly, silly fan fic writer.
So you know what? Go ahead. You keep on giving your [shitty, unwelcomed] input on what you think about me writing fan fiction and what I could or could not ever understand because I’m not like you. I’ll be over here doing something I love, something I often times have to fight to be able to do, and I’ll keep doing it because nothing you or anyone else could ever say will make me feel like what I’m doing doesn’t matter. Because it does. And that is something you could never understand.
Lonely and bored, you developed a secret language, that you consistently use to talk to yourself. One day, when you mutter something under your breath, a stranger replies with ease.
The important thing here, you think, is to stay calm. You smile at this stranger who’s looking at you with anticipation. It’s clear that they’re a figment of your imagination. Just a figment.
A figment that your friend, standing next to you, can see, but a figment nonetheless.
“Take a right,” you reply in your secret language, gesturing ahead. “Straight down Sunset Blvd. The theater will be on your left, you can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” the stranger says in YOUR secret language. They smile, showing off perfect, white teeth. Are their canines too sharp? You can’t tell. “May your enemies bleed freely and your friends drink with plenty.”
You don’t know what to say to that so you nod. This seems sufficient and they stroll away from your date like they haven’t just obliterated your world.
“I thought you were speaking gibberish,” your friend says. He sounds impressed. “You should have told me you were bilingual!”
You are actually a polyglot, you realize. Able to speak more than three languages. The problem is that, before today, you were pretty sure that that fourth language didn’t actually exist.
“I have to go,” you tell your friend. His brow furrows with hurt and you wince. You might have worried about upsetting him in the past, but time has shown that he gets upset often and easily. It’s starting to get tiresome, if you’re honest. “I’ll call you later.”
You leave your friend standing on the corner of Lankershim and Sixth to hurry after the stranger. What does this mean? Have you somehow intuited an entire language? That’s not possible.
Is it?
You find the stranger standing outside the theater you directed them too. They are speaking quietly into a box. When they catch sight of you, their mouth splits into a big grin.
Those canines are definitely too sharp.
“It’s so rare to see one as young as you familiar with the old ways of speaking,” they say to you, sounding pleased. “English is an infestation, wouldn’t you agree?”
You stare at them. You’ve heard that phrase before. Your grandmother used to say it just to make your grandfather laugh.Cautiously, you offer your grandfather’s response. “There are bigger insects to be concerned with, I think.”
The stranger actually nods as if this makes sense. “ You’ve sensed them too. The return of the Valkanas.”
You don’t think that sounds at all good. You nod and say nothing.
The stranger looks grim. “Of course, that’s not anything for you to be concerned with, young as you are. I would like to speak to your cluster, however. It’s been so long that I’ve lost touch with everyone and we have much to discuss.”
Your mind races. You are suddenly afraid of your ruse being discovered. You say, “Is there a number they can reach you at? An address? They have, um, disconnected. For a while.”
The stranger smiles another flash of teeth. “Ah, your language is slipping. It is not disconnected but hibernated, yes?”
You pretend to be sheepish. “It’s been a while speaking for so long in this language.”
The stranger laughs. “It is good to practice then! And I do have a number though it was a journey trying to figure out what a cell phone is. Humans! So inventive.” They pull a business card from their wallet and hand it to you. “Sooner rather than later, please.”
“Of course,” you say, taking the card. You lick your lips. “May your enemies bleed freely and your friends drink with plenty.”
“And good fortune to you as well!” they say with delight. “I look forward to speaking with the head of your cluster.” They stride away before you must lie anymore, into the alley beside the theatre. As you watch, they grasp the brick wall firmly and pull themselves up by their fingertips alone, scuttling out of sight.
I need to call my grandparents, you think faintly. You have recently taken up parkour. You realize that your “special” skill may be more genetic than anticipated.
blackash26 