Or, writing fanfic of your own work. It seems incredibly self-centered and navel-gazing at first glance, and maybe it is, but it’s been a useful process for me.
I know this will shock you all, but I’m a big proponent of fanfiction. It made up a large part of my reading material when I was a teen, too broke to buy books and living too far from the public library for regular visits; and it’s been useful training wheels for learning to write.
Like any tool, fanfic can be used correctly or not, and the precise definition of ‘correct’ varies somewhat depending on the context. Maybe it’s better to call them ‘purposely deleted scenes’ in this context, but fanfic is shorter, so I’ll go with that.
Take the time-travel WIP. Please. I’ve written a few fanfics of it at various points, to help myself understand where the characters are on their journeys and how they’d act at different points in the story. Changing one little thing at the right moment makes them end up in very different places, as different people, and that helps me decide if they’re on the right track in-story.
I recently wrote a fanfic in which the characters have a different and closer interaction at an early point in the story, and while I can’t use the actual setup in-story, it helped me work through a later scene. Basically, the fanfic showed a couple’s breakup through a different POV, which gave enough emotional distance that I could actually picture the scene; when I tried to write that breakup from the original POV, it was too intense and the emotions kept getting in the way of what the setting and people looked like, and what they were actually doing. So I’m going to mash together the description and actions from the fanfic with the emotions of the original fic, and I might get a workable scene out of it. It also made me think of a few things I wouldn’t have thought of before- I hadn’t realized that the FMC is going to have problems with walking into dark or empty houses, because she died the last time she did that. Also, and less upsetting- the MMC needs to have a dog at this point in the story.
The fanfic in question isn’t publishable, or even complete. But it was enough to knock loose a bit of the original story that had been stuck for a while. So I’m going to get back to it. Words don’t write themselves, and all that.
Mad Genius Club 
20 responses to “Narcissism”
I did a talk to a 7th grade English class, a couple of years ago as part of the Giddings Word Wrangler program – I flat out told them that it was perfectly OK to take characters and a world that they knew – Star Trek, Star Wars, Sherlock Holmes, whoever engaged their interest – and make up new adventures for their characters. It was an easy practice, a good starting point, playing in the literary sandbox with someone elses’ characters. The kids were enthusiastic – I don’t think anyone else had told them that this was perfectly OK.
I’ve seen a lot of folks sniff, and sneer, and get flat out nasty– they make the TruFans in western music who are not sure about all these new kids that sing songs they didn’t write look down right welcoming.
Annoys me, because looking at professional writers– they really need the practice of being able to ‘sell’ an established character to the audience. Fanfiction websites will get you a lot of feedback on that…and teach you how to tell good feedback from bad, eventually. 😀
I can remember being told years ago in the iciest possible words that both fanfic and self-publishing were proof that you were incapable of True Literature. From what ‘True Literature’ looked like even back then to these people, I can only heave a sigh of relief.
;snarky: Yeah, fanfic and self pub have to be something you WANT to read, not stuff that gets assigned to hostages!
I wish I’d had a teacher like you when I studied English in school. Your ideas would have been a lot more fun than all the ‘what is the true meaning of this chapter’ stuff we got.
And I still wonder what makes the difference between, say, a Star Wars or Sherlock Holmes fanfic and a new work that can be added to the official canon. I suspect it boils down to whether you get paid for it or not.
And to “get paid for it”, you need to have permission of the person and/or organization that owns the characters.
Or it’s old enough.
Or someone with more lawyers doesn’t decide to object; the House of Mouse is notorious for asserting ownership, or that your parody needs to be hauled through the court system just to check that it’s really a parody….. Hopefully, they’ve had their ears clipped, although I suspect the CA court system will be cooperative.
They finally figured out that it cost them a lot of good will, and aren’t quite so quick on the trigger.
(which is related to why several years have gone by without a new discovery that intellectual property of a very narrow variety is even more important and must be legally protected for even longer!)
I didn’t.
The Princess Seeks Her Fortune and The Other Princess sneak by by ripping off old stuff.
I love that, in manga and anime!
Anime tends more towards the “look, it’s the characters, BUT they’re– [something improbable]” and it gets used in the intro/outro videos.
Seems like a great way to ‘get to know’ your characters, and it’s just fun!
Ah, yes, these fantasy characters are all now in a typical Japanese high school.
I’ve never really gotten “AU in a more mundane world” fics, maybe because a “typical BLANK high school” strikes me as a deeply undesirable place to be. I guess I could make a case for my Jaiya books being less mundane AUs relative to the Indian movies I was watching when I wrote them. And I am, to my great embarrassment, committing actual fanfic alongside my current original fic project.
For Blake: Thank you for the topic. I tend to resent it when I have to redraft a scene/plot element from a different angle, so it’s useful to think of it the way you do, as an alternative approach to understanding the story and its people.
:feral grin:
Oh, I can see the appeal of Bakugo showing up at my high school.
Heh. Hehehe. Heheheheheheeee…….
If we’re talking the Full Metal Panic approach of people with less than mundane skills going to a mundane high school, then yes, I get it, but my impression was that high school AUs were mostly YA love stories about depowered versions of the leads.
Wouldn’t have a clue about “most.”
The ones I’m familiar with are little bonus bits that are highly variable in how much power ports over, but are usually invoking a strong emotion– almost like a short story.
My faves are humor. ^.^
The author of a writing program that was beloved of homeschoolers long ago used to say that no-one hands you a violin and expects immediate great music with no practice… Fanfic is like practice I think. I also think some fanfic is about characters whose lives aren’t a proper story arc at that moment. Maybe…
Well, there’s always juvenilia.
I never wrote actual fanfic though my teen work was always heavily derivative.
Your Fanfic sounds a lot like what I do with models. If I am going to use a new technique (water for my ship dioramas, for example), I make a small model (ship’s boat, small working boat, fishing boat, something) using the technique on that model. If the technique works I use it on a major project. If it doesn’t? Oh well, I only invested a week or two, not half a year. Then I move onto a new small project to try another technique. You learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t that way – which sounds like your goal. Artist do the same thing with studies. Duhrer’s “Praying Hands” is an example of a study that became famous in its own right.
JUST HAD A REALIZATION!
THESE ARE HOLODECK EPISODES!
😀
/blames the cold medication she hasn’t taken yet