Spontaneous Musings

Yep, my hypothesis was correct, situational and/or minimalist writers who create interesting characters and relationships, but do not follow through or leave serious gaps in how those interpersonal relationships develop - pave the way for lots and lots of fanfic.

Dragon Riders of Pern has a lot of fanfic, also smutty fanfic (because the sex in that story happens off stage, which is actually a good thing, it is after all targeting a young adult readership.)

Buffy got a lot of fanfic for similar reasons, the writers left gaps, which the viewers craved to be filled, hence, fanfic. Also, the writers chose to go in certain directions that aggravated various viewers who wanted the story to go in different directions than it did.

In some cases, you just want a little bit more emotional character depth, the quiet moments, what the characters think of one another - which is what is more common in the romance and literary genres and less so in the straight sci-fi/fantasy/mystery and adventure genres - where the emphasis is less on character and more on the situation and/or puzzle being resolved. It's actually my pet peeve with the straight sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, mystery and adventure genre. But then I'm more interested in the emotional and psychological relationships of the characters as both a reader and writer than I'm in the resolution of the puzzle. I like puzzles, don't get me wrong, but I want the emotional character moments more.

It's odd, but we often get that in fanfic, more than we do in the original work. I only tend to read fanfic, when I get frustrated with the story that I'm watching and/or reading - or rather, when the original writer is not providing me with the character depth or the emotional scenes I'm craving. I love the characters they've created, I like the setting, I'm enjoying the plot more or less, or at the very least the situations they've place the characters in -- but there's something missing.

Not sure I'm explaining this well? It reminds me a bit of eating a desert. It's great. I love it. But I want more. I'm not satisfied. There's something missing. And I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

Or...how about I just provide examples of when a story has motivated me to seek out fanfic? Most of them tend to be romantically oriented, although not all.
( Read more... )
Not sure that was helpful.

Family and romantic relationships intrigue me, but are rarely developed well in genre stories. I don't know why the genre writer struggles with that, often focusing more on the puzzle or killing the big bad. I think you can do both successfully. The better books and television shows do, actually.
I noticed Daredevil did an excellent job of navigating the characters personal and emotional arcs, while at the same time resolving the situation. Breaking Bad was also good in this respect. BSG and Lost were hit and miss, or uneven. I've not felt compelled to seek out fanfic for the shows or books that do it well, just the one's that don't. Illona Andrews "Kate Daniels" Series doesn't make me want to read fanfic, but I have felt a desire to read it for Jim Butcher and Kim Harrison's books...which always leave something lacking. Neither writer is very good at romantic or interpersonal relationships, they either fall into cliche or are underwritten. Situational yes, interpersonal/romantic long-term, no. It's why often friendships work better in genre shows, because the writer can't quite pull off the other type of relationship. And yet, we all to some degree crave the other relationships...at various points in our lives.

It tends to only be genre serial tales that inspire an urge to write or read fanfic in me. I know fanfic exists for non-genre related stories, I've seen it posted. But I've no interest in it.
No, I tend to read fanfic or want to write it either in my head or on my computer, when something starts to nag at me. And I'm an obsessive sort - when it nags at me, my focus is on what is nagging at me. I want to figure it out. I always tend to write meta when this happens. I have to be inspired to write - and it's rare that I understand the inspiration. (Does anyone, does it matter?)
But when I read - it is either to scratch an itch, obtain information, satisfy curiosity (okay that spelling just doesn't make logical sense to me - shouldn't it be curious = curiousity? Why is the "u" suddenly removed? This in a nutshell is my problem with languages - it's not consistent and makes no logical sense. I have a feeling linguists aren't logical and just make this stuff up as they go.).
Or to resolve a question, problem or puzzle that's been nagging at me. Sometimes just to comfort myself.

Right now? I appear to be obsessed with dragons for some reason. I want to read books about them. But, I'm picky. I don't want to read military or militaristic stories - so I'm thinking the Naomi Novic books are out. So too anything with kids, no interest in Eragon, too young adult. I think it will pass eventually.

I don't tend to enjoy serial novels. Serial tv shows yes, serial novels and films? Not so much. I think the reason for this is that with tv shows - there's no more than a gap of about a week between segments. At the most? Three-four months. If you get the whole thing on DVD? No gap at all. At least for most tv serials.

But with movies and novels? You have to wait at the very least a year, if you are lucky, if not, upwards to ten years for the next segment. And by the time you finally get that next chapter, it rarely lives up to the long-ass wait or expectations. Which can be aggravating.

Add to this the tendency to forget what came before. Oh sure, you could always re-watch the prior movie or re-read the prior books before you read the next installment, but that I find rather exhausting, particularly if it is a long book or movie. (ie. The Lord of the Rings triology or books, or worse, the George RR Martin novels.) I can see why publishers and film producers tend to love them - you can get a devoted fan base that will buy everything associated with the product. Serials get devoted fan bases, non-serials not so much...because you need the promise (at the very least) of new content to keep a fan-base interested and/or enthralled. The moment you stop promising more content, they lose interest. Note - I stated "promise" - this doesn't have to happen immediately, it can just be a proverbial carrot you hang out there for a bit. ( Read more... )

There's been several insightful posts online regarding the fight that erupted between professional writers and fanfic writers. I read the two main posts in question, although not all of the discussion. There were over 400 comments. One was by Fantasy writer George RR Martin, the other by romance novelist - Diana Galabadon - two published writers who did not like fanfiction.

Five things I want to convey to the published authors online who may or may not come across this post, but like to rant about fanfiction and self-publishing in the blogs to the great dismay, embarrassment and chagrin of their devoted readers and fans:

( cut for length, in defense of self-publishing and fanfiction. )

1.( fanfic recommendation )
2. ( why would anyone in their right mind plagarize someone else's fanfic to write their own fanfic? )

3. Why do people write and read fanfic? What compells us to do it? And what draws us to it?
And what do we look for in fic that we can't find in something else? And more to the point, why are we so judgmental and critical of the fanfic that others write and read - regardless of the type? Why are people judgmental of others tastes?

4. Who in the heck came up with OTP as one true ship, why isn't it OTS - OTS would make more sense and wouldn't be confusing since (ETA: Never mind, I figured it out on the way to work this morning, when it hit me = "paring" and I thought, Duh. Then I pondered why people picked pairing over "ship" or "relationship" or "romance"...because in the real world - OTP means On-Time Performance and has meant this since the 1800s, hence my confusion. My difficulty is that Online and Offline are using the same accroynymes/abbreviations but with completely different meanings. Examples:

ETA = Estimated Time of Arrival (at work) vs. Edited to Add (online)
OTP = On time performance rating (at work) vs. One True Pairing (online)
And there are others...]

5. What is up with this whole fic must be based on canon?? Isn't this an oxymoron of sorts? Isn't all fanfiction by its very nature based on canon??? (Personally, I find if the fic concerns a favorite pairing of mine - I will try anything. Canon, smanon. I honestly don't care that much...as long as the characters are interesting, provide a new twist, and seem plausible - I'm there. Also more character-centric than plot centric fic wise. Overly plotty fic bores me. It should be about the characters, new layers, bits I didn't think of or see before.) Not sure I understand the whole canon thing when it applies to fanfic. I mean let's be honest, can any fanfic be considered canon and not AU at a certain point? And isn't all fanfic to some degree based on canon - including an everybody's human fic - after all you are basing it on the characters of the story, using their attributes and similar themes from the tale to tell your own. If it was "canon" then it would be plagarized and not original in the least and sorry, what is the point of doing it in the first place? PRide and Prejudice with Zombies was certainly not canon, yet it is certainly based on canon.


PS: While I'm generally speaking not a huge fan of parody, the Buffy the PEnguin Vampire Slayer Fanfic/Fanart meme going about is hilarious. Especially the photo of a naked Spike in Wrecked conversing with a Penguin Buffy, after a hot night of sex. That you don't see everyday. Someone even wrote a fic in which everyone in the series is a penguine and what it would have been like if it had been a series with well the animated Penguin cast of Happy Dance. At the very least it would have been something kids between the ages of 6-10 would have loved.

[Because I'm feeling a bit crazy today and trying to distract myself from other things... here's a rough meta on stuff that was rolling about my brain today and yesterday.]

After finishing Darkapple's Imitation of A Man this morning...I realized something about the difference in fanfic, many vampire gothic romance novels, and the Whedon Television Series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It can be summed up rather nicely in the following lyrics from a Lady Gaga number entitled Bad Romance

I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything, so long as it's free, I want your love, love, love, love, I want your love, I want your drama, the touch of your hand, I want your leather studded kiss in the sand, I want your love, love love love, I want your love, you know that I you, and you know that I need you, I want it bad, a bad romance, I want your love and, I want your revenge, you and me could write a bad romance, I want your love, and all your lover's revenge, you and me could write a bad romance, oh oh oh, caught in a bad romance

( A Rough Meta on the Buffy Romantic Relationships, referencing fanfic interpretations and Whedon's original series, as well as Lady Gaga's bad romance. )

Why is it that I can remember some books regardless of how long ago that I read them or for that matter how much I liked them, vividly. To the point that I could have read them an hour ago. While others, I can barely remember the title let alone what happened? Or I'll remember the plot, the characters vividly, but not the time period in which it was set?

Memory is an odd thing. My Granny can remember what happened during the depression - in meticulous detail, as if she were watching it in front of her eyes, but she cannot remember what she had for lunch or what we just said or if we had Christmas yet.

I'm pondering this as the result of a brief discussion I had with a poster on a review I wrote of Blood & Iron. The discussion was on another book - Perilious Guard, which I can remember the name of, the plot of, the characters, what happens, even the illustrations in the novel, but for the life of me cannot remember the author or what time period it was set in, except that people lived in castles, traveled by horse and carriage, it was in Wales, and there was a King or Queen on the throne. Granted I read it over 20 years ago. But I remember it better than portions of well, Harry Potter. Or for that matter whatever book I was reading last year at this time. Tried to do a list of the books I enjoyed most in 2007 - only to realize I couldn't remember half of them. They'd somehow all blurred together in my memory. I remember snatchs here and there. Atonement - a book I despised - sticks better. I still remember snatchs of it - and no, I have not seen the film. Same with Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow - can remember that entire book as if I read it yesterday. I remember it better than the last two books I finished.

There are also fanfics I remember well - two. One by wisteria and one by herself_nyc. Both have cars in them. Both dealt with the complicated emotions of two people who cared deeply for one another, yet were at odds. Both are angsty. Can't remember the title of the one by wisteria, just what happens. And I get it confused at times with the one by herself_nyc. The Herself_nyc one was "Whatever She Deserves". I think what intrigued me about both stories was the difficult emotions, the messiness. They both dealt with a vampire who had attempted to rape a woman he loved and how he felt about it after he got a soul, not to mention how she felt about it. The stories were brutal.

And... when I think about it - the books that stick with me and that I have a violent emotional reaction to are much the same as the films and tv shows that stick. They are similar to the types of stories I like to write.

Years ago, a creative writing teacher that I had in college, told me something that I've never forgotten. He said - "You are an interesting writer. You want to explore and investigate the ambiguity of the messy, difficult, and nasty emotions people have and shine a light on them. Figure them out."

He said this after reading several of my stories. They dealt with: 1) a man witnesses an annoying elderly woman, who reminds him of his beloved mother, dying on a plane and struggles with his own desire for his sick and elderly mother's death and his subsequent guilt regarding that desire. The fact that his mother was kind to him and he loves her, makes the desire that much harder to deal with. But she is a problem. And it would be easier if she were gone. And he hates himself for thinking that. 2)a young girl on a road trip with her first boyfriend/first love struggles with the pressure to have sex (when she's hot, sweaty and uncomfortable and hasn't had it before) and the realization that he probably doesn't really love her and they don't work, while she's stuck in the back of a pick-up truck with him on Donner Pass. She's also struggling with her own guilt regarding the relationship. 3)a boy lonely and away from home, at college, estranged from his girlfriend who got into another school, sends notes to inanimate objects in his dorm room and to his sister. 4) a boy and his mentally challenged brother kills the boy's best friend in a gruesome manner after learning of that friend's betrayal.

The two fanfic's that herself_nyc wrote that stuck with me - both explored self-loathing and guilt in a brutal physical manner. One disappointed me - because she appeared to give in to the desire to turn it into a romance, when it was anything but. It was almost as if she gave in to her own fantasy - the worst thing a writer can do in my opinion - but that is only because I fear that I am guilty of it and we often hate that in another's work that we hate in our own. It is admittedly my own failing. The novels I've written, often fall short, because of that tendency. Except for the last one - I did not give in to my fantasies in my most recent novel - which may be why it was the hardest for me to complete. It is easier to write one's fantasies, much harder to write one's reality, methinks.

This is true with published fiction as well - I see it all the time in genre stories, less so in literary ones. Which explains why genre isn't taken as seriously, I suppose. Blood and Iron felt at times as if the writer was giving in to her own fantasies - specifically regarding horses. And Kim Harrison's novels - also felt like that at times (except with vampires not horses). As did Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens - where the writers got carried away with their own cleveriness. Clearly this tendency does not prevent one from being published, let alone read or adored - since many readers do. Perhaps the reader likes the indulgence, the ability to fall into fantasy? Heck, Harry Potter would have been less realistic if everyone survived, but more comforting.

It's not that I don't like those types of stories. I obviously do. The mere fact that I've read so many of them is certainly evidence of it. We all need to escape once and awhile after all. And for me, the best escape hatch has always been through a story regardless of its medium, although books remain my favorite. But, but... I remember better the stories that explore something a bit deeper. Those difficult emotions. Stories that are uncomfortable or are comfortable because the characters in them share and act on difficult/nasty/uncomfortable emotions we ourselves feel. Make mistakes, we would make , because of them. And suffer consequences that we suffer, yet somehow still survive intact like we do. Not dysfunctional family stories - such as the one's Oprah has made famous and unfortunately are all too prevalent, but smaller stories, ones that examine these emotions in people who do not have dysfunctional families per se.

This desire - often places me in a minority when it comes to reading. I found that I was the only one online for example that enjoyed Herself's creation of a squicky, self-loathing Spike in Vietnam, a vampire who had become human and despised himself as well as Buffy. And a Buffy, who did not know how to handle this creature. Or even if she loved it. The ambiguity of the relationship, the squickiness of it. It was uncomfortable. Atonement - a book I hated, at the same time haunts me, because it deals with the difficult emotion of guilt and the attempt to not feel it, to make oneself better, to hide. It is a haunting book because it talks about how one uses fantasy to lie to oneself, to shroud the truth, and the effects of doing it. Great Gatsby also haunts me - because it is about a man who much like the female writer (Briony) in Atonement, attempts to reinvent himself and retell his life through comforting lies with quite different yet similarily tragic results. Neither it seems are entirely able to escape themselves. The best they can do is somehow blur the line between fantasy and reality in their own and others memories. It is also, like Atonement, about class and the impossibility of ever quite fitting in. Both take place during similar time periods, but one is in the US and one is UK.

The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell - is about a priest who has lost all faith in God, and in people, and in himself. Which wouldn't be so startling, if he hadn't started out as a "true believer" or incredibly devout. Devoted. The story is about how he changed and why. It is also about how cultural anthropologists can destroy the culture they are studying with the best of intentions. But most haunting of all - it discusses a cultural practice that we may find horrendous (eating sentinent life forms), but may not be so horrendous in that other culture - since it keeps everything in balance on that world. The book never answers the question - what is morality? And is it right to impose our own sense of morality onto someone else - is that moral?

Each of these books asks what does it mean to be human. How do we handle these emotions? How do we deal with the contradiction of being alone in our bodies yet social animals? How do we handle being self-absorbed and selfish creatures by necessity yet at the same time in denile over it, hating the fact that we are selfish? How do we determine meaning? And how do we determine right from wrong? What makes one person a killer and another a savior? How do we handle our imperfections?

I've always for some reason or other been more interested in reading about the imperfections than the perfections. Perfect characters seem to either bore me or I forget them. I like deeply flawed ones. The character of Spike intrigued me for all the reasons other's appeared to despise him. I found him a mass of contradictions. Yet, I'm inconsistent. I found I could not tolerate the character of Briony in Atonement. And I wonder if perhaps her villainy hit too close to home? While Spike's felt like discovering an unknown orgasism? I don't know.

I don't know. Time to go to bed. I've rambled here long enough.

Picked up the following bits from my scan/read of my flist.

1. Cool Book Meme via petzepillingo

( cut because it is a frigging long book meme...and I'm saving you real estate on your flist, aren't I nice? )

2. Canon - ( canon - wtf? Cut because I'm certain something in there is bound to offend someone on my flist, 'canon' and anal debates on 'canon'='continuity' is one of my pet peeves about sci-fi/fantasy fans - and why I've never really fit in that much with them. )

3. Fanfiction - a debate about whether or not women writers are being silenced or hiding behind fanfic. And should write original works. Sigh. Old argument - which isn't logically supported when you look at all the evidence. Such as: ( Read more... )

4. The Golden Compass Daemon thing is fun. Tempted to post my original version just for comparison. The only problem with it is it is really hard to move that slider on a lap-top computer. Took me forever last night. Some questions I left at neutral b/c it was just too damn difficult and I decided didn't care that much. Which makes the meme either slightly inaccurate or really accurate, can't decide which. Not crazy about my second name - Alvin? Alvin? What happened to Achelynon or Thelon...hello? ;-)

5. Whedon. Three really good bits on flist this week about Whedon.

First was an interview with him - where he states why he decided to go with Lynch on ATS S6 series and what canon means to him. In case you are curious - he defines it in the same way rahirah does in her lj. It's the work of the original writer and comes directly from the story he created and fits within that continuity. Can't remember who posted it though.
Most of them came from elisi.

The other two come from interviews with David Fury - posted by elisi and possibly petzepillingo - who has a lj name I can't remember how to spell, sorry.

*Whedon loved his characters. Unlike most TV writers, who after a while grow tired of them and see writing the show as a job and just do it as a job - Whedon genuinely loved what he did. He lived his characters. Adored them. Lived for them. They remained active in his head. And he was driven to tell their story. It was never just a job - and that energy, that passion spilled over to everyone else.

- That may explain why I fell in love with BTVS, ATS & Firefly and have not really fallen in love with any other tv show in quite the same way. When the creator loves the characters - the audience does. It's a good piece of writing advice, actually. If you love your characters - others will to. If you don't care about them - how can you expect anyone else to?

*Whedon and Sarah M. Gellar both left the series feeling that the other treated them inadequately, didn't respect their work, what they did for them or the series. Whedon thinks Gellar didn't appreciate how Buffy helped her career. Gellar thinks Whedon doesn't appreciate
how Gellar created Buffy. Fury personally thinks they are nuts - and that they were equally great. But what can you do? LOL!

--In short - don't expect Gellar to ever reprise the role. (Which I'm actually pleased about, I think she's too old and it would look funny, but hey to each their own. Also never expected it anyway. Got the very strong impression when BTVS ended most of those guys were happy not to see each other again. 12-15 hour days is a long time to work with people who irritate you. Wouldn't mind a Spike movie though, doubt I'll get one - Have the very strong impression that Marsters doesn't want to reprise the role either, unless he was paid a lot of money for it which there is no way in hell Fox will dish out. Much cheaper and easier to do comic books. Plus, I'm not certain Whedon is that interested in doing a Spike movie.)

See previous post for details. But this is part II of a fanfic I posted in jagged bits and pieces in my lj from 2004-2006. The final chapter I had to get from a fanboard that I posted it on.

Buffy at 40 goes to visit a shan-shued Spike at his mountain retreat.

( No Regrets Part II )