So...fanfic
Dec. 9th, 2014 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
transposable_elementAs far as I can tell from the “created” dates on my documents I started writing fanfic in the spring of 2013, but I don’t remember now exactly what prompted me to start. I had never written fiction of any kind before, except for a few assignments in school more than 30 years ago. Until recently the only other stories I’d made up were the rather formless narratives that I tell to my daughter at bedtime and during long car trips, most of them tales of the adventures of Ruby the Tiger and the Rockhopper Penguins. (They have not yet been to the moon. I am keeping that one in reserve for an emergency.)
I truly have no idea what possessed me to start writing fanfic.
About a year ago I opined on Facebook: “I understand why people write fanfic. I just don’t understand why they show it to anybody.” Yeah. Well, um…I don’t know why anybody else does it, but at a certain point I started feeling quite pleased with some of the things I was writing and began to wonder whether anybody else would like them. I didn't want to show them to anybody who actually knew who I was, so that meant posting online. And then last May a friend told me about AO3, and I thought “well, that doesn’t sound too bad,” and off I went. I got some positive responses, enough to encourage me (now see what you’ve done?), so I started posting more, including a few things that surprised me by coming out more or less on the fly. I have so far posted 32 works (about 150K words) on AO3.
My husband doesn't know I'm doing this. I have only shown him two of the things I’ve written. I think he suspects that I’m hiding something from him. With any luck he’ll assume it’s an affair.
I started out with Narnia but quickly branched out into Swallows and Amazons (originally via a Narnia crossover) and have touched down briefly in a few other fandoms. I seem to be the only person writing anything set in Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s world of Green Sky, which is a real shame. I blame “Frozen 2: A Synoposis” on my daughter. A mature adult can be compelled to listen to “Let it Go” only so many times before something snaps.
If I’m going to keep doing this I've got a lot of work to do on craft—I’m just beginning to realize how much work. Also, I started writing fanfic knowing nothing about the community or conventions or terminology and have been teaching myself as I go along, probably stepping on toes and/or reinventing the wheel. (Beta? What’s a beta? How do you get one? Will you be my beta?) My new favorite expression is “head canon,” because I’ve had head canons for many things all my life and now I know what to call them.
But mostly, I find this puzzling. I’ve been in and around SFF fandom for many years, and I’ve always been the one person in the room who didn’t write fiction and had no ambition to do it. I have no idea what changed.
By the way, I really am looking for a beta reader, preferably one who knows something about the Anglican church. I know I have only a few subscribers, but if you know anybody who might be interested, you might pass this on to them.
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Date: 2014-12-09 08:54 pm (UTC)I have conservatively written 1.5 million words since then. Yep. And my husband has no clue. Mostly. He's a little more aware now than he used to be but basically, as the saying says on my LJ, I've been hiding fandom in the underwear drawer since 1977. My spawn is more aware than the spousal unit because the spawn understand the Internet.
When I went back to fic -- Narnia -- in 2009, I didn't tell my old fandom friends about the new fandom friends. I had a tag that said, "It's better that they think you are writing Twilight porn than know you are writing Narnia." I made myself an icon: Doctor Prescribes Hormone Replacement Therapy. Read smut.
At this point, I am FAR closer to the age of retirement than the age of legal drinking.
All this to say, you are not alone, welcome from an old crone, and as to why, well, at any age, we need our creative outlets amidst work and car pools, be it dancing, singing, gardening, baking, playing an instrument, knitting, crafting, or writing. For so many, writing is work. for others it is a joy and of particular value is the community that develops around fic, the modern version of chatting over the back fence.
OK, speaking of, I'm off to the daily sports activity car pool.
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Date: 2014-12-10 06:58 pm (UTC)All of which is to say that menopause may very well be the explanation for my sudden transformation.
[TMI gynecological digression deleted.]
My husband knows the internet better than I do, which makes me nervous. That's why I use a super-secret pseudonym that he could probably uncover in five minutes if he tried...
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Date: 2014-12-10 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 08:43 am (UTC)And oh, me too! re: "knowing nothing about the community or conventions or terminology and have been teaching myself as I go along, probably stepping on toes and/or reinventing the wheel". A bit scarey,when you don't know if you might be mortally offending someone. Things I've learnt relatively recently:
- "gen" doesn't mean "only for children"; it means "not primarily about sex or romance" i.e.gen can be about serious adult themes,but just not those ones in particular.
- it's seen as very poor form to offer criticism, even if constructive, when it's not been specifically asked for. (No, I didn't blunder in this way - but I could have, easily!. Phew. But I'm going to have to go and write "concrit welcome" on all my stories, because for me, it is.)
About craft... I'm a bit wary about when the descriptive (of what often works well in fiction) becomes suffocatingly prescriptive. The Chekhov's Gun rule for example - okay, it works for Chekhov. But plenty of great writers are alive with wild red herrings and tangents and by-paths which lead nowhere at all. Too much prescription, and everyone would end up writing the same book. (In short - I'm sticking to adverbs, no matter what anyone says! :D )
(I'll mull over who would know more about the Anglican church than I do. I know a little, but not the arcana of rural deans and synods etc.)
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Date: 2014-12-10 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-12-11 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 07:41 pm (UTC)Yes, I think the main question about craft is, does it work? I look at things I wrote a year ago, and they're very obviously clunkier than most of what I'm writing now, so apparently I've learned something, but I'm not sure what. I have a book of writing exercises by Ursula Le Guin that I bought because I'm a completist but never really looked at. She's generally not prescriptive about craft.
Re the Anglican church, I don't think what I need is anything very arcane. Basically, I'm dealing with Susan Pevensie's first Christmas after The Accident, and she's going to midnight mass. Any thoughts on theology would be from her point of view, and therefore would be a layperson's and not especially sophisticated. It's just that the only service of the Anglican Communion I've ever attended was an Episcopal service many years ago, and I remember almost nothing of it. (I went because a boy I had a crush on invited me.) I've found a lot of information about the order of services, and even a very helpful video of the eucharist from the London Internet Church (!), and I've just found a very useful article on a particular Anglican figure I'm interested in. It's more the experiential part that I'm concerned about, because I am not religious myself, let alone an Anglican. I'd like to know if it feels right.
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Date: 2014-12-11 02:02 am (UTC)I wish I could feel I'd improved in craft. :( I've been keeping a list of things I'm learning as I go through. (Note to self: read the list and start a new story! Ummm....with a working-class female protagonist. :D ))