FAM #03

[aadler]

The Fanfiction Ask Meme (from cornerofmadness through trobadora through naye through something from Tumblr).

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What made you start writing fanfic?
Which of your own fanfics have you re-read the most?

Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.

My most recent fanfic (though I currently have two in progress) was “Better Left Unspoken”. My first … well, I found myself automatically thinking of “Point of Focus” again, but cornerofmadness’s post reminded me that, as I noted two days ago, my actual first was rather longer ago than that. Yes, the one I described as so horrendous I wouldn’t even let my kids see it, and they’ve always been my primary and most appreciative audience.

Which comparison do I make, then? It’s hard to choose, not because of quality (I’m better now than I was at that ‘first’ beginning, but I had already been writing in other endeavors for years), but because the first and second phases were two entirely different things. The first phase used the fandoms as backdrops, but the stories were about the non-fandom people (almost always me, once my youngest brother, and usually with accompaniment from one or more of the California girls who introduced me to the concept of fandom hijinks) who frolicked about within those fandoms. It wasn’t just that the stories were amateurish, but that they weren’t really attempting to be anything else; they were personal fun with fictional universes as the settings … or, just as accurately, as the pretexts.

When I started Buffy fanfic, that was something else. Those were ALL about the fandom (which attitude continued with the eventual Otherfandom stories I did in the worlds of Alias, the DCU, Magnum, P.I., the Book of Eli, the Hunger Games).

This was a difference not just in quality, but in kind. Another way of saying it would be that Phase 1 and Phase 2 weren’t on a continuum, but were entirely separate branches that just happened to have sprouted at different times. Still, in fairness I can’t entirely ignore my pre-Buffy writings, so I’ll just have to do a triple-comparison here.

The first fanfic (and I won’t even reveal the title) was, as I said, a silly story done as an answer to another silly story. It featured me, the California girls, Sam McCloud, Billy Jack, the Clint Eastwood Man-with-No-Name character, and Questor (the naïve-moral android from yet another of Gene Roddenberry’s many prospective series pilots), with the entirety of the tale set on the Counter-Earth of John Norman’s Gor books. (To give you some insight into my ‘creative’ processes of the time, the characters I considered but didn’t include were John Shaft, Christie Love, Lamont Sanford — I’m not kidding — and the Six Million Dollar Man.) The story had some moments, but it was silly and dumb and never remotely aspired to be anything else.

“Point of Focus” was an imaginative exercise — Buffy’s mother as a replacement Slayer — but I took every part of it seriously. I flattered myself at the time (and see no reason to believe otherwise now) that this was a story that could have been filmed as one of the actual episodes without being inconsistent with the larger canon. Though there were occasional humorous touches, it was not silly and self-indulgent, and did its utmost to treat all the characters with respect. I even had a really moving passage about Harmony (wanting so desperately to atone for the tragic consequences of her cowardice of Halloween night, and failing so terribly in her hopeless running battle with the Gorch brothers in the Sunnydale mall) that took place not only before her canon death, but before the show itself started using her as more than occasional Sunnydale High background. The story also had several slam-bang action scenes, to which I brought a new focus, and a repeating refrain that was purely my own inspiration but still works.

“Better Left Unspoken” was rather less ambitious, but then it was the 75th of my Buffyfics, and I had long since started exploring a variety of themes. First, PoF was set ‘within’ canon (actually, an alternative canon like — and actually branching from — the one shown in the Season 3 episode “the Wish”), but BLU was set across canon, formed of progressively more divergent scenes from no less than ten canon episodes, minor alterations building to something else entirely. It was more subtle than PoF, more deliberate, less active (as in, NO action scenes), and gradually built a relationship where PoF had been about a woman with no relationships but only a cause that carried the force of obsession.

As previously noted, I was already grown when I started on fanfic (and, in Phase 2, was already married and with near-teen children), so my ‘development’ was less exaggerated than would be seen in most cases. In fact, if “Better Left Unspoken” had been my first story, and “Point of Focus” my most recent, neither one would seem particularly out of place from those immediately preceding or following them. I haven’t stayed exactly the same … but I started from a foundation that was already mostly developed, and the construction that took place thereafter was less evolutionary than incremental.

Still to come:

Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?
You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?
Name three stories you found easy to write.
Name three stories you found difficult to write.
What’s your ratio of hits to kudos?
What do your fic bookmarks say about you?
What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?
What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?
For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?
Name three favorite characters to write.
You’re applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?