FAM #11

[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.
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?

I touched on some of this yesterday. My favorite relationship types are plain old relationships: male/female in a physical-romantic meant-to-be-permanent (even if it doesn’t work out that way) bond. Xander is my favorite vessel for such stories because Xander is just so likeable, the everyman who classically deserves to get the gal in the end, and also the person it’s easiest for me to identify with. (Actually, that would be Giles, but I’d like to be more Xander in this aspect of things.)

The incomparable yahtzee63, in a little side-tale called “Put the Blame on Steele”, observed about the Thin Man series that the two main characters started out married. Thus, their stories were never about how to get them together, but how these two people together dealt with the things in their life. UST is such an attractive lure in current fiction that writers have famously been unable to make things work after actually getting a couple together; when a pair is already paired, though, and it’s done well — as in the TV series “Medium” and the miniseries “Death Comes to Pemberley” (a sort of professional Price and Prejudice fanfic) — it can be delightful.

I’ve never done that, because my ‘pairing’ stories tend to be one-offs, and most of them are in the Independent Stories section, where there are not only no sequels but are sort of designed to NOT have sequels. When I do those, they tend (I think) to be along the lines of ‘?person finds him/herself in a relationship and needs to figure it out’, or ‘such-and-such is going on and the relationship mixes in with that’, or even ‘oh hell what just happened, are we really that to each other —?’.

Checking past stories, of those where the relationship was actually shown, Giles is the next most frequent after Xander: Giles/Anya (“In Ev’ry Angle Greet”; of course, in that one, Xander had already been paired with just about every canonical female in the Buffyverse), Giles/Cordelia (“Better Left Unspoken”), Giles/Jenny Calendar (“the Final Cut”), Giles/Joyce (“Morning’s Echo”), and Giles/OFC (“Into the Abyss”). His librarian-fu is powerful indeed …

I occasionally do relationships these days, but my stories still aren’t about finding a way to get people into relationships; sometimes, it’s just taking a look at what things are like in there.

Still to come:

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?