Half past November

[aadler]

 
11:00PM Central Afghan Time

I’ve been out of touch the last few days, but I haven’t forgotten where I am or what I’m doing. Things have been happening (quietly and undramatically, I’m not talking about a major military offensive here) that have kept everyone occupied, and it may be several days before the mass of it blows past. Also, as I feared, I let myself get caught up in Veronica Mars, and watched the entire DVD set over about three days’ time. Even so, I’m almost up to 18,000 words on “Glass Ceiling”, and should have no trouble finishing it before the end of the month. (Maybe within a week, but then I’ll want to do a comprehensive edit — I always do — before I post.)

liz_marcs posted a Q&A in her LJ a few days ago. Because it took me so long to get an answer ready, and because I don’t have anything else to post right now, I’m placing it here as well as in a reply to her post.

What category of fiction do you write, and why?

Like liz_marcs, I consider myself to be primarily a gen writer, though I may be a little vague on some of the category labels; I spend a heck of a lot more time reading fanfic than I do engaging in discussions about it, and it’s the nature of any community that the lingo has a certain fluidity about it. I’m on record as scorning ’shipperfic, but that’s not because I have anything against relationships per se; in my own writing, “In Ev’ry Angle Greet” was essentially about all the Scooby relationships being warped into a different shape by an outside force, and “Dusk Over Pompeii” was — if not precisely a ’shipper story, and I won’t swear it’s not — definitely a pairing story. My objection is to stories that seem to be done expressly for the purpose of the relationship, or having no other purpose visible. Pure action isn’t a story, it’s action; pure erotica isn’t a story, it’s porn; pure relationship/romance isn’t a story, it’s fluffy gooey nothing.

What characters/fandoms do you tend to write in, and why?

– Fandoms:

Thus far I’ve stuck entirely to Buffy/Angel fandom (with touches into other realms due to crossover elements), and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I began writing in this field for pleasure, and will keep doing it for as long as I keep enjoying it. However, I will resist moving into other fandoms. I derive tremendous pleasure from my membership and participation in Buffyficdom, but it demands time and attention and resources; while I am willing to expend these things, in return for what they bring me, I would prefer not to make the same investment elsewhere.

Having said that, two things:

First, I have had to exercise some significant self-restraint to keep myself from getting sucked into writing Smallville fic. And, if Firefly had continued, I might very well have allowed myself to start doing things there. But it didn’t, so I didn’t.

Second, this wasn’t precisely my first involvement in fanfic. As I’ve observed elsewhere, I technically was doing fanfic before the term came into being; well before the Internet became available, I was trading stories with friends in California, who were die-hard Trekkies but happily mixed and included numerous other fandoms. My own stories were all unabashed self-insertion, and took place in the worlds of STAR TREK (TOS), Genesis II (a Roddenberry pilot that didn’t catch on, but who can forget Mariette Hartley with two navels?), Gor (the John Norman books, before they turned into soft porn), and a couple of worlds of my own invention. The first story was such horrendous crap that I wouldn’t even let my own kids read it; the rest were of increasing quality, but have never been posted online and almost certainly never will.

So, why do I write in the world of Buffy? As I said, I do it because I enjoy it, but that doesn’t answer the question of exactly why it has so much appeal for me. Possibly the best answer is that this world was so constructed and so presented that I just see all kinds of stories waiting to be told there, and then I want to write them so I can read them.

– Characters:

Another difficult one to answer, possibly because as time has passed I’ve branched out quite a bit. I started out focusing on characters who got less of the spotlight, but it hasn’t stayed that way. I’ve done the core Scoobies (Buffy, Giles, Willow, Xander, Cordelia), separately or in combinations, with one ensemble appearance; second-tier characters (Anya, Dawn, Faith, Joyce, Doyle, Lilah, Tara, Wesley, Jenny Calendar); repeating characters of lesser status (Amy, Drusilla, Ethan, Gwen Raiden, Jonathan, Kendra, Parker Abrams, Snyder, Quentin Travers); and minor or one-shot characters (Dalton, Cathy [Buffy’s first college roommate], Whistler, Nancy [killed offstage during “the Wish”], Sandy [killed by VampWillow at the Bronze, and then staked by Riley two years later], Tara’s father, Sheila [killed by Drusilla in “School Hard”], and Hank Summers [not seen since Season 2 and MIA since Season 5]).

I like to write action scenes, which are always more fun with Slayers: Buffy, Faith, and AU versions of my own or others’ creation. I used to write a lot of Joyce (but haven’t done any Joyce fic in two years now) because she was the most normal one of them all and I could probably identify more with her than with anyone else, plus I totally lusted after her. I’ve used OCs for one purpose or another, and will again. Final analysis, I go where the story takes me, and that mostly includes choice of characters.

Why do you write what you do?

Sometimes I see possibilities that I want to explore. Sometimes I’m so annoyed by someone else’s presentation (including canon) that I’m moved to react. Sometimes I just like a certain character and want to take a better look at him/her.

Basically, though, I write the stories that come to me, and I don’t have a lot of control over that. Shaping an idea is one thing, but getting one that has the right stuff to work itself out, totally different issue. When something really takes hold of me, it won’t let go; I wrote “Point of Focus” (my first Buffyfic, 13,000 words) in three weeks, while working two jobs and taking full-time college classes); a few of the shorter pieces I’ve turned out in a single day — or maybe two — of sustained production. That isn’t a guarantee of anything (“Whisper of a Moment”, which got more positive response than anything else I ever did, took a long time to come together and almost as long to write), but it’s a lot more fun than struggling to make something work.

Maybe it will help if I list why I don’t write certain things:

• ’Shipperfic. Already touched on that, but I’ll expand the theme just a bit more. Buffy was many things — comedy, horror, action, drama, romance, teen hijinks — without being limited to any of them. I loved the mix, and for someone to take that marvelously complex world and reduce it solely to relationship issues is missing the point entirely. For me to do it is simply impossible.


• Angst. Same basic thing. I’ll work with inner psychological turmoil — even anguish — if it furthers a story, but it isn’t enough by itself to make a story.


• All-human AUs. I saw some distinct negative reaction at WriterCon when someone made an observation that was taken to diss the sub-genre, and it could have been a lot worse if everyone hadn’t been so carefully polite. For myself, I’ve never been able to see the reason for such things. Take Buffy, which we like (all of us being here because we like it), and strip away the things that make it Buffy; what’s entertaining about that? Anybody who enjoys it is welcome to do so, but count me out.


• Songfic. Too hard to do well. Too hard to do in any way that isn’t bad. I won’t say it can’t be done, but I’ve seen that happen only twice: once in a story that was in many ways prophetic of “Once More With Feeling” (Elaine McMillian’s “The Musical Comedy Version”), and once in a story that was explicitly done as a companion piece to the episode itself (visitorfic’s “Once More With Buffybot”). Someday, somewhere, I might decide to take it as a challenge to do a songfic, but even that would be strictly for the challenge, not because I find any appeal in songfic.


• Slash. I haven’t explored canonical slash issues because 1) none have interested me so far, and 2) frankly, there haven’t been that many. (Despite being hailed as groundbreaking, Buffy had exactly two mainline same-gender pairings: Willow/Tara, which stretched out over two and a half years, and Willow/Kennedy, which even most fans of the show found gratuitous and unconvincing.) Another reason would be that I don’t focus a lot on any relationship issues; yet another would be covered in my reasons for eschewing erotica, seen below. As to the matter of noncanonical slash … well, what for? I’ve just never seen the point of taking canonically straight characters and converting them. For some people, exactly that twisting of characterization seems to be the central entertainment in such an endeavor; in most cases, it’s done clumsily and for no purpose past doing it; but even when it’s skillfully and semi-plausibly carried out, my best possible reaction is, “Okay, I can actually see that almost happening. But why did [the author] see any need to make it happen? I just don’t get it.” And that’s the best possible case; mostly, if I’ve read that far — I tend to abandon slash stories as soon as I identify them as such — it leaves me annoyed and impatient, and more often I’m horrendously pissed off.


• Erotica. Plain truth? Unless I’m a direct participant, sex bores me. It’s boring. Occasionally — not often, but now and then — something done in a visual medium can be striking, memorable, artistically satisfying. (By which I mean the best that movies and television have to offer. Standard porn is soul-destroying shit.) But written depictions of graphic sex … I just skip over them in a story I like, and if that’s the main focus of the story, then there’s no story. Sex — the intricacies, the dynamics and pitfalls of human sexual relationships — can play a vital and powerful part in a story. Description of sexual acts is just time wasted.

In the end, I write what I do because I want to have an effect on people. Not necessarily to change their perspective, but to move them to experience something that wouldn’t have happened without me. I write the stories I do, in the way that I write them, in order to maximize and shape that effect. Ideally, I want to make the world of Buffy more vivid, more immediate, more fully realized, if only in some small increment. Fanfiction is a collaboration of the audience in the building, maintenance, and extension of the thing that entertains them. Ultimately, we want to place ourselves more deeply into that world. If we do it well, we enable others to achieve the same goal.

Comments

[meyerlemon.livejournal.com]

Hi! I saw your comment in agilebrit's journal and, er, stalked friended you post-haste after reading your userinfo.

Just wanted to let you know who this totally random person was. :)

[aadler]

You’re on my list now, too. Thanks for the notice.