The Original Fiction Dilemma Rears Its Ugly Head
Saturday, 23 November 2013 19:23![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lea_hazelFor years I've been trying to put my mind to an original fiction project. I want to be a novelist. I want to tell stories. My mind is full of extrapolations and ideas and allegories that I want to explore more deeply. I'm always up to my eyeballs in story ideas, because every time I'm dissatisfied with a piece of fiction my first thought is, "No, no, no, here's how I would do it..."
That urge never really goes away. It's also not completely satisfied by fanfic. I write and write fanfic and I'm happy because I'm interacting with a source text that fascinates me and imbuing it with my own point of view. But eventually I run into a wall where the shortcomings of the text overwhelm me, and I start to feel restricted by too many canon elements that I can't or won't work around. I start coming up with story ideas that are too deconstructed to be proper fanfic, too close to home to be proper A/U, and far too derivative to be proper original fic.
I can't really see myself writing the book where every character is familiar, everyone is a blatant proxy or expy. I no longer want to write the story that goes, "This is Narnia is Aslan was an asshole," or "This is Harry Potter if magic weren't genetic," or "This is Buffy if the Scooby Gang were a polyamorous witches' coven." For example.
But my writing is reactive. When I formulate a story that isn't (or rather, is less so), no matter how fascinating it is in theory, it can't stand on its own too legs. I can't keep myself interested enough, for long enough, to pin the story down. Ignoring my juvenile attempts (of which the less said, the better), none of my adult stories ever picked up. Because they were just a collection of ideas that I liked, slapped together: the high priestess and her lesbian daughter, the vampire spy and the secret mermaid, the theologian who gets infected with a soul.
The thing is, the fanfic format is comfortable to me. It accommodates my short attention span, it allows me to jump and race between ideas to my heart's content (more or less). I can keep several projects side-by-side. I don't have to commit to one continuity; I can, for example, kill a character and still write about her future. I can go a bit wild with crossovers and A/Us. I get absorbed in the short-form fanfic in a way that no original short story ever hols my interest.
I can focus primarily on relationships and introspection, while the characters doing these things still exist in a world full of plot. Plot that I love to read, but am at a loss to write. And I can be as self-referential as I damn well please.
So I decided to write fanfic about a canon that doesn't exist. Kind of a meta exercise, which also allows me to dialog with the canons that disappointed me, and the fandoms that didn't make up for it. And is self-indulgent because it lets me wallow in my fanfic happy-place while still having control over the parameters in which the world exists. And pick up all sorts of fanfic tropes that I always wanted to get into, but which constantly referred to characters that left me cold, or slightly pissed off.
It remains to be seen if all my faffing and ruminating will ever produce any actual words-on-paper or if, like so many projects before, it will die on the vine, shrouded in my expired enthusiasm and lack of follow-through.
Oh, I made myself sad.
That urge never really goes away. It's also not completely satisfied by fanfic. I write and write fanfic and I'm happy because I'm interacting with a source text that fascinates me and imbuing it with my own point of view. But eventually I run into a wall where the shortcomings of the text overwhelm me, and I start to feel restricted by too many canon elements that I can't or won't work around. I start coming up with story ideas that are too deconstructed to be proper fanfic, too close to home to be proper A/U, and far too derivative to be proper original fic.
I can't really see myself writing the book where every character is familiar, everyone is a blatant proxy or expy. I no longer want to write the story that goes, "This is Narnia is Aslan was an asshole," or "This is Harry Potter if magic weren't genetic," or "This is Buffy if the Scooby Gang were a polyamorous witches' coven." For example.
But my writing is reactive. When I formulate a story that isn't (or rather, is less so), no matter how fascinating it is in theory, it can't stand on its own too legs. I can't keep myself interested enough, for long enough, to pin the story down. Ignoring my juvenile attempts (of which the less said, the better), none of my adult stories ever picked up. Because they were just a collection of ideas that I liked, slapped together: the high priestess and her lesbian daughter, the vampire spy and the secret mermaid, the theologian who gets infected with a soul.
The thing is, the fanfic format is comfortable to me. It accommodates my short attention span, it allows me to jump and race between ideas to my heart's content (more or less). I can keep several projects side-by-side. I don't have to commit to one continuity; I can, for example, kill a character and still write about her future. I can go a bit wild with crossovers and A/Us. I get absorbed in the short-form fanfic in a way that no original short story ever hols my interest.
I can focus primarily on relationships and introspection, while the characters doing these things still exist in a world full of plot. Plot that I love to read, but am at a loss to write. And I can be as self-referential as I damn well please.
So I decided to write fanfic about a canon that doesn't exist. Kind of a meta exercise, which also allows me to dialog with the canons that disappointed me, and the fandoms that didn't make up for it. And is self-indulgent because it lets me wallow in my fanfic happy-place while still having control over the parameters in which the world exists. And pick up all sorts of fanfic tropes that I always wanted to get into, but which constantly referred to characters that left me cold, or slightly pissed off.
It remains to be seen if all my faffing and ruminating will ever produce any actual words-on-paper or if, like so many projects before, it will die on the vine, shrouded in my expired enthusiasm and lack of follow-through.
Oh, I made myself sad.
