I'm going to have to reread in the morning because there is so much that I want to ask you. When we wanted to invite someone to address AUs and ARs for shared_wisdom, it was something very close to me since that's what I write. A self-assured, long term writer of these kinds of stories--and it sounded from your biography as if you have always specialized in them--is really something that fascinates me.
I especially liked what you had to say about the whole OOC thing. That rap sort of comes with the territory of writing alternative stories, I've found. You seem really pragmatic about how to deal with it, which I have to admire. Was it always that easy for you, or did it take time?
I will be back in the morning for more since I'm not a night owl.
But I also wanted to give you this to thank you for being our speaker:
So I'm going to be selfish and not particularly metaish and ask you about Medium Security.
I was really impressed with a certain 'dark' event you let befall Justin in the first part of the story. (I don't want to spoil people who haven't read it). Did that shock your readers?
You researched it thoroughly before starting out. Did you outline the story? It's very long, so I'm curious about how you wrote all those sections of chapters, if you knew all along where the story was going?
I too like to research my fic thoroughly, but have always stuck to the present day. I live on the opposite side of the world to the characters I write about and therefore, to get any sense of reality for readers, I need to look things up. The price of coffee, the locations of things, what a certain district might be like. The WWW is great for that kind of stuff.
But what you are doing requires so much more research, and thought/time to bring together a character who is both IC, and fits with their setting/time. How much research and planning do you put in before you begin to write? And what resourses (books? films?)do you find most helpful?
I love that you mentioned Shakespeare being a writer of Fanfic. I never thought of it that way :)
I usually plan the fic out in a general outline. For instance, for "Medium Security" I sketched out the Stanton Quad, based on a map in one of my main source books, "Men Behind Bars," an ethnography of a medium security prison in California in the late 1970's. This book gave me a location and also a picture of what life in this prison was like, based on the prisoners' own words. I also used the "Stop Prison Rape" website, which has an amazing amount of material on jock/punk culture, as well as "how-to" guides to punk survival (including instructions on how to pick a good jock -- assuming you have that option!). Fitting the canon characters into this world worked better than I thought -- Michael, who looked so pretty in drag, and Emmett became the center of the Quad queens, while Ben was a natural jocker. Justin as the new fish was also obvious. The one character who needed the most rationale and the most detailed backstory was, of course, Brian. So I gave him one what was political and tragic, based in part on someone I knew who had
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I'm pretty new to all this but have to admit that my interest has been spiked. Taking original characters and putting them into an alternative universe is not really a novelty, nor "stealing", because it's what authors have been doing for years. Pride and Prejudice has been done to death in all its forms and there's been one or two on Rebecca
( ... )
"Nowhere Man" was intended as an "Alternate Stream" to the main story of "Queer Theories" -- I never thought of it was anything else. But it was so popular people wanted more. When "Queer Theories" my intent had been to go back and continue "Nowhere Man." But I put it to the vote of my readers, and although "Nowhere Man" got a lot of votes, "QT" got a lot more to continue, so that's what I did.
"Nowhere Man" is Brian's view of what his life would have been like if he had stayed with Ron and never returned to Pittsburgh, just as "The Evil Stream" (aka the Canon Stream!) is Justin view of what would have happened if Brian hadn't left with Ron for L.A. So "NM" fits into the whole "Fiona" scenario and jumps off of the main story there, when Brian is in England in the fall of 2002 -- see:
I have one reader who always complains that in my fics "everyone" wants Brian. Um, isn't that pretty much canon? Deb says in 102, "Everybody wants Brian." I mean, it's not like I'm coming up with something out of the blue! LOL!
You really narrowed it down to the two salient points that together are critical to the making good AU/AR fic: thorough research/attention to detail, and maintaining good in-character characterization despite the different time or setting.
Two things occurred to me as I was reading this that I'd like to elaborate on, one falling under each of those two categories, but apparently I'll have to divide this comment into two due to length.
Re: research
When I read a book or story that takes place before the 20th century and hear a character refer to "homosexuals," I know the writer didn't do even basic homework, since that term wasn't coined until the late 1860's and was only known in Germany among doctors and social scientists until at least the 1890's. That's easy to get right. I have no patience or sympathy for the all too frequent situation wherein an author writing, for example, a surgeon Brian/psychiatrist Justin AU is too lazy to do any research to make their AU generally accurate, instead opens with a disclaimer saying "Sorry if
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Yeah, I'm fussy about stuff like that. But with professional writers at least, that's what editors are for. That's what research is all about. Getting the language right, getting the food, the clothes, the way people walked, all of that stuff. In one chapter of "Wayfarers" I used the word "weekend." I knew it didn't matter to my readers, but it bugged me because I knew it was too modern. I spent a while tracking down exactly when the term "weekend" came into usage and found out about 20 years after "Wayfarers" takes place. I didn't change it then, but when I began to rewrite and "de-fanfic" the story, I removed it because I knew it was wrong!
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I especially liked what you had to say about the whole OOC thing. That rap sort of comes with the territory of writing alternative stories, I've found. You seem really pragmatic about how to deal with it, which I have to admire. Was it always that easy for you, or did it take time?
I will be back in the morning for more since I'm not a night owl.
But I also wanted to give you this to thank you for being our speaker:
( ... )
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So I'm going to be selfish and not particularly metaish and ask you about Medium Security.
I was really impressed with a certain 'dark' event you let befall Justin in the first part of the story. (I don't want to spoil people who haven't read it). Did that shock your readers?
You researched it thoroughly before starting out. Did you outline the story? It's very long, so I'm curious about how you wrote all those sections of chapters, if you knew all along where the story was going?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu17mTqx9ac
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But what you are doing requires so much more research, and thought/time to bring together a character who is both IC, and fits with their setting/time. How much research and planning do you put in before you begin to write? And what resourses (books? films?)do you find most helpful?
I love that you mentioned Shakespeare being a writer of Fanfic. I never thought of it that way :)
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"Nowhere Man" is Brian's view of what his life would have been like if he had stayed with Ron and never returned to Pittsburgh, just as "The Evil Stream" (aka the Canon Stream!) is Justin view of what would have happened if Brian hadn't left with Ron for L.A. So "NM" fits into the whole "Fiona" scenario and jumps off of the main story there, when Brian is in England in the fall of 2002 -- see:
http://fortruthis.net/gaelmcgear/fanfictionpage3.html
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(The comment has been removed)
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Two things occurred to me as I was reading this that I'd like to elaborate on, one falling under each of those two categories, but apparently I'll have to divide this comment into two due to length.
Re: research
When I read a book or story that takes place before the 20th century and hear a character refer to "homosexuals," I know the writer didn't do even basic homework, since that term wasn't coined until the late 1860's and was only known in Germany among doctors and social scientists until at least the 1890's. That's easy to get right. I have no patience or sympathy for the all too frequent situation wherein an author writing, for example, a surgeon Brian/psychiatrist Justin AU is too lazy to do any research to make their AU generally accurate, instead opens with a disclaimer saying "Sorry if ( ... )
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Yeah, anal much?
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Interesting tidbit about the time of origin of 'weekend.'
Would that more people were so anal about usage.
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But your example with "homosexual" is a good one. I,too, had an experience when I´d thought: "Did they even use this word at this time?"
But that is an interesting discussion and I´ve taken the liberty to link it in my LJ.
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