On Writing
Do you ever have an idea for a fic where, maybe after a bit of searching, when you hit on it you just grin and nod to yourself and think, perfect? I love that feeling. I've missed that feeling this November and beginning of December, since school and especially finals took over my life. Yesterday I had that feeling twice with my Glee fic that has somehow elbowed itself to the front of my to-do list. That doesn't mean there isn't BSG fic coming down the pike, too, though!
I love the BSG 'verse, but it's been refreshing to write in a 'verse where I can make pop culture references. Okay, I do that constantly in "Culture Shock," but you know what I mean. One of my "aha!" moments yesterday came in pop-culture-reference form. I needed my boys, Kurt and Blaine, to be watching a movie that had some sort of resonance with Kurt's dad, Burt, as well. I wanted it to be a musical, and if it had Christmasy overtones, that would be an added bonus. That led me to Meet Me in St. Louis. I've never seen the movie in its entirety (bad Kappa!). I've seen most of the musical numbers, though, and what I've seen made it a perfect fit. Though Kurt doesn't have a musical doppleganger like some of the characters do (Mercedes=Aretha, Rachel=Streisand), if he does have one close, it's either Julie Andrews or Judy Garland. But the real reason I love it? Because as soon as I thought of it, my Burt!muse told me that when Kurt was little, Kurt and Kurt's mom used to do the "Under the Bamboo Tree" song and dance that Margaret O'Brien and Judy Garland do. Why yes, I am trying to make my readers tear up a little bit, thank you very much. ;)
AUs are fun! One of the most fun things about them? Coming up with better solutions to Lee's Giant Slingshot into the Sun, and better answers for why all the weird stuff happened. I've run the gamut with the no technology ending: Culture Shock blithely throws it out the window by having them land at a different period in Earth history. It never comes up in Picture Perfect because Lee is dead and nobody else would come up with that idea, though the Galactica has a different fate in that one than the rest of the Fleet. Though they get rid of the ships in Sanctuary, they don't go completely caveman, and I feel like I've found a more interesting and less thematically jarring reason for them to do it than what canon gave us. (Hint: Ever watch Mutiny on the Bounty?) Plus, I'm really excited about how Hera is the shape of things to come in Picture Perfect 'verse. It goes back to something about the Cylons that the show very, very vaguely alluded to concerning the Cylons' development and that I think they should have exploited a lot more.
With all this AU-thinking, I'm starting to get a bit more frustrated with "Daybreak Part II." If I, hobby writer in Middle-of-Nowheresville, can figure out a better explanation while singing in the shower or driving home than the folks who were paid to live and breathe this story for five years could...? Or maybe my explanations are just as problematic, and I'm not seeing the problems, just like the writers on the show probably didn't see the problems with their ideas.
That Kara-poof is really hard to write around, though, isn't it? I have to dump it in pretty much every fic that attempts to offer any kind of explanation of what Kara is. Though I'm not going the angel route, I'm starting to wonder if it even works if you do call her an angel. How did her dead body get to Earth in a Viper, then? She really should've been a Cylon or a Cylon experiment, TPTB...
Writing this Glee fic and getting prepped to write more in my BSG AU 'verses got me thinking a bit about POV. I don't feel like there is any character in BSG that I can't write from the outside looking in. There are some whose voices are easier to capture than others, but getting the qualities of a character's speaking voice right seems more like a technical skill than something that requires inspiration or deep insight.
Writing a fic from a particular character's perspective is a whole different ballgame. Do characters sound different to themselves when they're thinking versus when they're speaking? I'm not always sure, but it feels that way when I write. With this and the other Glee fic I wrote, I'm writing from the perspective of the father of one of the main characters. He's laconic, and a very blue-collar masculine guy, but he loves his son--who is the opposite of all these things--so very fiercely. I shouldn't connect with this guy as much as I do, and yet I feel so sure about him being my window into the workings of everyone else. It's not the distinctness of the voices, because if it were, I should be cranking out Brittany-POV fic like nobody's business, and yet I can't imagine what the hell is going on behind Brittany's eyeballs.
Looking back at my BSG fics, though, I realized that I've written from the POVs of some characters that I at least didn't feel like I understood when I started. The biggest standout is "Gnothi Seauton" with Lee. The way that I got through that one was using the Lee POV to make it look like the fic was all about Lee when, honestly? Lee didn't say or do much in that story at all. He was the pair of eyes I used to watch people I understood better (Laura, Billy, Gaeta, Hoshi, Dee, Baltar, Hotdog, and to a lesser extent Kara and Athena) do things. All I had to do then was figure Lee out well enough to come up with a plausible internal reaction to what those other characters did. I also have a habit of putting passive characters as POV characters. It even cropped up in my original work in college. Sometimes I wonder what that says about me. Anyway, I think that technique worked, though again, maybe there are problems with it that I'm too close to see.
Happy weekend, all!
I love the BSG 'verse, but it's been refreshing to write in a 'verse where I can make pop culture references. Okay, I do that constantly in "Culture Shock," but you know what I mean. One of my "aha!" moments yesterday came in pop-culture-reference form. I needed my boys, Kurt and Blaine, to be watching a movie that had some sort of resonance with Kurt's dad, Burt, as well. I wanted it to be a musical, and if it had Christmasy overtones, that would be an added bonus. That led me to Meet Me in St. Louis. I've never seen the movie in its entirety (bad Kappa!). I've seen most of the musical numbers, though, and what I've seen made it a perfect fit. Though Kurt doesn't have a musical doppleganger like some of the characters do (Mercedes=Aretha, Rachel=Streisand), if he does have one close, it's either Julie Andrews or Judy Garland. But the real reason I love it? Because as soon as I thought of it, my Burt!muse told me that when Kurt was little, Kurt and Kurt's mom used to do the "Under the Bamboo Tree" song and dance that Margaret O'Brien and Judy Garland do. Why yes, I am trying to make my readers tear up a little bit, thank you very much. ;)
AUs are fun! One of the most fun things about them? Coming up with better solutions to Lee's Giant Slingshot into the Sun, and better answers for why all the weird stuff happened. I've run the gamut with the no technology ending: Culture Shock blithely throws it out the window by having them land at a different period in Earth history. It never comes up in Picture Perfect because Lee is dead and nobody else would come up with that idea, though the Galactica has a different fate in that one than the rest of the Fleet. Though they get rid of the ships in Sanctuary, they don't go completely caveman, and I feel like I've found a more interesting and less thematically jarring reason for them to do it than what canon gave us. (Hint: Ever watch Mutiny on the Bounty?) Plus, I'm really excited about how Hera is the shape of things to come in Picture Perfect 'verse. It goes back to something about the Cylons that the show very, very vaguely alluded to concerning the Cylons' development and that I think they should have exploited a lot more.
With all this AU-thinking, I'm starting to get a bit more frustrated with "Daybreak Part II." If I, hobby writer in Middle-of-Nowheresville, can figure out a better explanation while singing in the shower or driving home than the folks who were paid to live and breathe this story for five years could...? Or maybe my explanations are just as problematic, and I'm not seeing the problems, just like the writers on the show probably didn't see the problems with their ideas.
That Kara-poof is really hard to write around, though, isn't it? I have to dump it in pretty much every fic that attempts to offer any kind of explanation of what Kara is. Though I'm not going the angel route, I'm starting to wonder if it even works if you do call her an angel. How did her dead body get to Earth in a Viper, then? She really should've been a Cylon or a Cylon experiment, TPTB...
Writing this Glee fic and getting prepped to write more in my BSG AU 'verses got me thinking a bit about POV. I don't feel like there is any character in BSG that I can't write from the outside looking in. There are some whose voices are easier to capture than others, but getting the qualities of a character's speaking voice right seems more like a technical skill than something that requires inspiration or deep insight.
Writing a fic from a particular character's perspective is a whole different ballgame. Do characters sound different to themselves when they're thinking versus when they're speaking? I'm not always sure, but it feels that way when I write. With this and the other Glee fic I wrote, I'm writing from the perspective of the father of one of the main characters. He's laconic, and a very blue-collar masculine guy, but he loves his son--who is the opposite of all these things--so very fiercely. I shouldn't connect with this guy as much as I do, and yet I feel so sure about him being my window into the workings of everyone else. It's not the distinctness of the voices, because if it were, I should be cranking out Brittany-POV fic like nobody's business, and yet I can't imagine what the hell is going on behind Brittany's eyeballs.
Looking back at my BSG fics, though, I realized that I've written from the POVs of some characters that I at least didn't feel like I understood when I started. The biggest standout is "Gnothi Seauton" with Lee. The way that I got through that one was using the Lee POV to make it look like the fic was all about Lee when, honestly? Lee didn't say or do much in that story at all. He was the pair of eyes I used to watch people I understood better (Laura, Billy, Gaeta, Hoshi, Dee, Baltar, Hotdog, and to a lesser extent Kara and Athena) do things. All I had to do then was figure Lee out well enough to come up with a plausible internal reaction to what those other characters did. I also have a habit of putting passive characters as POV characters. It even cropped up in my original work in college. Sometimes I wonder what that says about me. Anyway, I think that technique worked, though again, maybe there are problems with it that I'm too close to see.
Happy weekend, all!