Fanfiction: On Writing Styles and Professional Influence, With Apologes to the Teal Deer
...In this case, by "professional" I mean "Three years of college wankery that I didn't have to try at to get A's." But it's so much shorter the other way about.
So mithrigil has this really fascinating post about how she writes fanfic like the coloratura soprano that she is. I read it, and read a response to it on IJ (link for that one is right here, and then I started babbling. It's a bad habit. I oughtn't be allowed on LJ/IJ/the Intartubes when I've just gotten home from work because the ramble bunnies start up their hamster balls and....yeah, no, that didn't even make sense to me.
Starting fresh.
Mith's post, and the resultant comments, basically add up to how writing (fanfic, especially) is like [doing your profession or passionate hobby of choice] for most people - regardless of what that profession is. I was thinking about this, and how it applied to the way I studied history at university and also the fact that I have not formally studied writing for any extended length of time. I don't count NU's introductory Reading & Writing Poetry and Fiction to be anything other that pretentious stylistic wankery on the part of the writing department (you and your "only write realism and only our way" can suck my nonexistent cock, for serious, yes I am still bitter). Prof. Powers's Fiction Writing class was actually the only useful writing class I have ever taken, in the way in which it broke writing down not into "oh, your imagery of [whatever] is gorgeous and I felt that your sentence fragments really captured blahblahblah" but into actual building blocks. We talked about the size of the average person's active and passive vocabulary. We talked about how poetic devices such as euphony, alliteration, and meter could be relevant and useful for prose. We talked about how words built into sentences, and those into paragraphs, and those into stories, and how they broke down into plot and theme and image.
It is seriously the most I have ever learned about writing until I got to fandom, but that's for later in this discussion.
Anyway. The other classes I was in were workshopping classes, and I get the impression they were not really designed to teach, but rather to give people a place to show off and have other people who were forced, by virtue of not wanting to fail, to read their work and to comment on it. But we were talking about the ways in which one's profession affects one's writing, and not NU's asstarded writing program of six years ago.
So I came to Northwestern to major in creative writing. I ended up in history, for reasons ranted about before (in this post, even) and because the history department was full of really cool wacky professors who thought startling things. I had a professor who said of A Knight's Tale, "Of course it's not historically accurate, but it accomplishes its purpose, which is to have fun." SO MUCH LOVE, sir.
Now, as a history major, I was good at themes. I was good at remembering quirks of individual people, and how those quirks informed their policies and created the chains of events that drove great historical moments. I was also really good at social influences on events and why the cost of hiring mercenaries is directly relevant to the creation of the precedent for trial by jury.
As a fic writer, I'm not as interested in pairings, per se. Which is not to say that I don't have preferences and ships I will get relatively rabid about (though, seriously guys, I do not have a patch on the C/A and C/T ship wars that are still going on in FF7 fandom. Those people are fucking crazy, for real.) I mostly stick to canon ships when I'm writing. I also obsess a lot over how the world makes the person, and how the past makes the person.
I write a lot with historical attention. I don't mean that in the sense of recording what has gone before, but more in the sense of analyzing cause and effect. I think I do a lot of that with my writing. Every Light is all about cause and effect, with the overlaying aspect of who is Kain Highwind? But even that goes back to the cause and effect - because who Kain is, and the choices he makes as a result, create the tensions that drive the plot. Kain's father was a hero who died when Kain was a baby; Kain therefore grew up with an idolized and polished image of his father that he strives to be, but that image is perfect and he is not. He is human, and has human failings. (His father did too, one of which was King Odin, but I'm really not getting into that bit of my headcanon here.) Because Kain is obsessed with this perfect image of his father, and being worthy of that perfect image (and worthy to follow his father translates to worthy to have Rosa, which is why Cecil infuriates him because he can't understand why Cecil is perfect and he is not when he never prostituted his honour to the Dark Knights but instead chose the harder path of the Dragoon...okay, I'm stopping now.) Anyway. End result: Kain is shaped by his past, and his past shapes his future in all iterations of my FF4 fic. Kain dwells on the past.
I spend a lot of time looking at how the world makes the characters, and that was always my focus in history as well. Elizabeth Tudor is, in and of herself, an impressive woman - but she is impressive more for what she did within the strictures of her times, as a queen who ruled rather than taking a husband and making heirs, a woman who made the conscious choice to end her line at herself that she might keep her power (...I will not get distracted into trying to parallel her with Ashe...) Richard the Lionhearted is more fascinating for his flaws and a bright light soon extinguished than John was for being forced into laying a framework we take for granted now (trial by jury). Richard was a terrible administrator and a gifted warrior; John was a piss-poor warrior but a gifted administrator who nonetheless lacked the personal charisma to make of himself a truly spectacular king. Had John had Richard's charisma, things would have gone very very differently.
In the same way - how is Celes different for the fact that she is magic-infused? Did being infused with Ice magic make her the way she is or would she have been that way to start with? How does the loss of magic affect her personality - are the changes ingrained, or would she become a warmer person because that unnatural influence is fading? And this is actually where my appreciation for good AU comes from, because how would Locke be different if Rachel had retained her memory? Might he still have joined the Returners? Would Celes have done so? Change one thread and change the tapestry; what happens if I pull this one? But it's no good if I unravel the whole damn thing and reweave it whole cloth. Then I'm building my own out of archetypes I appreciated elsewhere and it is original fiction.
I think one of the reasons that I'm most prolific with Locke/Celes as a pairing is because the history is there; I don't have to do the work of building up to it. I'm not afraid of long fics (see also: Anything in Lucis Ante Terminum), but sometimes I just want to see the pretty and not have to work at it. This is one reason that I rarely write slash although I love to read it. I am dissatisfied with myself if I have not gone to extreme lengths to justify why exactly Seifer has Squall pinned against the wall and whimpering (besides the fact that it's hot, which is not enough justification for me to write it although it is quite sufficient justification to read it.) I want that history. This is probably why I'm pinging so hard on Kaim Argonar. A thousand years of history. omfg.
Having abused italics, I'll actually carry this one step further. Even in original fiction, I'm obsessed with what has gone before and how social structure is affecting the characters, and who they are as a result of how they came to be here. Case in point: Wyrdborn has two thousand years' worth of history written down for twenty years' worth of plot, on the off chance that I might need it. Which I won't. It's window-dressing and historical allusion for the characters; but Lassarina had to know before she could really start the story, because it just might be important later. I built the society because it was important for the story to know why this character is an outcast and that one is a celebrated star, but it was important for me to know how the society came to be that way, and to know that once it was different.
Cause and effect; past shapes the present. I can't get away from it in my fics, whether I'm writing normal canon or AU. Locke isn't himself without the grief surrounding Rachel. When I'm writing about minor characters (or major ones), I always want to know how they got there. Why did General Leo decline the MagiTek infusion and how did that change his own life, Celes's, and Kefka's? What if he had taken it? Who are the four High Summoners who came before Yuna, and why did they succeed where so many others failed? What was the secret of Mist, that it had to be destroyed? How did KluYa come to descend from the moon, and when? I mean, was he in Ordeals for decades or centuries before he got to ensuring the main plot would happen? These are the things I want to know. With the exception of Every Light, or poking at the PTSD that I'm convinced all FF main story characters develop, I'm usually more interested in the backstory than the future.
In short: I agree that our studies and/or professions shape our design when we write. And I will now go apologize to the poor teal deer for beating off his skin and muscles. And play Lost Odyssey.
So mithrigil has this really fascinating post about how she writes fanfic like the coloratura soprano that she is. I read it, and read a response to it on IJ (link for that one is right here, and then I started babbling. It's a bad habit. I oughtn't be allowed on LJ/IJ/the Intartubes when I've just gotten home from work because the ramble bunnies start up their hamster balls and....yeah, no, that didn't even make sense to me.
Starting fresh.
Mith's post, and the resultant comments, basically add up to how writing (fanfic, especially) is like [doing your profession or passionate hobby of choice] for most people - regardless of what that profession is. I was thinking about this, and how it applied to the way I studied history at university and also the fact that I have not formally studied writing for any extended length of time. I don't count NU's introductory Reading & Writing Poetry and Fiction to be anything other that pretentious stylistic wankery on the part of the writing department (you and your "only write realism and only our way" can suck my nonexistent cock, for serious, yes I am still bitter). Prof. Powers's Fiction Writing class was actually the only useful writing class I have ever taken, in the way in which it broke writing down not into "oh, your imagery of [whatever] is gorgeous and I felt that your sentence fragments really captured blahblahblah" but into actual building blocks. We talked about the size of the average person's active and passive vocabulary. We talked about how poetic devices such as euphony, alliteration, and meter could be relevant and useful for prose. We talked about how words built into sentences, and those into paragraphs, and those into stories, and how they broke down into plot and theme and image.
It is seriously the most I have ever learned about writing until I got to fandom, but that's for later in this discussion.
Anyway. The other classes I was in were workshopping classes, and I get the impression they were not really designed to teach, but rather to give people a place to show off and have other people who were forced, by virtue of not wanting to fail, to read their work and to comment on it. But we were talking about the ways in which one's profession affects one's writing, and not NU's asstarded writing program of six years ago.
So I came to Northwestern to major in creative writing. I ended up in history, for reasons ranted about before (in this post, even) and because the history department was full of really cool wacky professors who thought startling things. I had a professor who said of A Knight's Tale, "Of course it's not historically accurate, but it accomplishes its purpose, which is to have fun." SO MUCH LOVE, sir.
Now, as a history major, I was good at themes. I was good at remembering quirks of individual people, and how those quirks informed their policies and created the chains of events that drove great historical moments. I was also really good at social influences on events and why the cost of hiring mercenaries is directly relevant to the creation of the precedent for trial by jury.
As a fic writer, I'm not as interested in pairings, per se. Which is not to say that I don't have preferences and ships I will get relatively rabid about (though, seriously guys, I do not have a patch on the C/A and C/T ship wars that are still going on in FF7 fandom. Those people are fucking crazy, for real.) I mostly stick to canon ships when I'm writing. I also obsess a lot over how the world makes the person, and how the past makes the person.
I write a lot with historical attention. I don't mean that in the sense of recording what has gone before, but more in the sense of analyzing cause and effect. I think I do a lot of that with my writing. Every Light is all about cause and effect, with the overlaying aspect of who is Kain Highwind? But even that goes back to the cause and effect - because who Kain is, and the choices he makes as a result, create the tensions that drive the plot. Kain's father was a hero who died when Kain was a baby; Kain therefore grew up with an idolized and polished image of his father that he strives to be, but that image is perfect and he is not. He is human, and has human failings. (His father did too, one of which was King Odin, but I'm really not getting into that bit of my headcanon here.) Because Kain is obsessed with this perfect image of his father, and being worthy of that perfect image (and worthy to follow his father translates to worthy to have Rosa, which is why Cecil infuriates him because he can't understand why Cecil is perfect and he is not when he never prostituted his honour to the Dark Knights but instead chose the harder path of the Dragoon...okay, I'm stopping now.) Anyway. End result: Kain is shaped by his past, and his past shapes his future in all iterations of my FF4 fic. Kain dwells on the past.
I spend a lot of time looking at how the world makes the characters, and that was always my focus in history as well. Elizabeth Tudor is, in and of herself, an impressive woman - but she is impressive more for what she did within the strictures of her times, as a queen who ruled rather than taking a husband and making heirs, a woman who made the conscious choice to end her line at herself that she might keep her power (...I will not get distracted into trying to parallel her with Ashe...) Richard the Lionhearted is more fascinating for his flaws and a bright light soon extinguished than John was for being forced into laying a framework we take for granted now (trial by jury). Richard was a terrible administrator and a gifted warrior; John was a piss-poor warrior but a gifted administrator who nonetheless lacked the personal charisma to make of himself a truly spectacular king. Had John had Richard's charisma, things would have gone very very differently.
In the same way - how is Celes different for the fact that she is magic-infused? Did being infused with Ice magic make her the way she is or would she have been that way to start with? How does the loss of magic affect her personality - are the changes ingrained, or would she become a warmer person because that unnatural influence is fading? And this is actually where my appreciation for good AU comes from, because how would Locke be different if Rachel had retained her memory? Might he still have joined the Returners? Would Celes have done so? Change one thread and change the tapestry; what happens if I pull this one? But it's no good if I unravel the whole damn thing and reweave it whole cloth. Then I'm building my own out of archetypes I appreciated elsewhere and it is original fiction.
I think one of the reasons that I'm most prolific with Locke/Celes as a pairing is because the history is there; I don't have to do the work of building up to it. I'm not afraid of long fics (see also: Anything in Lucis Ante Terminum), but sometimes I just want to see the pretty and not have to work at it. This is one reason that I rarely write slash although I love to read it. I am dissatisfied with myself if I have not gone to extreme lengths to justify why exactly Seifer has Squall pinned against the wall and whimpering (besides the fact that it's hot, which is not enough justification for me to write it although it is quite sufficient justification to read it.) I want that history. This is probably why I'm pinging so hard on Kaim Argonar. A thousand years of history. omfg.
Having abused italics, I'll actually carry this one step further. Even in original fiction, I'm obsessed with what has gone before and how social structure is affecting the characters, and who they are as a result of how they came to be here. Case in point: Wyrdborn has two thousand years' worth of history written down for twenty years' worth of plot, on the off chance that I might need it. Which I won't. It's window-dressing and historical allusion for the characters; but Lassarina had to know before she could really start the story, because it just might be important later. I built the society because it was important for the story to know why this character is an outcast and that one is a celebrated star, but it was important for me to know how the society came to be that way, and to know that once it was different.
Cause and effect; past shapes the present. I can't get away from it in my fics, whether I'm writing normal canon or AU. Locke isn't himself without the grief surrounding Rachel. When I'm writing about minor characters (or major ones), I always want to know how they got there. Why did General Leo decline the MagiTek infusion and how did that change his own life, Celes's, and Kefka's? What if he had taken it? Who are the four High Summoners who came before Yuna, and why did they succeed where so many others failed? What was the secret of Mist, that it had to be destroyed? How did KluYa come to descend from the moon, and when? I mean, was he in Ordeals for decades or centuries before he got to ensuring the main plot would happen? These are the things I want to know. With the exception of Every Light, or poking at the PTSD that I'm convinced all FF main story characters develop, I'm usually more interested in the backstory than the future.
In short: I agree that our studies and/or professions shape our design when we write. And I will now go apologize to the poor teal deer for beating off his skin and muscles. And play Lost Odyssey.