About Writing Fanfic and Slash
My friend owldolatrous is writing a paper about fanfic and slash, and asked me about it. I thought my answers to him were interesting enough that I'd share.
He said:
I'm focusing on slashfic now more than fanfic as a whole. And I'm concentrating on Star Trek, because my professor will have more familiarity with the source material.
What criticism(s) have you heard about fanfiction in general? About your own work?
Do you write any Slashfic? If so, please replace "fanfic" with "slashfic" in all of these questions.
What debates have you heard or engaged in about how fanfic should be written?
How did you get into writing fanfic?
Why do you write fanfic? What does it "do" for you? Is there something about it that is rewarding in a way that writing fiction based entirely on original characters is not?
What is it about Naruto that made you want to write fanfic for that setting specifically?
My answers were perhaps a bit rambly, but here they are:
Technically much of my fic is slash, since I'm writing male/male relationships. I'm not a porn author (often) though if you want to read the NC-17 stuff I've written I would be happy to show it to you. [Our mutual friend B] gave an enthusiastic review when I showed him one of them.
My biggest crit about fanfic is that it's largely immature stereotyped crap. In fact I read almost no fanfic or slash, except stuff by authors I know to be very good. In my own work I try very hard to write authentically, about adult, 3-dimensional characters with talents and flaws and a full range of emotion. I detest the weepy uke (bottom) and the callous seme (top) stereotype. I feel a lot of badly written slash emasculates the characters.
Here is an essay I wrote on why I write about Kakashi and Iruka from Naruto. I've since moved on to spending time writing about a different male/male pair - Genma and Raidou - but the reasons for wanting to write about them remain the same.
In addition I write about it because it's a very wide open world with a lot of potential for peripheral characters, original characters, and interesting storylines. It's a highly morally ambiguous world. A world in which these military organizations of magic users (ninja) have come to dominate. And while it's based on a traditional Japanese culture, it's clearly neither ancient nor modern Japan, but something else. My own theory is that the Naruto world is a post-apocalyptic one, where surviving humans have created a new society, long enough ago that the pre-apocalyptic society, and the apocalypse itself, have been largely forgotten. It explains to me why so many of the characters have Caucasian appearances, and the level of technology and western behaviors in the society.
In some respects I feel Star Trek is similar, in that it offers a fleshed-out enough world concept that one could, for example, tell the stories of crew members on a different ship, or whom one sees onscreen very little, and make them three-dimensional people.
As for how fanfic should be written? There are as many answers as there are authors. For me, I want the writing taken seriously. The characters kept true to whatever we know about them and their world. The world made self-consistent. The stories and plots to involve character development, growth and change. In a lot of ways I'm not writing traditional slash or fanfic, because I'm writing almost exclusively about the characters we don't get to know in the original material. I am writing about original characters, or at least creating from whole cloth character profiles and behaviors to fit canon characters we know almost nothing about. For Star Trek, it would be like taking some random redshirt who dies in the first ten minutes of some episode, and telling his life story. All we really know about him from canon is that he was in engineering, was a low-rank, carried a side arm, and had brown curly hair.
I got into writing fanfic and slash in late 2004, when I discovered it online, and realized that the stories I'd spent a lifetime telling myself about characters in things I'd read or seen were effectively fanfic. I mean, I've spent my whole life making up stories about random Elves in the age of Tolkein's Silmarillion, about other pilots in the Jedi Academy before Luke was around. And always, I'll admit, the stories were a way for me to imagine myself as a young, adult, heroic male.
I should be clear here, though, that self-insertion is both a stage that all young fanfic writers go through, and is heavily frowned upon. The classic is the "Mary Sue" where the author puts herself in the story as the ultra special girl that the male lead falls in love with. My own Mary Sue stage was, thankfully, over with when I was 13 or so, and not actually writing yet. When I say my writing allows me to imagine myself as male, it's because to write each of the characters, I see the story from their perspectives, and put myself into them.
At the time I discovered fanfic, I'd also just discovered Naruto, and was busy spinning backstories and tales about peripheral characters I liked there. And I thought - you know I could write this down, and then I wouldn't have to remember it from night to night. And as I read other people's work, I thought, I know I can write better than this.
So I wrote and published It's Nothing, and received a ton of critical success and feedback, which kept me writing. It became a core of who I am, to think of myself as a writer.
I think a lot of why I like fanfic now is just because I've put so much into creating the world, thinking about it, making my characters real, that it really is very close to being original fiction. I have a couple of original stories in the works as well, but it's not as easy to share that with others, and I love sharing my work and getting feedback on it. With a fan community you get that.
As for why I write slash- well I guess I've always felt more like a guy than a girl. Writing male characters allows me to explore my guyness. And slash because I'm queer. I'm bi, in fact, and I understand the appeal of the male body. And I wish I had one. If I woke up tomorrow male, I'd probably sleep with other men at least some of the time. I suppose this begs the question why don't I write female slash. I guess it's because I don't want to project myself into a female character, so it holds no appeal for me to write a female protagonist.
I've never taken any formal writing classes, beyond a creative writing class in my senior year of high school. In fact what is really funny about that is that I was a very good poet, and had my work published. I was a good essayist. But I hated writing fiction. I spent 20 years thinking I simply couldn't write fiction, and then in November 2004 I woke up one day and had my epiphany about fanfiction, and started writing. I've never looked back.
I just wish my writing could be taken as seriously by others as it would be if it were entirely original. I think a lot of stuff out there is essentially fanfiction. For example, the various Star Trek spin-offs, Next Generation, DS9, Enterprise and Voyager are all very similar to what I do with my fanfic. Play in a universe created elsewhere (the original Star Trek series). Or the new Doctor Who and Torchwood. It's fanfic that's been legitimatized.
He said:
I'm focusing on slashfic now more than fanfic as a whole. And I'm concentrating on Star Trek, because my professor will have more familiarity with the source material.
My answers were perhaps a bit rambly, but here they are:
Technically much of my fic is slash, since I'm writing male/male relationships. I'm not a porn author (often) though if you want to read the NC-17 stuff I've written I would be happy to show it to you. [Our mutual friend B] gave an enthusiastic review when I showed him one of them.
My biggest crit about fanfic is that it's largely immature stereotyped crap. In fact I read almost no fanfic or slash, except stuff by authors I know to be very good. In my own work I try very hard to write authentically, about adult, 3-dimensional characters with talents and flaws and a full range of emotion. I detest the weepy uke (bottom) and the callous seme (top) stereotype. I feel a lot of badly written slash emasculates the characters.
Here is an essay I wrote on why I write about Kakashi and Iruka from Naruto. I've since moved on to spending time writing about a different male/male pair - Genma and Raidou - but the reasons for wanting to write about them remain the same.
In addition I write about it because it's a very wide open world with a lot of potential for peripheral characters, original characters, and interesting storylines. It's a highly morally ambiguous world. A world in which these military organizations of magic users (ninja) have come to dominate. And while it's based on a traditional Japanese culture, it's clearly neither ancient nor modern Japan, but something else. My own theory is that the Naruto world is a post-apocalyptic one, where surviving humans have created a new society, long enough ago that the pre-apocalyptic society, and the apocalypse itself, have been largely forgotten. It explains to me why so many of the characters have Caucasian appearances, and the level of technology and western behaviors in the society.
In some respects I feel Star Trek is similar, in that it offers a fleshed-out enough world concept that one could, for example, tell the stories of crew members on a different ship, or whom one sees onscreen very little, and make them three-dimensional people.
As for how fanfic should be written? There are as many answers as there are authors. For me, I want the writing taken seriously. The characters kept true to whatever we know about them and their world. The world made self-consistent. The stories and plots to involve character development, growth and change. In a lot of ways I'm not writing traditional slash or fanfic, because I'm writing almost exclusively about the characters we don't get to know in the original material. I am writing about original characters, or at least creating from whole cloth character profiles and behaviors to fit canon characters we know almost nothing about. For Star Trek, it would be like taking some random redshirt who dies in the first ten minutes of some episode, and telling his life story. All we really know about him from canon is that he was in engineering, was a low-rank, carried a side arm, and had brown curly hair.
I got into writing fanfic and slash in late 2004, when I discovered it online, and realized that the stories I'd spent a lifetime telling myself about characters in things I'd read or seen were effectively fanfic. I mean, I've spent my whole life making up stories about random Elves in the age of Tolkein's Silmarillion, about other pilots in the Jedi Academy before Luke was around. And always, I'll admit, the stories were a way for me to imagine myself as a young, adult, heroic male.
I should be clear here, though, that self-insertion is both a stage that all young fanfic writers go through, and is heavily frowned upon. The classic is the "Mary Sue" where the author puts herself in the story as the ultra special girl that the male lead falls in love with. My own Mary Sue stage was, thankfully, over with when I was 13 or so, and not actually writing yet. When I say my writing allows me to imagine myself as male, it's because to write each of the characters, I see the story from their perspectives, and put myself into them.
At the time I discovered fanfic, I'd also just discovered Naruto, and was busy spinning backstories and tales about peripheral characters I liked there. And I thought - you know I could write this down, and then I wouldn't have to remember it from night to night. And as I read other people's work, I thought, I know I can write better than this.
So I wrote and published It's Nothing, and received a ton of critical success and feedback, which kept me writing. It became a core of who I am, to think of myself as a writer.
I think a lot of why I like fanfic now is just because I've put so much into creating the world, thinking about it, making my characters real, that it really is very close to being original fiction. I have a couple of original stories in the works as well, but it's not as easy to share that with others, and I love sharing my work and getting feedback on it. With a fan community you get that.
As for why I write slash- well I guess I've always felt more like a guy than a girl. Writing male characters allows me to explore my guyness. And slash because I'm queer. I'm bi, in fact, and I understand the appeal of the male body. And I wish I had one. If I woke up tomorrow male, I'd probably sleep with other men at least some of the time. I suppose this begs the question why don't I write female slash. I guess it's because I don't want to project myself into a female character, so it holds no appeal for me to write a female protagonist.
I've never taken any formal writing classes, beyond a creative writing class in my senior year of high school. In fact what is really funny about that is that I was a very good poet, and had my work published. I was a good essayist. But I hated writing fiction. I spent 20 years thinking I simply couldn't write fiction, and then in November 2004 I woke up one day and had my epiphany about fanfiction, and started writing. I've never looked back.
I just wish my writing could be taken as seriously by others as it would be if it were entirely original. I think a lot of stuff out there is essentially fanfiction. For example, the various Star Trek spin-offs, Next Generation, DS9, Enterprise and Voyager are all very similar to what I do with my fanfic. Play in a universe created elsewhere (the original Star Trek series). Or the new Doctor Who and Torchwood. It's fanfic that's been legitimatized.