So I have been working on a story about Lady Christina, the one-off Who "companion" from 2009, for about two years now. (If it's any more than that, I don't want to know
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Okay - so I apparently have a lot of thoughts on this. ;-)
Fanfic gives us a cheat; it's both a starting point and a shortcut. Try reading a fanfic, especially a short one, and pretend you don't know the source. (Or better yet try reading a fic from an unknown fandom.) You realize fanfic on its own is entirely without context. The back story is the readership's collective knowledge of what came before. We get so used to format, we forget how dependent fanfic is on that knowledge and how some of the fics we love the most are meaningless without it.
The novel I'm working on was inspired by many other works and did have its start as a vague idea for what could come after a particular novel I love. I've ended up reading and analyzing fanfic from many fandoms (and original novels) for plotting ideas so I've been thinking about fanfic a lot.
Now to your fic. Honestly - it sounds like you've begun to write original fiction with a DW inspiration. Much of the struggle might be trying to reconcile the original fic and the fanfic. If you drop the fanfic parts you'll have to do that part of the world building on your own - and that is difficult. (Worldbuilding is where my struggle is and I even have a beginning and end. It's all that *stuff* in the middle. ;) )
So I think you have to ask yourself:
1) *Is* this original fic? Is the back story *the* story or do you now have to move forward to somewhere as yet unknown?
Or
2)Is this fanfic and do you need to be less ambitious? Does it need to be a series of loosely connected character study ficlets rather than a novel-length story?
"ambitious". I hadn't thought of it that way. But, yes, this is very ambitious. And you're right, it's 99% original fiction.
Maybe -- for the sake of getting something done in less than geological time -- I should relax some of my artistic requirements. The requirement that it be a coherent whole, that it be tight, that it have internal structure. All the things that paralyze me because I don't know how to get to there from here.
Maybe I should write the clear, well-fleshed-out bits and just put them out there, turn them into mismatched beads on some kind of string. Maybe I should give up on shaping a forest and just grow some nice trees.
I want so bad for this to be done and to be something that people can read. But it is the trees I care about: I just have been assuming that I'd have to compile them into a forest, which has its own requirements.
Fanfic gives us a cheat; it's both a starting point and a shortcut. Try reading a fanfic, especially a short one, and pretend you don't know the source. (Or better yet try reading a fic from an unknown fandom.) You realize fanfic on its own is entirely without context. The back story is the readership's collective knowledge of what came before. We get so used to format, we forget how dependent fanfic is on that knowledge and how some of the fics we love the most are meaningless without it.
The novel I'm working on was inspired by many other works and did have its start as a vague idea for what could come after a particular novel I love. I've ended up reading and analyzing fanfic from many fandoms (and original novels) for plotting ideas so I've been thinking about fanfic a lot.
Now to your fic. Honestly - it sounds like you've begun to write original fiction with a DW inspiration. Much of the struggle might be trying to reconcile the original fic and the fanfic. If you drop the fanfic parts you'll have to do that part of the world building on your own - and that is difficult. (Worldbuilding is where my struggle is and I even have a beginning and end. It's all that *stuff* in the middle. ;) )
So I think you have to ask yourself:
1) *Is* this original fic? Is the back story *the* story or do you now have to move forward to somewhere as yet unknown?
Or
2)Is this fanfic and do you need to be less ambitious? Does it need to be a series of loosely connected character study ficlets rather than a novel-length story?
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Maybe -- for the sake of getting something done in less than geological time -- I should relax some of my artistic requirements. The requirement that it be a coherent whole, that it be tight, that it have internal structure. All the things that paralyze me because I don't know how to get to there from here.
Maybe I should write the clear, well-fleshed-out bits and just put them out there, turn them into mismatched beads on some kind of string. Maybe I should give up on shaping a forest and just grow some nice trees.
I want so bad for this to be done and to be something that people can read. But it is the trees I care about: I just have been assuming that I'd have to compile them into a forest, which has its own requirements.
Thanks. A lot. This was really helpful.
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