Musings about Genfic and Writer's Block
The hp_gen_ch gen challenge for the month of April is Transformation. I've had dozens of ideas for this challenge, so many possible characters that I'd love to write about. But I find myself facing a peculiar sort of writer's block. There are quite a number of characters that I just can't bring myself to write about - including Snape, Remus, McGonagall, and others - simply because there is so much about their backgrounds that we don't know, and therefore, there is a fairly large possiblity that either book six or seven will make my little ficlet inaccurate.
I have no problems writing a deliberately AU story. My WIP, The Phoenix and the Serpent, is an AU, even though it doesn't actually contradict anything that has yet been written, because I know that once book seven has been written, it will be an AU. It is a legitimate alternate universe, but it is a direction that I know without a doubt that JKR will not be taking the series.
But my one-shots are very different. I like to focus on a specific character (or two) and explore them through some sort of missing moment (or moments), one that either occurs during the timeline of the story or sometime in the past. And that sort of fic is the most likely to be made totally obsolete - worthless, almost - if one of the next books contradicts it. What's the point of a fic that explores a character if I've gotten them all wrong? My two one-shots so far have both played it very safe - it is very unlikely that either will be contradicted - but both have focused on characters (Neville and Luna) whose backgrounds we know quite a bit about. But although I'd love to write about Snape, and about Lupin, and McGonagall, and Dumbledore - I just feel that I won't be able to write them until after the series are over. Does anyone else feel anything remotely similar to this?
I have no problems writing a deliberately AU story. My WIP, The Phoenix and the Serpent, is an AU, even though it doesn't actually contradict anything that has yet been written, because I know that once book seven has been written, it will be an AU. It is a legitimate alternate universe, but it is a direction that I know without a doubt that JKR will not be taking the series.
But my one-shots are very different. I like to focus on a specific character (or two) and explore them through some sort of missing moment (or moments), one that either occurs during the timeline of the story or sometime in the past. And that sort of fic is the most likely to be made totally obsolete - worthless, almost - if one of the next books contradicts it. What's the point of a fic that explores a character if I've gotten them all wrong? My two one-shots so far have both played it very safe - it is very unlikely that either will be contradicted - but both have focused on characters (Neville and Luna) whose backgrounds we know quite a bit about. But although I'd love to write about Snape, and about Lupin, and McGonagall, and Dumbledore - I just feel that I won't be able to write them until after the series are over. Does anyone else feel anything remotely similar to this?