"No but seriously, what if they were flowers?" : The Art of AU Writing
I have a lot of feelings, guys, so instead of working on an actual fic I wrote this essay on a whim. I think I went crazy painting trim and that drove me to it. It is 4500 words long, and I actually just went and checked and it is in fact almost as long as some term papers I have written. The advantage here is that I didn't use any of the terminology I used to use in term papers (smart people not in my field have read academic writing from my field--including my own and also published stuff--and looked thoughtful and said, 'I can tell these words are English but have absolutely no idea what I just read' and okay that might still happen here).
Contents
Introduction
Terminology
Ingredients of a Good AU
The Art of Fusion: Will It Blend?
Practical Application
Conclusion
Introduction
I've been in fandom for a long time. It may surprise some people to learn that, given that I haven't been in Livejournal-based fandom for a long time, ie. I didn't come over to journals on the fandom Mayflower seeking new etc etc freedom to write the porn of my forebears etc etc. I spent probably the first half of my fandom existence on FF.Net/personal websites/using BBS-style message boards and even a mailing list (you ain't seen fandrama till you've seen it on a forum where you can banhammer people). But then I discovered fandom on Livejournal and that was about it.
Anyway, despite all probable appearances to the contrary, I also like to think about writing--my craft yes mmhmm, if you will. This may also come as a surprise to you, provided you have never actually talked to me in realtime about writing or fandom. Those who have are currently going, 'OH FOR--' and skipping the rest of this entry. This is because they spend a lot of time inciting me to cane-waving and ranting about kids these days and their fic-writing blunders. I mean, yes, we all did it when we started out, I personally committed many textual transgressions in my first fandom but well, cane-waving is a hypocritical practice by nature, and also back then a lot of people were doing these things. Internet fandom was still somewhere between the 'training wheels' and 'drive it like you stole it' stages of development and there wasn't any really all-around good fic like we stumble across today in our sophisticated modern meanderings. Let's just say that I don't think FF.Net ever actually saw a decline in quality to reach its current reputation. If anything, some people have yanked the bell curve up a little more. [By the way, my first fandom? I don't tell people what it was in case they go looking for my fic, because some things should be left to rest. I think one person knows what my first fandom was and I know where she sleeps at night so the secret may yet die with me.]
My favourite subject of cane-waving by far is AU fic. It's a popular trope-set, which, fantastic, but since 90% of everything is crap, a lot of AUs that I see and have fond hopes for end up being terrible and OOC and sad-making. I have been known to write an AU here and there myself (cards on the table, every fic I'm presently working on or should be working on is an AU, across three fandoms) and some of the comments I get on them follow a flattering/worrying trend of "Normally I avoid AUs like the plague but [for some reason] I read THIS one and I liked it, wth". Well, it's about technique, right. The difference between a good AU and a bad one normally comes down to one thing: characterization. This issue fucking eats at me and so, since I have AUs on the brain, there are fresh new kink memes for fresh new fandoms being filled with these kinds of fics by fresh new fans, and also it's Big Bang season yet again, it seems to me like as good a time as any to talk about writing AUs.
Terminology
First off, what is an AU in the first place? Your first ten minutes in fandom should tell you that it stands for 'alternate universe', ie. a story that takes place in a universe outside established canon. AUs have a million and six variations mostly thanks to tropes (I will refrain from linking TV Tropes here so that none of us lose hours of our lives in its dark maw) and the sky's the limit on interpretation, but basically there are three major terms tossed around: AU, crossover and fusion. A lot of newer fans don't know what the differences are between these terms and I'm sure some older fans have differing opinions they could throw down over, but there's a generally accepted explanation I'll work with here that'll allow us to move forward with the topic:
AU is an overarching term for all fics that exist in a universe outside of established canon, whether it's 'what if X had happened in this episode instead of Y' or 'what if characters A and B were both FLOWERS'. Crossovers and fusions are subsets of AUs and get confused really a lot because they both deal with combining two or more canons into one, eg. Star Trek and Merlin, and then basically playing 'Will It Blend?' Crossovers deal with characters from Canon A meeting characters from Canon B, as in, 'a gate team from Stargate steps through a gate and winds up on a planet with a place called Hogwarts, where they meet some kid with dumb glasses and a scar on his face'. Interaction between characters from different canons is key to the crossover's enjoyment factor. Fusions, on the other hand, have the characters from Canon A replace the characters of Canon B, wiping them out of existence and probably taking on their roles in the plot of Canon B. An example of a fusion is, 'Spock is an FBI agent working in white collar crimes and Jim Kirk is the rakish art thief he's apprehended and taken on as a CI after years of chasing; together they fight crime', which of course is the insertion of Star Trek characters into the universe of White Collar, replacing Neal and Peter and probably every other character as well with characters from Star Trek.
And naturally aside from fusions and crossovers, there are many many kinds of AUs one can write. Your only limits are your imagination, your sanity and your capacity for shame.
Ingredients of a Good AU
I could say that plot is a good thing to have locked down in an AU, because they can certainly get out of hand if you're not paying attention; I personally don't even like to start a fic until I have some idea what the ending will be like and just as importantly for me, how far away from the beginning it will be. However, plot is, generally speaking, an important component of all fics either AU or canon-compliant (unless you are writing straightforward porn and plot would just interfere with all the blowjobs and whipping), so we'll take that part as read and move down the checklist.
To my mind, characters are the biggest factor in whether your AU will be awesome or terrible. Think about it: if you take your beloved characters out of canon and plunk them into some other universe but they're not characterized correctly, then what is your reader reading? Best-case, they're reading OFic with names they recognize, which is not what they signed up for when they clicked on your fic. The characterization is what makes the story attractive as fanfic. Good characterization is the only reason that I am ever going to be compelled to read a high school AU about characters from the Justice League, and that's not because I don't like the Justice League, okay? I think they're pretty neat, with all their primary-coloured costumes, and I would be interested to know how Bats, Supes and Wonder Woman get along in the context of Algebra II and the floor hockey module in Gym but only if I can recognize them as Bats, Supes and Wonder Woman and not just some random teenagers who fit their physical descriptions and answer to their names. I live in Canada and some incarnation of Degrassi is on TV all the damn time if I want generic characters in that scenario.
That seems like a pretty basic concept, and really it is, but achieving it is another thing. What you have to do is figure out what makes your character tick before you can do anything with them. This helps with all writing exercises but is crucial for AUs. Some people advocate doing things like answering interview questions as your character to get into their heads or whatever, which is fine if you like it but I take a different approach.
TV and movie fandoms are great for this because their writers have a tendency to be kind of lazy (either that or the nature of different people writing different episodes means more basic characterizations are important to success and uniformity, what do I know, I'm sadly not in the industry); essentially what I do is figure out what archetype each of my main characters falls under to streamline the characterization process for myself. If you consume a lot of media this is pretty easy to do. Using this mindset, I can pick out important character traits that form the basis of my character's personality and I'm in business. For example, Jim Kirk from Star Trek XI is a basic Hero (debatable whether he's Willing or Reluctant depending on how you examine the movie); he is brave, brash, stubborn, arrogant, intelligent, a risk-taker, bridles under authority, has self-image issues, is loyal and thinks outside the box. Keep these traits intact in all he says and does in your fic and Jim Kirk will be a recognizable character whether he's captain of the Enterprise or a waiter in a restaurant.
The issue of alignment with the law is a tricky one and up for debate, I think. Some characters are clearly more capable of going darkside/lightside than others (I see Jim Kirk or Magneto trading sides more readily than I see Spock or Sebastian Shaw doing so) but depending on how it's done, is it possible to make a character strongly aligned to one side in canon switch to the other--as in a criminal AU, for example--without going out of character, or is that always going to be crackfic where Spock sports a goatee? Hard to say. While
leupagus was writing her Hawaii Five-0 fic This Thing of Ours, an AU in which Danny Williams was in the Mafia, we had lively debates as to whether or not Danny was OOC for being on the wrong side of the law. She thought that his good alignment as a cop in canon was crucial to his character, whereas I considered that as long as he was still a generally thoughtful and cautious person prone to occasional crazy temper and showed that loyalty to his loved ones that appears in canon, he was in the clear. On the other hand, neither one of us has a problem with the idea of Steve McGarrett being a criminal, because we both view him as the kind of character whose darker side is kept in check by social conditioning to obey the law (more or less). It's all up to your interpretation as the author and how hard you sell it, I guess.
Writing fic with good characters isn't just about getting the archetypes and major personality traits nailed down, although that is half the battle. Good characters have depth, like Mafia!Danny's conflict of alignment against the law versus his devotion to his loved ones. This is just something you learn how to add to characters with experience, though, and if you're paying attention to how you make your characters then you'll figure it out with practice if you haven't already. Observation of real human beings is the best way to add life to your characters, because real people are full of contradictions. Get used to figuring out what makes real people tick and your writing will improve accordingly as you add these same inflections to your characters.
The Art of Fusion: Will It Blend?
Fusions are ridiculously popular in the fandoms I interact with. I think we all like pop culture so much that mixing together canons we enjoy is like doing speedballs: twice the high (Note: don't do speedballs, we've lost a lot of bright sparks that way). I like writing them a lot myself, because they present an interesting challenge in trying to combine two canons into something new while keeping the charm of both.
There are a lot of bad fusion AUs on the internet that basically look like the author has transcribed the canon they took for their plot and then find-and-replaced new character names into it. These are bad for a few reasons: first, if you're going to have all the same dialogue and action that actually happened in Zombieland anyway, then why not just watch Zombieland? Second, the characters from, say, BBC Sherlock, are not the same characters as the ones in Zombieland. Name-swapping John Watson with Columbus doesn't make any sense because while they might have parallels in their personalities, they are not the same person. Columbus is a 20-something loser with OCD and is the nerdiest person to ever survive an apocalypse, while John Watson is a 30-something doctor and war vet with a jones for danger.
What it breaks down to is this: a new character in the role of Columbus from Zombieland (unless it's George-Michael Bluth) is not going to have the same personality and won't say or do all the same things Columbus did in any given situation. If you land on some really sweet parallel casting a la George-Michael, they might have mostly the same responses, but it's never going to be a find-and-replace-the-names level of character-swapping. And that's only the beginning of the challenge, because there are more characters to cast.
In your breathtakingly avant-garde (probably inadvisable) Zombieland/Sherlock fusion, is John/Sherlock going to be the main pairing? Sherlock is a little like the Wichita to John's Columbus, at least in the derision and outsmarting department, so that sort of floats. He'd make a shitty Little Rock or Tallahassee if you want to recast every Zombieland character, that's for sure. Tallahassee is a no-nonsense and abrasive bruiser, generally, so the best Sherlock character I can come up with to take his role is DI Lestrade. Little Rock is trickier. You could go the siblings route and use Mycroft. You could go the 'weak appearance' route and use Mrs. Hudson. Likely what I would do, though, is leverage Sherlock's loner tendencies and take the Little Rock character out entirely.
And that's okay. A lot of authors clearly run into trouble casting fusions when they try to find a character from Canon A to stuff into every available role in Canon B. All this creates is headaches because the more you cast, the fewer roles will have reasonable analogues and the more you get into OOC territory. Sometimes there aren't even enough characters in one canon to put in the other (eg. Zombieland has only four characters plus Bill Murray, the TV show Lost has more than ten identifiable major characters and no Bill Murray to be found, although casting him as Jacob in a fusion would be hilarious). Even if you somehow do find a situation where you have 1:1 swaps of all characters from both canons, then you have to be more careful that you're not just rehashing an identical plot again. This sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?
Well, it can be. Fusions are tricky to try and do a great job of, but that doesn't mean they're not amazingly fun anyway. Feel free to play fast and loose to make your life easier: can't find a character in Sherlock to take Little Rock's role in Zombieland? Toss her character. Just write it out completely. Have a character in Canon A with nowhere to fit in Canon B but you want to write about them anyway? Create a space for them. One character from Canon A is like two characters in Canon B? Can you combine their roles? Do it. It's okay, you're allowed. You're the one writing the fic; do whatever you want. You're only as constrained by canon as you want to be.
An actual example: I'm currently writing a fusion of the Scott Pilgrim movie with X-Men: First Class. I cast Erik as Scott and Charles as Ramona, which is the two most important characters out of the way. But what to do with all the supporting roles? Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has a lot of minor characters (the comic series has even more). X-Men has a potential cast of zillions but I mostly just wanted to use XMFC characters if I could get away with it. In the end, I cast Raven as Knives Chau, got rid of Scott's sister, combined the roles of Wallace Wells and Stephen Stills for Emma and then also combined the roles of Kim Pine and Young Neil for Hank. Other XMFC characters take on most of the other important supporting roles in the story, including Envy Adams and the Seven Evil Exes, which readers will see once I write about them. If I tried really hard, I might have found XMFC characters or other characters from X-Men canon to fill every available role in the story but not only am I too lazy to do that, Erik in XMFC doesn't really have a lot of friends. Surrounding his character in this story with the number of people that crop up in Scott Pilgrim doesn't really fit his personality. Regardless of all the casting I tweaked, the fic still reads like Scott Pilgrim because the fusion maintains the same setting, atmosphere and conflict.
And I may be a little strange (most assuredly I am strange) but I had a lot of fun figuring out what would work and what wouldn't.
Some fusions though, just won't blend. If you have to force it too much then it's probably not going to work, or at least not as a faithful fusion. The Sherlock/Zombieland example above is one such idea; not only are the characters a bit of a stretch, but the plot of the movie (going to California, breaking into Bill Murray's house, going to a theme park) doesn't seem like something Sherlock characters would do; that fic, if I wrote it, would turn into a generic zombie apocalypse AU. That is the key question--never mind whether you can find a casting fit, would the characters of your fandom even follow the plot of this story? If the honest answer to that question is no, then your fusion will probably suck and it might be time to shed a single tear and let the idea go for something else.
Once you've managed to get your fusion AU cast and you think the idea will hold water long enough to write a fic about it, just keep one thing in mind: make it your own. Put your own spin on it. The reason every fandom has more high school AUs than you can shake a stick at is that every one of them has their own style: different casting, different characterization, different conflicts, completely different angles of approach. And some people will read every single one of those AUs--even if they're based off the same movie plot!--so give those readers something fresh with your fic.
Practical Application
Let's cast and plot a fusion. I am going to develop something I've never written or thought about before and write down my thought process, and I have just decided that this is going to be a Leverage fic: the cast of Leverage fused with the movie Fight Club.
Leverage has five main characters: Nate, Sophie, Hardison, Parker and Eliot. Recurring characters include Sterling, Nate's ex-wife Maggie, Det. Bonanno of the BPD, and those two FBI agents whose names I think are Taggert and McSweeten.
Fight Club (spoiler time) is a movie based on a book that goes almost exactly the same, about a guy with a friend named Tyler Durden who first helps him start a club where dudes hit each other for fun and to let out their feelings, and later leads a guerilla revolution against the Man, like you do. They also fight over a lady named Marla who the main character met while crashing support groups during a bout of insomnia. In the end it turns out that Tyler Durden is a figment of the main character's imagination; a split personality maybe. Meatloaf plays a man named Robert Paulson and everyone is very concerned about him and his bitch-tits.
Anyway. Fight Club presents me with three main roles to cast: Tyler Durden, the nameless main character and Marla. Supporting roles to fill can include Robert Paulson/Bob, people in the support groups, people who show up to Fight Club, the main character's coworkers and the spacemonkeys of the guerilla group Tyler starts.
I personally ship any combination of Hardison, Parker and Eliot, while Nate and Sophie and their shit tend to bore me, so those first three people are going to be the main characters in this fusion. Hardison fits the main character's role the best with the whole ennui thing, Parker is a clear choice to play crazyface Marla's role, and Eliot is the Leverage Character Most Likely to Start a Violence Club, so he can be Tyler Durden. I might just leave Nate and Sophie out of this fic entirely but why not put Nate in as a member of an AA group that Hardison crashes on a sleepless night? Sophie could either be one of Hardison's coworkers or a support group member (Cancer Lady springs to mind). Taggert and McSweeten are perfect yes-men to go from the fight club to spacemonkey status. I like Bonanno best as a Bob-type sacrificial lamb character because he's kind of a big guy with a big heart, like Bob, and Hardison would be more likely to flip out over Bonanno's death than that of an asshole like Sterling. Sterling and Maggie, then, I'd just toss out of the fic.
With that settled, how does the story play out? I'm going to keep the basic plotline of Fight Club: suffering man meets figment of his imagination and develops a mancrush, meets suffering woman and falls for her, goes to Fight Club and AA and Testicular Cancer Support Group; suffering woman takes up with the exciting imaginary man and makes suffering man jealous, that whole... terrorism thing happens... things get right outta hand and then at the end, it turns out imaginary man is imaginary, suffering woman loved suffering man all along for some reason, and suffering man wonders how much he's really suffering, the end.
But how does this go with Hardison, Parker and Eliot at the wheel? How is this story interesting and fresh and new with Leverage characters? Well, let's see.
Hardison is a college grad with a lot of ennui who works by day in IT at a big company and his salary pays for a nice studio apartment, a nice computer rig and his Warcraft subscription. He can't sleep because he hates everything and is vaguely scared of it, too, and so he spends his nights on raids with people in Germany and doing some homebrew programming, nothing illegal although sometimes he toys with the notion. His therapist got tired of trying to get him to take Ambien and tells him to go to a support group to see what actual suffering looks like, and after some angry words about forefathers and slavery that he doesn't entirely feel, Hardison goes and then keeps going and then meets Parker. Parker goes to support group meetings because while she's gone through some shit, she doesn't react to it like most victims do, and the normal grief-and-suffering process of addicts and the terminally ill is fascinating to her. Hardison thinks she's fucking weird for being entertained by sadness and showing up to meetings about testicular cancer and starts avoiding her.
Then one night all his shit blows up and he winds up at the bar where he meets a white dude with a ponytail and scars on his knuckles, who says his name is Eliot and five beer later tells Hardison to hit him as hard as he can. Best friends!
After like two weeks of dodging Parker, she starts stalking him. She just wanted to know why he stopped showing up to AA because everybody apparently missed him and was worried he'd fallen off the wagon. Hardison starts dodging her again but she gets his phone number (stole his phone, called herself and then put it back) and one night while he's at the bar with Eliot before it's time for fight club, she calls and he ignores it, putting the phone on the bar and forgetting it when he goes to the bathroom. Eliot picks up the phone and talks to Parker because Hardison is a pussy.
Then shit goes off the rails and Eliot is asking Hardison if he can hack government websites while Hardison is pretty sure Eliot is fucking Parker, and the fight clubs turn into a trained militia under Eliot's command because he used to work for the government and doesn't trust them and sees the feebs and CIA everywhere because they have a 'very distinctive X'. His militia is basically living in his house by now and training all the time and Hardison suspects Eliot is wacko... events transpire, Eliot vanishes, Hardison learns he was planning to take down DHS facilities in a coordinated strike with his whole army, tries to stop it, learns Eliot is imaginary and Parker's still there even though Hardison is apparently a crazed generalissimo with DID, the plot may or may not succeed and they live, well, ever after, or for a while anyway.
And there you have it: something that is clearly the plot of Fight Club, but twisted around a little to be something new to read and to fit the personalities of the characters used in the story. (Before anybody asks me, I'm not going to actually write this fic. It's free to a good home. Call dibs in the comments, maybe, if you actually want to write it or something like it.)
Conclusion
So, this has been a bit of a guide to writing the kind of AUs (particularly fusions, what, I don't deny my biases) that people will enjoy reading, and I hope it's enlightening for at least one person looking for help out there, because then at least it'd have the same readership as my term papers. The comments are open to any discussion/argument with me about what I've said here, as well as further questions and general chat about AU-writing. If you're trying to write an AU right now and want some help, go ahead and ask! If you want to try and come up with terrible ideas for fusions, do that too! They entertain me a lot. I'm going to go back to working on the sports AU, the regency AU, and the movie fusion while letting my other AU WIPs rot until I finish something. Oh, and also: just in case, any story idea in this fic that doesn't have an associated link to an actual story came right out of my own head and so any relationship to a fic that actually exists is 100% a coincidence.
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/51290.html. (
comments)
Contents
Introduction
Terminology
Ingredients of a Good AU
The Art of Fusion: Will It Blend?
Practical Application
Conclusion
Introduction
I've been in fandom for a long time. It may surprise some people to learn that, given that I haven't been in Livejournal-based fandom for a long time, ie. I didn't come over to journals on the fandom Mayflower seeking new etc etc freedom to write the porn of my forebears etc etc. I spent probably the first half of my fandom existence on FF.Net/personal websites/using BBS-style message boards and even a mailing list (you ain't seen fandrama till you've seen it on a forum where you can banhammer people). But then I discovered fandom on Livejournal and that was about it.
Anyway, despite all probable appearances to the contrary, I also like to think about writing--my craft yes mmhmm, if you will. This may also come as a surprise to you, provided you have never actually talked to me in realtime about writing or fandom. Those who have are currently going, 'OH FOR--' and skipping the rest of this entry. This is because they spend a lot of time inciting me to cane-waving and ranting about kids these days and their fic-writing blunders. I mean, yes, we all did it when we started out, I personally committed many textual transgressions in my first fandom but well, cane-waving is a hypocritical practice by nature, and also back then a lot of people were doing these things. Internet fandom was still somewhere between the 'training wheels' and 'drive it like you stole it' stages of development and there wasn't any really all-around good fic like we stumble across today in our sophisticated modern meanderings. Let's just say that I don't think FF.Net ever actually saw a decline in quality to reach its current reputation. If anything, some people have yanked the bell curve up a little more. [By the way, my first fandom? I don't tell people what it was in case they go looking for my fic, because some things should be left to rest. I think one person knows what my first fandom was and I know where she sleeps at night so the secret may yet die with me.]
My favourite subject of cane-waving by far is AU fic. It's a popular trope-set, which, fantastic, but since 90% of everything is crap, a lot of AUs that I see and have fond hopes for end up being terrible and OOC and sad-making. I have been known to write an AU here and there myself (cards on the table, every fic I'm presently working on or should be working on is an AU, across three fandoms) and some of the comments I get on them follow a flattering/worrying trend of "Normally I avoid AUs like the plague but [for some reason] I read THIS one and I liked it, wth". Well, it's about technique, right. The difference between a good AU and a bad one normally comes down to one thing: characterization. This issue fucking eats at me and so, since I have AUs on the brain, there are fresh new kink memes for fresh new fandoms being filled with these kinds of fics by fresh new fans, and also it's Big Bang season yet again, it seems to me like as good a time as any to talk about writing AUs.
Terminology
First off, what is an AU in the first place? Your first ten minutes in fandom should tell you that it stands for 'alternate universe', ie. a story that takes place in a universe outside established canon. AUs have a million and six variations mostly thanks to tropes (I will refrain from linking TV Tropes here so that none of us lose hours of our lives in its dark maw) and the sky's the limit on interpretation, but basically there are three major terms tossed around: AU, crossover and fusion. A lot of newer fans don't know what the differences are between these terms and I'm sure some older fans have differing opinions they could throw down over, but there's a generally accepted explanation I'll work with here that'll allow us to move forward with the topic:
AU is an overarching term for all fics that exist in a universe outside of established canon, whether it's 'what if X had happened in this episode instead of Y' or 'what if characters A and B were both FLOWERS'. Crossovers and fusions are subsets of AUs and get confused really a lot because they both deal with combining two or more canons into one, eg. Star Trek and Merlin, and then basically playing 'Will It Blend?' Crossovers deal with characters from Canon A meeting characters from Canon B, as in, 'a gate team from Stargate steps through a gate and winds up on a planet with a place called Hogwarts, where they meet some kid with dumb glasses and a scar on his face'. Interaction between characters from different canons is key to the crossover's enjoyment factor. Fusions, on the other hand, have the characters from Canon A replace the characters of Canon B, wiping them out of existence and probably taking on their roles in the plot of Canon B. An example of a fusion is, 'Spock is an FBI agent working in white collar crimes and Jim Kirk is the rakish art thief he's apprehended and taken on as a CI after years of chasing; together they fight crime', which of course is the insertion of Star Trek characters into the universe of White Collar, replacing Neal and Peter and probably every other character as well with characters from Star Trek.
And naturally aside from fusions and crossovers, there are many many kinds of AUs one can write. Your only limits are your imagination, your sanity and your capacity for shame.
Ingredients of a Good AU
I could say that plot is a good thing to have locked down in an AU, because they can certainly get out of hand if you're not paying attention; I personally don't even like to start a fic until I have some idea what the ending will be like and just as importantly for me, how far away from the beginning it will be. However, plot is, generally speaking, an important component of all fics either AU or canon-compliant (unless you are writing straightforward porn and plot would just interfere with all the blowjobs and whipping), so we'll take that part as read and move down the checklist.
To my mind, characters are the biggest factor in whether your AU will be awesome or terrible. Think about it: if you take your beloved characters out of canon and plunk them into some other universe but they're not characterized correctly, then what is your reader reading? Best-case, they're reading OFic with names they recognize, which is not what they signed up for when they clicked on your fic. The characterization is what makes the story attractive as fanfic. Good characterization is the only reason that I am ever going to be compelled to read a high school AU about characters from the Justice League, and that's not because I don't like the Justice League, okay? I think they're pretty neat, with all their primary-coloured costumes, and I would be interested to know how Bats, Supes and Wonder Woman get along in the context of Algebra II and the floor hockey module in Gym but only if I can recognize them as Bats, Supes and Wonder Woman and not just some random teenagers who fit their physical descriptions and answer to their names. I live in Canada and some incarnation of Degrassi is on TV all the damn time if I want generic characters in that scenario.
That seems like a pretty basic concept, and really it is, but achieving it is another thing. What you have to do is figure out what makes your character tick before you can do anything with them. This helps with all writing exercises but is crucial for AUs. Some people advocate doing things like answering interview questions as your character to get into their heads or whatever, which is fine if you like it but I take a different approach.
TV and movie fandoms are great for this because their writers have a tendency to be kind of lazy (either that or the nature of different people writing different episodes means more basic characterizations are important to success and uniformity, what do I know, I'm sadly not in the industry); essentially what I do is figure out what archetype each of my main characters falls under to streamline the characterization process for myself. If you consume a lot of media this is pretty easy to do. Using this mindset, I can pick out important character traits that form the basis of my character's personality and I'm in business. For example, Jim Kirk from Star Trek XI is a basic Hero (debatable whether he's Willing or Reluctant depending on how you examine the movie); he is brave, brash, stubborn, arrogant, intelligent, a risk-taker, bridles under authority, has self-image issues, is loyal and thinks outside the box. Keep these traits intact in all he says and does in your fic and Jim Kirk will be a recognizable character whether he's captain of the Enterprise or a waiter in a restaurant.
The issue of alignment with the law is a tricky one and up for debate, I think. Some characters are clearly more capable of going darkside/lightside than others (I see Jim Kirk or Magneto trading sides more readily than I see Spock or Sebastian Shaw doing so) but depending on how it's done, is it possible to make a character strongly aligned to one side in canon switch to the other--as in a criminal AU, for example--without going out of character, or is that always going to be crackfic where Spock sports a goatee? Hard to say. While
leupagus was writing her Hawaii Five-0 fic This Thing of Ours, an AU in which Danny Williams was in the Mafia, we had lively debates as to whether or not Danny was OOC for being on the wrong side of the law. She thought that his good alignment as a cop in canon was crucial to his character, whereas I considered that as long as he was still a generally thoughtful and cautious person prone to occasional crazy temper and showed that loyalty to his loved ones that appears in canon, he was in the clear. On the other hand, neither one of us has a problem with the idea of Steve McGarrett being a criminal, because we both view him as the kind of character whose darker side is kept in check by social conditioning to obey the law (more or less). It's all up to your interpretation as the author and how hard you sell it, I guess.
Writing fic with good characters isn't just about getting the archetypes and major personality traits nailed down, although that is half the battle. Good characters have depth, like Mafia!Danny's conflict of alignment against the law versus his devotion to his loved ones. This is just something you learn how to add to characters with experience, though, and if you're paying attention to how you make your characters then you'll figure it out with practice if you haven't already. Observation of real human beings is the best way to add life to your characters, because real people are full of contradictions. Get used to figuring out what makes real people tick and your writing will improve accordingly as you add these same inflections to your characters.
The Art of Fusion: Will It Blend?
Fusions are ridiculously popular in the fandoms I interact with. I think we all like pop culture so much that mixing together canons we enjoy is like doing speedballs: twice the high (Note: don't do speedballs, we've lost a lot of bright sparks that way). I like writing them a lot myself, because they present an interesting challenge in trying to combine two canons into something new while keeping the charm of both.
There are a lot of bad fusion AUs on the internet that basically look like the author has transcribed the canon they took for their plot and then find-and-replaced new character names into it. These are bad for a few reasons: first, if you're going to have all the same dialogue and action that actually happened in Zombieland anyway, then why not just watch Zombieland? Second, the characters from, say, BBC Sherlock, are not the same characters as the ones in Zombieland. Name-swapping John Watson with Columbus doesn't make any sense because while they might have parallels in their personalities, they are not the same person. Columbus is a 20-something loser with OCD and is the nerdiest person to ever survive an apocalypse, while John Watson is a 30-something doctor and war vet with a jones for danger.
What it breaks down to is this: a new character in the role of Columbus from Zombieland (unless it's George-Michael Bluth) is not going to have the same personality and won't say or do all the same things Columbus did in any given situation. If you land on some really sweet parallel casting a la George-Michael, they might have mostly the same responses, but it's never going to be a find-and-replace-the-names level of character-swapping. And that's only the beginning of the challenge, because there are more characters to cast.
In your breathtakingly avant-garde (probably inadvisable) Zombieland/Sherlock fusion, is John/Sherlock going to be the main pairing? Sherlock is a little like the Wichita to John's Columbus, at least in the derision and outsmarting department, so that sort of floats. He'd make a shitty Little Rock or Tallahassee if you want to recast every Zombieland character, that's for sure. Tallahassee is a no-nonsense and abrasive bruiser, generally, so the best Sherlock character I can come up with to take his role is DI Lestrade. Little Rock is trickier. You could go the siblings route and use Mycroft. You could go the 'weak appearance' route and use Mrs. Hudson. Likely what I would do, though, is leverage Sherlock's loner tendencies and take the Little Rock character out entirely.
And that's okay. A lot of authors clearly run into trouble casting fusions when they try to find a character from Canon A to stuff into every available role in Canon B. All this creates is headaches because the more you cast, the fewer roles will have reasonable analogues and the more you get into OOC territory. Sometimes there aren't even enough characters in one canon to put in the other (eg. Zombieland has only four characters plus Bill Murray, the TV show Lost has more than ten identifiable major characters and no Bill Murray to be found, although casting him as Jacob in a fusion would be hilarious). Even if you somehow do find a situation where you have 1:1 swaps of all characters from both canons, then you have to be more careful that you're not just rehashing an identical plot again. This sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?
Well, it can be. Fusions are tricky to try and do a great job of, but that doesn't mean they're not amazingly fun anyway. Feel free to play fast and loose to make your life easier: can't find a character in Sherlock to take Little Rock's role in Zombieland? Toss her character. Just write it out completely. Have a character in Canon A with nowhere to fit in Canon B but you want to write about them anyway? Create a space for them. One character from Canon A is like two characters in Canon B? Can you combine their roles? Do it. It's okay, you're allowed. You're the one writing the fic; do whatever you want. You're only as constrained by canon as you want to be.
An actual example: I'm currently writing a fusion of the Scott Pilgrim movie with X-Men: First Class. I cast Erik as Scott and Charles as Ramona, which is the two most important characters out of the way. But what to do with all the supporting roles? Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has a lot of minor characters (the comic series has even more). X-Men has a potential cast of zillions but I mostly just wanted to use XMFC characters if I could get away with it. In the end, I cast Raven as Knives Chau, got rid of Scott's sister, combined the roles of Wallace Wells and Stephen Stills for Emma and then also combined the roles of Kim Pine and Young Neil for Hank. Other XMFC characters take on most of the other important supporting roles in the story, including Envy Adams and the Seven Evil Exes, which readers will see once I write about them. If I tried really hard, I might have found XMFC characters or other characters from X-Men canon to fill every available role in the story but not only am I too lazy to do that, Erik in XMFC doesn't really have a lot of friends. Surrounding his character in this story with the number of people that crop up in Scott Pilgrim doesn't really fit his personality. Regardless of all the casting I tweaked, the fic still reads like Scott Pilgrim because the fusion maintains the same setting, atmosphere and conflict.
And I may be a little strange (most assuredly I am strange) but I had a lot of fun figuring out what would work and what wouldn't.
Some fusions though, just won't blend. If you have to force it too much then it's probably not going to work, or at least not as a faithful fusion. The Sherlock/Zombieland example above is one such idea; not only are the characters a bit of a stretch, but the plot of the movie (going to California, breaking into Bill Murray's house, going to a theme park) doesn't seem like something Sherlock characters would do; that fic, if I wrote it, would turn into a generic zombie apocalypse AU. That is the key question--never mind whether you can find a casting fit, would the characters of your fandom even follow the plot of this story? If the honest answer to that question is no, then your fusion will probably suck and it might be time to shed a single tear and let the idea go for something else.
Once you've managed to get your fusion AU cast and you think the idea will hold water long enough to write a fic about it, just keep one thing in mind: make it your own. Put your own spin on it. The reason every fandom has more high school AUs than you can shake a stick at is that every one of them has their own style: different casting, different characterization, different conflicts, completely different angles of approach. And some people will read every single one of those AUs--even if they're based off the same movie plot!--so give those readers something fresh with your fic.
Practical Application
Let's cast and plot a fusion. I am going to develop something I've never written or thought about before and write down my thought process, and I have just decided that this is going to be a Leverage fic: the cast of Leverage fused with the movie Fight Club.
Leverage has five main characters: Nate, Sophie, Hardison, Parker and Eliot. Recurring characters include Sterling, Nate's ex-wife Maggie, Det. Bonanno of the BPD, and those two FBI agents whose names I think are Taggert and McSweeten.
Fight Club (spoiler time) is a movie based on a book that goes almost exactly the same, about a guy with a friend named Tyler Durden who first helps him start a club where dudes hit each other for fun and to let out their feelings, and later leads a guerilla revolution against the Man, like you do. They also fight over a lady named Marla who the main character met while crashing support groups during a bout of insomnia. In the end it turns out that Tyler Durden is a figment of the main character's imagination; a split personality maybe. Meatloaf plays a man named Robert Paulson and everyone is very concerned about him and his bitch-tits.
Anyway. Fight Club presents me with three main roles to cast: Tyler Durden, the nameless main character and Marla. Supporting roles to fill can include Robert Paulson/Bob, people in the support groups, people who show up to Fight Club, the main character's coworkers and the spacemonkeys of the guerilla group Tyler starts.
I personally ship any combination of Hardison, Parker and Eliot, while Nate and Sophie and their shit tend to bore me, so those first three people are going to be the main characters in this fusion. Hardison fits the main character's role the best with the whole ennui thing, Parker is a clear choice to play crazyface Marla's role, and Eliot is the Leverage Character Most Likely to Start a Violence Club, so he can be Tyler Durden. I might just leave Nate and Sophie out of this fic entirely but why not put Nate in as a member of an AA group that Hardison crashes on a sleepless night? Sophie could either be one of Hardison's coworkers or a support group member (Cancer Lady springs to mind). Taggert and McSweeten are perfect yes-men to go from the fight club to spacemonkey status. I like Bonanno best as a Bob-type sacrificial lamb character because he's kind of a big guy with a big heart, like Bob, and Hardison would be more likely to flip out over Bonanno's death than that of an asshole like Sterling. Sterling and Maggie, then, I'd just toss out of the fic.
With that settled, how does the story play out? I'm going to keep the basic plotline of Fight Club: suffering man meets figment of his imagination and develops a mancrush, meets suffering woman and falls for her, goes to Fight Club and AA and Testicular Cancer Support Group; suffering woman takes up with the exciting imaginary man and makes suffering man jealous, that whole... terrorism thing happens... things get right outta hand and then at the end, it turns out imaginary man is imaginary, suffering woman loved suffering man all along for some reason, and suffering man wonders how much he's really suffering, the end.
But how does this go with Hardison, Parker and Eliot at the wheel? How is this story interesting and fresh and new with Leverage characters? Well, let's see.
Hardison is a college grad with a lot of ennui who works by day in IT at a big company and his salary pays for a nice studio apartment, a nice computer rig and his Warcraft subscription. He can't sleep because he hates everything and is vaguely scared of it, too, and so he spends his nights on raids with people in Germany and doing some homebrew programming, nothing illegal although sometimes he toys with the notion. His therapist got tired of trying to get him to take Ambien and tells him to go to a support group to see what actual suffering looks like, and after some angry words about forefathers and slavery that he doesn't entirely feel, Hardison goes and then keeps going and then meets Parker. Parker goes to support group meetings because while she's gone through some shit, she doesn't react to it like most victims do, and the normal grief-and-suffering process of addicts and the terminally ill is fascinating to her. Hardison thinks she's fucking weird for being entertained by sadness and showing up to meetings about testicular cancer and starts avoiding her.
Then one night all his shit blows up and he winds up at the bar where he meets a white dude with a ponytail and scars on his knuckles, who says his name is Eliot and five beer later tells Hardison to hit him as hard as he can. Best friends!
After like two weeks of dodging Parker, she starts stalking him. She just wanted to know why he stopped showing up to AA because everybody apparently missed him and was worried he'd fallen off the wagon. Hardison starts dodging her again but she gets his phone number (stole his phone, called herself and then put it back) and one night while he's at the bar with Eliot before it's time for fight club, she calls and he ignores it, putting the phone on the bar and forgetting it when he goes to the bathroom. Eliot picks up the phone and talks to Parker because Hardison is a pussy.
Then shit goes off the rails and Eliot is asking Hardison if he can hack government websites while Hardison is pretty sure Eliot is fucking Parker, and the fight clubs turn into a trained militia under Eliot's command because he used to work for the government and doesn't trust them and sees the feebs and CIA everywhere because they have a 'very distinctive X'. His militia is basically living in his house by now and training all the time and Hardison suspects Eliot is wacko... events transpire, Eliot vanishes, Hardison learns he was planning to take down DHS facilities in a coordinated strike with his whole army, tries to stop it, learns Eliot is imaginary and Parker's still there even though Hardison is apparently a crazed generalissimo with DID, the plot may or may not succeed and they live, well, ever after, or for a while anyway.
And there you have it: something that is clearly the plot of Fight Club, but twisted around a little to be something new to read and to fit the personalities of the characters used in the story. (Before anybody asks me, I'm not going to actually write this fic. It's free to a good home. Call dibs in the comments, maybe, if you actually want to write it or something like it.)
Conclusion
So, this has been a bit of a guide to writing the kind of AUs (particularly fusions, what, I don't deny my biases) that people will enjoy reading, and I hope it's enlightening for at least one person looking for help out there, because then at least it'd have the same readership as my term papers. The comments are open to any discussion/argument with me about what I've said here, as well as further questions and general chat about AU-writing. If you're trying to write an AU right now and want some help, go ahead and ask! If you want to try and come up with terrible ideas for fusions, do that too! They entertain me a lot. I'm going to go back to working on the sports AU, the regency AU, and the movie fusion while letting my other AU WIPs rot until I finish something. Oh, and also: just in case, any story idea in this fic that doesn't have an associated link to an actual story came right out of my own head and so any relationship to a fic that actually exists is 100% a coincidence.
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/51290.html. (
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