Meme time

[trovia]

Taken from kappamaki33

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this

Comments

[trovia]

Oooh... this was a story where I'd had to think long and hard about what to write, and I was surprised in the end by how fast I got it written once I had the right idea. (I tried to write Gaeta's own graduation first but I couldn't for the life of it make it an interesting occasion. I tried for a scenario where Colonial tradition says you pick your job at the day of graduation, but I didn't have the vocabulary to make it sound sufficiently exotic.)

This was a little snippet of a fic I'd carried along with me for a long time, something I'd contemplated writing after the end of the show if the show ended in a way to make it work (which it didn't, since Gaeta died only one episode after I wrote this ficlet). It was a setting where the Colonials had found Earth, and many years had passed. The Colonials are now in charge of the space fleet of Earth and suddenly, there's a new war (a bunch of outcast Cylons attacking or whatever). A couple of the old crowd are still in the service of course... I thought of Kara and Athena being in charge of things. After all the crap he'd gone through, Gaeta had retired, not having anything to do with the Colonials anymore at all. When watching the mutiny arc, I thought maybe he was an outcast to them and a bit of a new Zarek. The first scene I had in mind was, this has all just gone down and an elderly Helo walks up to Gaeta's house to convince him to join the service again, because while everybody in the fleet still hates Gaeta, they need everybody with experience in fighting the Cylons they can get.

One problem of writing a fic like this is that you need an awful lot of original characters, and OC are always this factor which you have to handle with care. Though one thing that original characters are very good for is, they're great to describe the canon characters from the outside. So it's still about the canon characters, which will please your audience, and also it's a new POV with new input so you can make observations about those characters you might not be able to make otherwise. In my last fandom, I wrote a lot of stories in 1st person, told by original characters who were outsiders to the situation, talking of things they didn't fully understand. It was a great way of playing with the insider knowledge of the readers, of which they had plenty of course.

So I didn't have a full story but it was easy enough to write a snippet, and it was easy to think up the original characters because they weren't knew to me, and the thought of using them here wasn't. This story also plays a lot with the knowledge of the readers, using the knowledge they already have but also giving them hints of what's going on. It was easy and fun to write! And I very much went by feeling when writing this character without overthinking her much. :) I just needed somebody who'd match the pictures in my head. Also I wanted her to be from Tyrol because I'd recently grown aware that many people don't seem to know that Tyrol is a place. I thought it'd be a fun place for Galactica to set down. ;)

[millari]

Thanks for such a thoughtful response to my question.

I can count on one hand the number of OCs I've written so far in my fanfic life, and I think I mostly don't because you're right, they are quite the challenge and they can easily become an indulgence for the author that no one else cares about. Plus, they can be all this extra thinky work ;) which I don't necessarily mind, but sometimes it just doesn't seem all that worth it.

However, I like what you said about OCs being good for describing characters from the outside. This OC really shone through and seemed real, yet what she really did that was cool was tell us something new about Gaeta. We've never seen him be a mentor, or for that matter, a cranky old man, and that's really what made this snippet so intriguing and dear to my heart - imagining the slow relationship that must have developed between this spunky little girl and this tired, old soldier. It's a wonderfully economic way to tell this story too. I think you were right not to overthink her. I probably would have.