FAM #01
The Fanfiction Ask Meme, which I got from cornerofmadness (but she got it from trobadora, who likewise credits
naye, who cites something from Tumblr).
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What made you start writing fanfic?
I’ve told versions of this one before, but here goes again.
My fanfic ‘career’ came in two cycles. The second - how the world came to know me - began in 1999, after I purely by accident in late 1998 discovered this thing called ‘fanfiction’ on the internet when I was looking for additional fan-type-stuff about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I had been unwillingly divorced for a year and a half, I was working two jobs and trying to grit my way through postgraduate study, and seeing my kids every couple of weeks; Buffy was something I shared with them, just as a thought at the beginning and more and more as we found that we all did, in fact, actually like it.
In my own turn, I found I really liked fanfiction. I was enraptured to discover that this world existed, people creating their own versions of, or perspectives on, the characters and situations we so enjoyed. Much of the material was awful, but not all, and some of it was really good and a lot of it was exciting and thought-provoking. I followed it, found new sites, sifted through the dross to find the good ones and then followed the recommendations of people whose taste I had learned to trust …
… and then, on one site, I ran across a contest for new fic, and the thought came to me instantly, unsummoned but unresisted: Heck, I could do a lot better than some of the stuff I’ve been seeing.
The result was “ Point of Focus”, which ultimately didn’t even qualify for the contest because it came in over 13,000 words and their limit was 10,000. That started me off, though, and I’ve been going ever since.
But, as I said, that was the second phase. The first began much earlier, before the term ‘fanfiction’ came into existence and even before there was an operating internet. I had a girlfriend. She had a cousin, visiting from California, who we opportunistically paired with my younger brother. Their relationship, though ultimately as unsuccessful, lasted longer than mine. The cousin had friends. Some of the friends wrote self-insertion fan stories, ranging all over various fandoms (from Alias Smith and Jones clear through the Funky Phantom) but centered primarily on the original Star Trek, which even then had been in syndication for considerably longer than it had ever been on prime-time.
I was sent a copy of one of those stories. I was inspired, and turned out a reply that - while the actual writing wasn’t that bad - was so thematically horrendous that I’ve never let even my own children see it. That was just the beginning, though, and I used it as a springboard for more. Following the template that had been laid out for me, all of them (except for one which, instead of me, featured my youngest brother) were blithely unapologetic self-insertion fics: me on the Enterprise, me in a comic-book world which I had created along with that same youngest brother, me and some rowdy friends raising hell in a barbarian world of my own devising, me and the youngest brother and a real-life popular singer of that time and my college judo team, finding ourselves dropped into the middle of Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II (oh, yes, Mariette Hartley with two navels) … it was a blast, and done strictly for fun, and at the same time I got a heck of a lot of writing practice on things that I didn’t agonize over because it was all done purely for self-entertainment. (For one thing, that was where I discovered that I love doing fight scenes, and that I’m not too bad at it.)
My interest in those pursuits faded out before I ever finished the ideas that had come to me. (Example: a multi-part story that would have combined the sci-fi classic “Highways in Hiding”, time travel, reincarnation, 1970s small-town caper hijinks, the Old West, ninjas, steampunk-level genetic engineering, and the Bride of Frankenstein. Yes, I had it worked out in my mind, but moved on to other parts of my life without ever writing it.) Nevertheless, the foundation had been laid, and when Buffy came along, it was all the spark I needed to throw myself into massive effort that produced nothing of any worth beyond my own pleasure and that of the ridiculously small coterie of people who found my scribblings worth paying attention to.
I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
Still to come:
Which of your own fanfics have you reread the most?
Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.
Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?
You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?
Name three stories you found easy to write.
Name three stories you found difficult to write.
What’s your ratio of hits to kudos?
What do your fic bookmarks say about you?
What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?
What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?
For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?
Name three favorite characters to write.
You’re applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?