Writing live TV vs Book Canon

[meri_oddities]

When I started writing HP, there was time to write it. I had a couple of years between books. It was plenty of time to write long stories using the canon I'd been given. I had time to read, and reread the books, and get a feel for where the characters were when the book ended, also to extrapolate where they might be going

Comments

[meri_oddities]

The recent hiatus has been so annoying!

Heh. I breath a sigh of relief when I get a minute to sit down and think about the source material. As a writer, I can only tell you that getting the details right is important to me. If I get Jossed once it's written, I'm okay with that, but I have a hard time finishing a story that is now out of date.

And I tend to write long stories that take a while to be published. It's sort of hard to be looking at a few months worth of work going down the drain. *g*

[kaiz]

I'm of the "Long Live the A/U" school of TV fandoms! Since most of the time I'm writing slash, it's not like that is going to show up in the canon anyway, so I figure that pretty much everything else is up for grabs too. *g*

Plus, I really like to read stories that diverge from canon, so as a reader, I never mind when an episode Josses a story premise. In fact, I like to see how things might have been different in the who if only Major Event X hadn't happened. Which is what Jossed fic reads like to me after the fact.

[meri_oddities]

I like to see how things might have been different in the who if only Major Event X hadn't happened.

I'm so stuck in canon from my years in HP, I find it hard to even consider working on that much of an AU. And it's funny, I used to write AU. But now, I think that I'll be getting some detail wrong.

I've got two major story plots in SPN and I feel like I'll be Jossed before I can even start.

You are right about slash, though, not even close to canon. But on the other hand, I cringe when a writer gets the details of HP canon wrong. Not as much if they were right at one point, like Sirius being alive in an old story, but still, I notice it.

[destina]

I pretty much just write what I want and if it turns out AU, so be it. I had the same problem with SG-1. The destruction of Abydos made maybe three of my stories instantaneously jossed, so. Been there, done that, got the sand fleas. *g*

[meri_oddities]

Yeah, sand fleas. *sigh*

I think my first story will be *cough* het *cough* with a OFC. I'm not sure I'll show it to anyone.

[destina]

Hey, I posted MY het OFC story. You can post yours, too. This fandom is pretty friendly towards them. *g*

[meri_oddities]

I have that story bookmarked to read! I probably will post it. *g*

[rexluscus]

When I was reading in "X Files" fandom, around season 4-5, I found people doing a few different things

[rexluscus]

I forgot one:

6) Stories that weren't necessarily AU because they didn't really have any bearing on the ongoing storyline of the series. These could easily be written during a spate of "monster of the week" episodes, or maybe they just wouldn't be affected one way or the other by new revelations. You could always count on Mulder and Scully to be investigating some paranormal phenomenon, regardless of what they'd learned about the conspiracy. Often these were gen. These always ran the risk of being jossed but were usually safe, since you could just assume they happened between episodes in the third season or something and nothing new would really contradict them. "Supernatural" might not be able to have these yet, though, if very little has been revealed about the main characters. It could, though, if the story didn't really get into anything about the characters' backgrounds etc. and thus contained nothing that could be contradicted.

[meri_oddities]

Stories that weren't necessarily AU because they didn't really have any bearing on the ongoing storyline of the series.

That is actually a good idea. I'm not sure how it would work since all of my stories end up wanting to be in the timeline. Also, I could set it after the series finishes, and then that might work unless I say too much about what happened.

[rexluscus]

Yeah, it's tough to...just not get into stuff. :) I mean, you want the story to get to the hearts of the characters and how can you do that if you're just operating on a superficial level? So yeah, it's tricky. :-/

[twistedchick]

In Highlander, I picked which season to set things in and didn't worry if it went AU after that (but to some degree almost everything in HL is AU to some degree after season four.) In X-Files, the little I wrote was Jossed a few times, but still fit relatively well.

I think it depends on what kind of fiction you're working on. If it's deeply character-based, with an internal POV, it has a better chance of surviving series changes, maybe. Also, there is always time between episodes -- the canon time of a show is very seldom exactly an hour an episode or seven days between. So there should be time to fit a few stories in without going outside canon.

[meri_oddities]

I think it depends on what kind of fiction you're working on.

That of course, is the problem. I can't do deep characterizations since we don't have that deep a knowledge of the characters yet. We've got a season and a half. It's not enough to really know what's going to happen with them. I mean, yes, you can extrapolate broken Dean pretty well, but you don't know what other things haunt him. I just feel like i don't know them well enough yet.