Actually writing fan fiction.
In some ways it’s less demanding than conventional fiction. You’re
dealing with a known and understood world, known and understood characters,
a known and understood back-history. You don’t have to invent these
things and keep them consistent, you can step straight into a universe that’s
already been created for you. Location and appearance and characterization must
be maintained rather than developed; as a rule, anyone reading fan fiction
is already a devotee of that particular fandom, so you don’t have to
explain the differing personalities and world-views of Scully and Mulder, or
provide an explanation of exactly why Buffy and Willow have supernatural
abilities but Xander doesn’t. The game is already in progress, you can just
grab the ball and run with it.
There are two problems with the preceding assumption.
First and most important, it’s the lazy way out. Why should somebody read
your works if you don’t have anything new to offer? Why should your audience
be limited to people who already are familiar with the television show or book
series that provides the backdrop for your stories? You have to take every work
seriously if you want others to do so, which means you can’t accept the
shortcuts that have been provided for you; you need to write every story as if
for someone who has never before encountered that universe. Not only will this
expand your audience past those already familiar with the world of origin (which
may not make much difference for online fanfic, but can matter enormously if you
like to show your stuff to real, live people in your circle of acquaintances),
it will make your work better for those who do know that world.
The second problem is just the flip side of the primary advantage. You don’t
have to invent the world, that’s already been done for you … but you’re
stuck with it, even more surely than if you had created this reality yourself.
It’s fan fiction because there’s a fan base ready at hand, but they’re
as conversant with that world as you are (more so, many of them), and you
contradict their view of it at your peril. Furthermore, the characters aren’t
your characters; they’re the clay you have to work with, but some forms have
been mandated and others proscribed, and you simply don’t have the wiggle-room
that would be there for persons of your own creation.
Given all that, if you’re going to write fan fiction, there are three things
you have to do before all else. Since my own chosen venue is the world of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, I’ll henceforth frame everything in those terms.
You have this wonderful, rich tapestry of facts and history from which to
draw, and God help you if you ignore it. For instance:
These are broad and obvious examples, but minutiae can trip you up, too: for
some readers, the tiniest deviation from what they ‘know’ to be true can
kill the mood, and the story, from that point on.
Two: Know the people
Buffy’s parents divorced when she was fifteen; show them together as
a happy couple, and there had better be a good reason for it. Willow’s
father is Jewish, and she identifies herself as such, so we’re unlikely to see
her at Catholic Mass. Xander’s home life has been several times charactized as
unhappy and dysfunctional; best to avoid any idealized Ozzie-and-Harriet scenes
in the Harris household. More to the point, Oz’s hair color may change (that’s
been a running joke in several fics), but his size is constant: he’s
significantly shorter than Xander, so any physical comparison of the two would
have to recognize the disparity; by the same token, Faith is taller and has
a longer reach than Buffy, so fight scenes — or sex scenes, if you must
go there — need to take that into account. Again, stuff that may seem basic
and obvious … and again, you can’t pick and choose what’s important,
because any single thing you point to will be important to someone.
Three: Know the personalities
More stories probably stand or fall here than anywhere else. If you flub on
the history or a character’s appearance, a good beta-reader will
catch it and you can make a correction. Screw up on the personalities and
behavior of the main characters, and you’re cooked. People watch the shows and
read the stories because they like these characters; if your depiction of
them departs so far from the standard that the resemblance can’t be seen, you’re
left with diddly. Minor out-of-character behavior can be overlooked or adjusted
to (although, again, the warning about nothing being minor in fanfiction),
but Willow behaving like a devil-may-care adventuress, or Xander as
a sanctimonious goody-two-shoes, will land you in a world of
trouble.
Vital as this area is, it’s also the most problematic. To begin with, many
people write fanfic in the first place precisely so they can look at things from
a different slant. “What if Willow wasn’t such a wallflower? What
if Xander let out his dangerous side, became more of a tough guy?”
Exploring new themes is part of writing; plus, there’s what I said toward
the beginning, about the necessity of bringing something to a story beyond
the rehashing of what’s already known. Show the characters exactly as they’ve
always been shown, and you’ll be safe but unexciting; to have any development
at all, you have to go at least some distance outside the historical standard.
The answer consists of two interlinked parts: consistency, and justification.
Yes, you can show these people as different from what we’ve seen … but
different within tolerable and plausible limits, and different for a reason.
You want Willow more assertive, more daring, more active? Provide an explanation
for how she became that way, or — better yet — show her becoming that way.
(She’s in a strange town, she saves someone by having a cross in her
purse and knowing how to use it, the rescuee looks on her with awe and
expectation of more of the same; there’s a need for her to play
a certain role and she’s not being held back by her old stereotypes
because she’s in a place where nobody knows them, so she fakes it and
finds herself doing well at it and liking it, something that was already inside
her coming out under the right circumstances …) I could provide
a comparable example for Xander or Giles or anyone else, but I believe
the basic point has been made. You can get away with a lot of what
otherwise would be blasted as out-of-character inaccuracy, if you can just
show 1) this really is the person we thought we knew, but 2) there’s more to him/her than we realized. This requires that your
opening depiction of the character be recognizable and accurate, and his/her
movement from the beginning point to the ending point should proceed by
understandable and believable stages.
In a similar way, you can not only get away with, but turn to your
advantage, deliberate departures from other series basics. As an example: it was
early established that the Bronze is ‘the only club in town’ as far as
Sunnydale is concerned; one of my stories needed other places to provide
a backdrop for the action, so I offered a reason why the
conventional wisdom might not actually to be true. In the process,
I established something about the character and attitudes of my narrator.
Another example: it always seemed to me unusual and slightly unrealistic that
the Anointed One’s followers would have left Xander alive in their raid on the
library in “When She Was Bad” (Season Two opener). One fanfic writer — and, sorry, don’t
remember who or the name of the story — offered a novel explanation for
that: they didn’t leave him alive, and that’s when Xander found out
he was one of the Highlander-type immortals. At which point, to protect
himself and his friends from the consequences of his new status, he began
training in secret, meanwhile continuing to play the part of goofy, inept Xander
Harris. This is what I love to see in Buffyfic: the world we know, the
people we recognize, but more than was there before the story began.
Know, know, know. How?
How? Well, the best way is to have watched the show from the beginning (or
read all the books if it’s non-visual media). For a show, it’s pure
gold to have the episodes on video so you can review them; episode summaries and
transcripts are also invaluable, and should be seen as supplementary to, rather
than poor substitutes for, a video library. If you weren’t fortunate
enough to catch the series from the start (or close to the start), reading
summaries and lots of stories by other authors can give you some feel for the
various physical, personal, and historical basics; a beta-reader solidly
grounded in series lore will also save you a lot of grief. (Of course, you
were already going to use a beta-reader anyway, right? Right?)
Something else that can help a lot is to belong to a mailing list
of fans and/or fanfic writers. If you pick one where posting stories is
acceptable, you’re more likely to get feedback there than by most other means.
Which brings us to the next category: Feedback.
But, hey, that’s a subject big enough for another essay.
