Fan Fiction Writing Meme

[valyssia]

Note: I considered taking the silly little story I wrote for this and turning it dark. There were so many places it could go. Secret military testing of biochemical agents designs specifically to demoralize the most recent sect of brown people to have earned our ire. Suggestions aversion of therapy as a potential avenue for the town’s people to explore.

I decided to leave it goofy. It’s better that way.

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Questions 6 - 10

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6.	When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
	Well, I write femslash, so… Huh. You folks can do the math. I do like male characters. I relate to them well. Though, I don’t really believe that portraying one gender is more difficult than portraying the other. Not really. It’s just that I can’t get past the boy parts. I’m not a fan. Me writing het sex is laughable. It reads like a parody. I enjoy telling stories with romantic and sexual content, so I tend to stick with the ladies. But that’s totally funny too because I don’t relate to ‘being a girl’ very well. I’ve spent more time researching clothes and makeup and girly bullpoop for my stories than I’ve probably spent on any other topic. I’m a very plain person. I don’t wear makeup. I typically dress in gym clothes because they’re comfy. My idea of doing my nails involves getting out a pair of clippers. To me doing my hair is as simple as putting the annoying stuff back with a hair tie. I know. I’m just sad. But then, none of you have to date me, so… Because of this weakness, I set a goal for an upcoming story. Not doing something well irks me. I have a place where a romantic heterosexual relationship is going to be demanded by the plot. I had planned to sweep most of the sexual content under the cut scene. I’ll include some it if I can pull something artful out of it and meet my criteria of developing the plot as a result of sexual contact. I still refuse to write sex just for the sake of sex. It has to influence the plot. Anyway, I’ll give it a shot. You guys could use a laugh, right?
7.	Have you ever had a fic change your opinion of a character?
	Absolutely. Buffy. I started off just not really relating to her. I understood her motivations well enough, but the way she did things was kind of alien to me. I’ve never had that level of confidence. I get that other people do, but it just isn’t me. And there’s this fine line to my mind between pure arrogance and self-assurance. She flirted with that line a lot. But whatever. As the series progressed, her pity party hit levels that I just couldn’t abide. I found her irritating. I wanted to choke her. I watched that progression from beginning to end a few times and that opinion really settled in. And it’s not that I didn’t have any sympathy for her. It’s just— Yeah. She started blathering about cookie dough and I really wanted to choke her. Writing is the process of putting yourself in another person’s shoes and attempting to extrapolate how they view the world. They have X, Y and Z experiences that relate to this circumstance. They would recall which of those things? How would those things influence them? How would the events make them feel based on those influences? I really don’t think that there are ever hard and fast answers to those questions. People react based on how they feel in the moment. Sometimes we have seemingly endless well of patience. Other times we can’t muster patience to save our lives. We’re cold and hungry. We’re warm and contented. We’re somewhere in between. Sometimes we just really, really, really need to pee. And those are just a few base physical influences. There are hordes. It’s a thing. A very human thing. So as I observed Buffy and extrapolated honest responses, I came to appreciate her. I developed sympathy for the lot she was dealt. What would Buffy do? *snickers* In doing that for a million words or so, I evolved the character. I grew her into something that is uniquely mine. And I fell in love with her. The change in me has been so complete that I started off believing that Sarah Michelle Gellar was an average woman. I didn’t think she was ugly, but she just didn’t do much for me. Now I think she’s very pretty. I found the thing that everyone else was talking about in the late nineties. I thought they were all mad, but now I see it.
8.	Do you write original characters? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues. Explain your thoughts on original characters.
	Of course I write original characters. On the topic of Mary-Suedness, let’s look at a couple of Joss’s characters. Here’s a fun example: She’s a god…a time warping Hell God with blue hair and too blue eyes. She kicks the crap out of anything that gets in her way. Her name is Illyria. In Joss’s mythology Old Ones like Illyria are drawn directly from the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. Illyria begins life as Winifred Burkle, a small town girl of humble means. She goes to the big city because she’s a genius. Her field of expertise is theoretical physics. As a result of her affiliations in college, she is sucked into a portal and imprisoned in a hell dimension, dog collar and all. The hero of the story rescues her and she is smitten. He very politely spurns her advances. She’s something of a loon upon returning to this plane. Imagine that. She damsels quite nicely for several seasons. She is shy, awkward and nerdy to the extreme. Her friends call her Fred. Fred becomes the object of two primary character’s affections before she is reduced to a ‘shell’ by Illyria. Wesley, a character who passes from one Buffyverse series to another, resulting in a run of six or seven years in canon, is decimated by the loss. The levels of angst generated by Fred’s not-quite-passing rival Romeo and Juliet in the category of romantic tragedy. Not poking fun. I actually think that’s true. Another example: She’s a little geek girl with all of the quirks of the trope. She begins playing with magic. Over a period of several years she becomes addicted. The magic consumes her. Stricken by grief at the loss of her lover, she attempts to bring about Hell on Earth. She is thwarted by a dear friend who tells her a sentimental story about her childhood involving a yellow Crayon. Her humanity is touched and thereby restored. She begins her plight with auburn hair. She dyes it various shades of red some of them vibrant. Her hair and eyes turn black when she’s magically possessed. Her hair turns white when she does something very, very good. She is said to be ‘the most powerful witch in the western hemisphere.’ Her magical hat tricks are used to bail her people out of countless impasses. When the writers paint themselves into a corner, she’s their go-to character. She’s powerful enough to teleport a Hell God into the upper atmosphere. To balance that, they write several humorous episodes about her magic going ‘floopey.’ Her name is Willow, but her closest friends call her Will. In the comics Will can fly and teleport at whim. WOOT! Oh, and both of these characters are plainly gorgeous, even by Hollywood standards. I see the bar as being somewhat lowered by the standards of Joss’s universes. The extremely abnormal is normal. What I do is look for balance. I create a fairly detailed history for the character, usually in my head. Why write things down if you don’t need to? A truly amusing thing about me…I can track countless characters and multiple story arcs down to subtle shifts in plot, but I can’t remember the name of someone I met five minutes ago in real life. I really am brain damaged. It’s sad. Anyway, I ask myself how they got to the point they’re at—the point that I need them at for them to be effective in my story. I extrapolate a reasonable path that would’ve led them there. That’s my idea of a history. It works for me. I usually pull physical attributes out of the air. They’re often based on stereotypes or to some degree on people I’ve met. I almost never go for plain. The Buffyverse isn’t a place for plain. My point is that I create characters to fulfill the needs of the plot. The term Mary Sue is about wish fulfillment. It’s about writing yourself into a story, or creating an overpowered character to live out some fantasy. Mary Sue happens when the author overrides the plot. The way I work mostly precludes any Mary Sue elements. The last two original characters I created were for Crimes. One of them is Buffy’s housemate. Her presence in the story is only felt because she’s very ill. She’s someone that Faith and Buffy care for. This is a point of curiosity for Faith, but she’s got enough going on that any questions as to why slip by the wayside. The second character was created to fill a need. And that wasn’t to make the end of the story fall neatly into place. Some of you might think that, but that’s not the case. ‘Yes,’ she does get the girls where they’re going with great efficiency, but that’s just a side effect. She’s there to ease a couple additional situations that will occur later down the line. The first character I described a few times through Faith’s eyes, but really very little time is wasted on her. She’s a shadow in the background that occasionally passes over the primary character and the primary effect character. More time actually goes to the second character and that’s because Faith is curious about her. She spends a fair bit of time sizing her up. That’s how I measure how a character is described. How curious is the primary character about them? If he or she doesn’t care or is distracted, then the descriptions get really vague. Seems like a fair gauge to me. My very first original character developed out of this premise: what if a vampire existed who was for all intents and purposes self-made. That sounds like what Ford was attempting to do, but it isn’t. This character abducts, subdues and forces and vampire to turn her by exsanguinating herself to feed him, and then feeding from him. Why would anyone do that? The answer I came up with was grief…to exact revenge for a loss. That said, I have Mary Sued a character. I sure didn’t mean to. It was stupid. So stupid I didn’t even see it. What I wrote was deeply personal. I was creating a back story for a minor canon character that didn’t really have one and I gave them a history of sexual trauma to explain the more heartless parts of their nature. It was so subtle, but the story related directly to me. Those parts were removed. Lesson learned. Moving on.
9.	Pairings. For each of the fandoms from day two, what are your three favorite pairings to write?
	Buffy and Faith never really spoke to me as a couple, not like Willow and Buffy did. I started off wanting to put Buffy and Willow together because they were such a hoot on the show. They played off of each other so well. For me it was about who the characters were. I appreciate that a percentage of ’shipper fiction is about how a couple looks together. And that’s fine, but I looked at how their personalities meshed. They really are kind of built for each other. Crimes was actually something that I conceived because of the popularity of the pairing. I had issues with making the relationship work. There were stretches in their base personalities that would have to occur in order to facilitate the pairing. I’m so happy I took that leap. Playing with Faith has been incredibly rewarding. Gosh, this asks for three… Another pairing I’ve written? Uh… I really can’t talk about it without spoiling things to come. Suffice it to say that if two characters come together because the plot compels it, I don’t fight it. I just write.
10.	Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?
	Not really, ‘no,’ on all counts. The one place I’ve really gone outside my comfort zone is the one time I tried to write intimacy between two heterosexual characters. I swear I’ll try to get better. But I’ve already discussed that, so I’m gonna digress a little.   It’s a beautiful, sunny, summery day in East Hoboken, Misery. Traffic has been diverted from the town square and the area is alive with activity. You’d think at first glance that this might be due to a festival of peach, or apple, or corn, but you’d be wrong. A glittering cloud of fine powder rains over the crowd. As the sunlight catches it, it refracts the many colors of the rainbow. The lawns, buildings, streets, trees, and even the people shimmer with it. Curious, the town’s people appear to be coping poorly with something so lovely. Some wear dust masks, others have bandannas or scarves tied over the lower haves of their faces and still others hold their mouths and noses in an effort to not breathe the stuff in. A distinguished, older gentleman steps through the courthouse doors. As if to calm the crowd, he’s taken no such measures. The instant the people spot him, a chaotic clamor of voices rises up. He calls for order, “Attention folks! Attention! May I please have your attention?” He raises his voice, shouting to be heard, “You must remain calm!” The agitated mob drowns him out, so he places his index fingers into his mouth and whistles. The shrill sound gets their attention. A hush blankets the crowd. The man straightens his tie and smoothes his suit coat before he speaks, “As you all know, there was an accident last night.” He paces himself to allow time for a team of uniformed officers to exit the building. “Due to architectural defects an explosion has devastated the fairy dust factory in West Kumquat Ill-an-noise.” The officers setup a parameter, pushing the crowd back. “Prevailing winds have carried the dust over our fair city. It seems highly probable that most of you were contaminated.” Panic ensues. The mob presses in, but the man and the officers stand their ground. When order is restored, the man continues, “Now there’s no cause for alarm. It has been determined that homosexuality is not a disease or a mental illness. Many people who are afflicted go on to lead fairly normal lives. And in some places—not many—they are even allowed to get married and have families. Unfortunately, Misery isn’t one of them, so you may want to consider moving.” Question after question is asked, becoming a cacophony. The man raises his hand, waiting patiently until silence is had. “Your patience is appreciated,” he says. “Avery down at Sullivan’s Hardware and June at The Corner Diner have both agreed to distribute information packets to all concerned.” As the man turns from the crowd, he concludes, “Thank you and have pleasant day.”   Nothing reads cheesier than an AU where all of the key characters are gay. It’s just… Meh! …wish fulfillment at its most hokey. C’mon, roughly ninety percent of the population is straight, people. Statistically you’re seriously skewing the odds. But that’s the thing about slash and femslash authors, we tend to take characters who are portrayed as straight or primarily straight in canon and say, “you’re a lesbian,” or “you’re gay.” We wave our magic wands and ‘poof’ the hero or heroine of the story becomes as queer as a twee dollar bill. Another wand wave and we have a couple. That’s the very definition of Mary Sue. Now honestly, I see some truth as well as some wisdom in the premise that everyone is just a little bit bisexual. Some people more than others, but very few people are stringently straight. And most of the people who are are put off for religious or social reasons or both. Or they find nature of the sex acts yucky. “You want me to do what with my…? What? No!” There’s room to play the percentages and make a story seem natural, but putting a same sex couple together that has potential for anything more than a one-night-stand or some sort of sustained tryst takes work. You have to be willing to play to extremes because extremes are required to break a pattern that is firmly established in canon. I’ve played to a ton of them. Most of my stories are radical divergences from canon. I’ve also sprinkled fairly dust and waved my wand. Those stories are far less satisfying to me. Making the improbable happen is so much more appealing. I enjoy it. My A.T.S. AU is seriously pushing the limits of what is plausible, but I’ve couched part of that in Buffy being out of her mind. She’s needy in a big way. She goes to Willow, who feels like a sure thing because she’s a lesbian and most probably attracted, and is summarily shut down. That part’s actually beautiful. Willow believes that she’s going to become the feel-good thing of the moment. Being used like that just sucks, especially when it’s by someone you love. The problem with A.T.S. is that I have two primary female characters who are exploring their sexuality. That’s not impossible, but it is improbable. I’m walking a tightrope with the plot. Making that feel natural isn’t going to be easy. And there’s Dawn. She’s been away at college experimenting too. If I fall, don’t be surprised.

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Comments

[tennyo-elf.livejournal.com]

Totally get the thing about being girly, I try too, but in the end I just don't care. It doesn't help I have a husband and he doesn't care either (mostly).

I sometimes relate better to guys too, but I guess that's because I'm a total tom boy.

It's OK though, I don;t think women should always fit the mold society has put on us to be a girly girl 24/7.