Fan Fiction, part 3

Last week I talked about how I overcame my distrust and dislike of fan fiction enough to recommend writing it as a good exercise for beginning writers. The argument was, much of what beginning writers struggle with--character, worldbuilding, and so forth--are done for you. You can think about character and setting without having to invent character and setting.

One problem writing fan fiction does not solve is poor pacing. In fact, terribly slow pacing is one of the biggest problems I've seen in the fan fiction I've read. It seems like the writers love these characters so much, they'll draw out every scene as long as they can, and have long dialogues that do nothing useful from a story perspective.

So how can fan fiction help a beginning writer learn pacing? By modifying the concept a bit. Instead of writing a new adventure featuring your favorite characters, why not turn an existing story into prose?

Try this sometime. Take an episode of your favorite TV show, or a portion of your favorite movie, and turn it, scene for scene, line for line, into prose. Write down all the dialogue exactly. Describe what the characters are doing exactly. All you're changing is the storytelling medium.

Of course, that's a huge change, because TV is visual and auditory. We've all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, let me tell you, if you're taking a 24-frames-a-second movie and turning each frame into 1,000 words, you're going to need 24,000 words to describe EVERY SECOND of the original. And that's just wrong.

Filmed stories give you a ton of details that don't matter all that much because the camera can't fail to record anything in its field of vision. If Buffy the Vampire Slayer enters a living room, you'll see the exact color of all her clothing and whatever else she's wearing. You'll see the carpet, the drapes, the size and color and position of the couch, whether the living room has one or several lamps, which lamps are on, how bright they are, what their shades look like, whether there are bookshelves, how many books are on each shelf... and all that information is present immediately.

Do you have to describe all that in your prose version? No, but I've seen people try. And their stories are harder to get through than root canals. 

Here's a piece of advice I've been giving for several years now, and I keep giving it because a few beginners have told me it's some of the best advice they've ever received. Here it is:

Write what matters, not what happens.
 

When Buffy enters the room, don't bother telling us whether her left foot or her right foot stepped on the rug first unless that information matters to the story. In a TV episode, you can't help seeing which foot hits the floor first when she enters, if the camera shows her legs as she's walking. That information doesn't matter, but it takes no time to show that extra information, so letting the camera record it doesn't slow the story down. In prose, every word takes time to read. Don't make readers waste time reading whether her left foot or right foot hit the floor first unless it matters.

So does any detail matter about how Buffy enters the room? Maybe. What's her mood like? Is she cautious or is she racing into the room? Is she saying anything as she enters? Sometimes these details add more to a story than the time to read them takes away, and sometimes they don't. 

Turning a comic book, TV episode, movie scene, or play scene into prose is a terrific exercise for a beginning writer because it forces them to examine every piece of information in the original source, and ask whether it matters to the story's purpose. If it does, you find a way to describe it or evoke it in prose. If it does not, then you leave it out. Learning to leave out story elements that don't matter to the story is the single most valuable technique for improving a story's pacing in any medium.

Go back to the idea of the bookshelves Buffy's walking past in my earlier example. They're filled with books, right? So, do you think the show's writer and director said, "Make sure the first book on the first shelf is slightly taller than the second, but slightly thinner than the third, and a bit darker in color than the fourth..." No. The writer or director said, "There are old, well-bound, dusty books on the shelves. The books look expensive, maybe even historic, but they haven't been read in a while." That's the information the set designers had to work with, and that's the information that might go into your prose... if the bookshelves can play an important role in the story, such as setting a mood, or relating to a key plot point.

No matter how experienced a writer you are, if you've never tried to write a prose version of a non-prose story, you've missed out on a great writing exercise. I strongly recommend it to anyone with fewer than five short story sales to their credit, and frankly, it's don't think it's a complete waste of time unless your fiction is winning literary prizes.

Fan Fiction, part 2

Last week, I talked about my personal, and to some degree irrational, bias against fan fiction. I don't like having irrational biases, so I've worked on finding positive uses for fan fiction. I've concluded that beginning writers may want to start writing fan fiction, on the condition that these writers are serious about improving their fiction skills. I can also say I don't remember ever hearing or reading any writing instructor suggest using fan fiction in the way I'm about to, so as far as I can tell, my advice here is original.

A beginning writer attempting a complex story--especially a story set in any world that is not pretty much the same one the reader lives in--has a lot of work to do. The world has to be introduced, characters have to be introduced, some kind of problem has to be introduced... it's a lot to grasp for someone just starting out.

Fan fiction does a lot of the work for you. Let's say you're going to write a fanfic episode of the now-finished TV show Eureka from the Sci-Fi channel. (Oops, I mean "SyFy" channel--don't get me started.) Your setting is pre-made: a town full of genius scientists, most of whom are weird in some way. Your characters are set and you've got a broad range to choose from. Your plot is half-set; virtually every Eureka episode is about Sheriff Carter and his allies trying to solve a mystery caused by one or more crazy experiments that have gone wrong. And best of all, since fan fiction is written by and for fans of an existing fictional world, all your readers will already know this world, these characters, and this kind of plot. So look at all the work you will not have to do! You don't even have to describe what these people look like, if you don't want to. Your readers already know. All you have to focus on is your story, which is the fun part.

And yet...

If you take this exercise seriously, and show your fanfic to cooperative fans of the show, then readers will complain if your version of the show's characters don't act right. If you get basic facts wrong, you'd better be clear you're writing some kind of alternative version of the show or you'll get negative reactions, too.

Fan fiction, when taken seriously, forces writers to think about their characters and the story's world. You have to constantly ask questions like, "How would Sheriff Carter react if...", and "Does that really sound like a line of dialogue Jo Lupo would say, especially that early in the morning?"

Nor can you ignore tone. Does your Eureka episode read more like an episode of The X-Files? Eureka isn't that creepy/paranoid/dark. Does it read like Law & Order? Now you're being too procedural and probably not weird enough.

Fan fiction can be a great exercise for writers who struggle with worldbuilding, character development, getting different characters' dialogue to sound different, and tone. And probably some other things.

On the other hand, it won't help with pacing, an area where most fan fiction is especially dreadful. The fanfic I've forced my way through generally wastes page after page describing events and scenes of no importance to the story. If you're on page 20 of your Eureka story and nothing strange has happened yet, you're doing it wrong. 

Next week, I'll tell you how I think fan fiction can help you improve your pacing. But for now, have fun with this link, in which Kate Lawrence pokes fun at some of the worst excesses of fan fiction's fringes. (You'll need to scroll down a bit; there are ads at top.) Articles like hers make me feel my irrational dislike of fan fiction might not be quite so irrational after all.

Fan Fiction, part 1

For a long time, I've held such a strong bias against fan fiction that I've felt it had to be irrational. Fan fiction has never done me any harm, so why does it make me cringe? Because so much of it is wall-to-wall bad writing? Sure, that's part of it, but there's more. So first, I'll explain my personal bias against fan fiction, then I'll show how I've come to appreciate fan fiction as a great tool for learning how to write better. (Seriously.)

FanFiction.net holds, thoroughly classifies, and cross-indexes over four million pieces of fan fiction, nearly none of which would qualify as well-written enough for On The Premises even if we accepted fan fiction, which we don't. (The exact number of stories is difficult to determine; see this article if you're interested.) And that site holds only the fan fiction that would be rated "R" or less if it were a movie. I can't figure out how to estimate the number of X-rated fan fiction pieces there are on the Web, but I'd be willing to be there's at least one X-rated piece for every piece that isn't.

I've started reading a few of these stories. Generally I get about three sentences into them before the editor in me cringes.

That's a reason to dislike individual pieces of fan fiction, but a terrible reason to dislike fan fiction itself. That's like saying all TV is garbage because you were repelled by one episode of one show. Fan fiction is a medium unto itself and to say "I don't like fan fiction" is like saying "I don't like novels" or "I don't like jazz." Surely there's some example of the medium I'd like?

Well, sure. Good writers trying hard to write well and choosing to use pre-existing characters in a pre-existing fictional world can produce stories I admire. I've seen a few. 

My problem with fan fiction is that virtually none of it is written by anybody who cares whether they're writing well. And that's okay if you're a young enough writer. Nobody expects a 12-year-old to produce literature. (Though I remember being a 12-year-old who thought, at the time, he was trying his hardest to produce literature, but that's another story). I do, however, expect people to want to improve, and to understate things, I get the sense that "learning how to write better" is not the point of most fan fiction. (cough wish fulfillment cough)

I used to be a serious jazz saxophonist, which means at one point I was a total beginner. I remember thinking even as a little kid in fifth-grade band that it was silly for adults to come listen to me and my bandmates play in our first ever live performance, because by any objective standard we were terrible. In other words, even back then, I was embarrassed at my lack of skill. Years later, I felt a lot better about playing for audiences when I knew I could produce music that adults didn't have to make apologies for. ("They're just kids! Clap, dear.")

(That raises a separate point--it's very hard for many adults to learn how to do anything complex well, like writing or playing a musical instrument or a speaking a foreign language. Adults are used to being pretty good at most things and it's embarrassing to realize that you may be 50 years old but when it comes to the guitar, you may as well be six, you're so bad at it. You have to put your pride aside and be willing to be very bad for a long time, or you'll never be very good. Many adults get embarrassed and quit, rather than struggle through the "I suck at this" phase. Which is a shame.)

Anyway, the point is, I've always demanded high quality output from myself and it grates on my nerves that so many fan fiction writers don't. They don't care, their (quite small) audience doesn't care... it bugs me. At least when I was a terrible writer, at some level, I knew I was terrible and I wanted to get better. Everybody starts out terrible, but no one has to stay that way, and I have issues with people who are proud to stay that way. 

But that's my problem, not theirs. Furthermore, I've come to believe that fan fiction can be a tremendous tool for teaching those serious few how to improve their writing skills, because in fan fiction, a lot of what's hardest about writing fiction is done for you. That'll be the subject of the next couple of posts. In the meantime, I welcome feedback from people who are true fans of even the worst-written fan fiction, because I enjoy hearing from smart people who disagree with me.