on fanfic & emotional continuity
Dec. 11th, 2018 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potboyvia https://ift.tt/2C56mbB
earlgreytea68:
bigblueboxat221b:
notjustamumj:
earlgreytea68:
glitterandrocketfuel:
earlgreytea68:
meanderings0ul:
earlgreytea68:
nianeyna:
earlgreytea68:
fozmeadows:
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why - it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
This is such an awesome conversation, but I think there’s even another layer here that makes ‘fic’ its own genre. And it is the plot.
Everyone who’s experienced in reading fic has their little ‘trope plots’ we are willing to read or even prefer in order to spend time with our favorite characters. We know how it’s gonna end and we genuinely don’t care, because the character is the whole point of why we’re reading. And that is unique. That’s just not how mainstream media publication does things.
But there are also hundreds of thousands of fics people might call ‘plot driven’ and they have wonderful, intricate plots that thrill their readers.
But they’re not at all ‘plot driven’ in the same way as other mainstream genres.
The thing about ‘plot’ in fic is that it tends to ebb and flow naturally. There’s not the same high speed, race to the finish you’d get from a good action movie. There’s no stop and start of side plots you get in TV genre shows. The best fic plot slides from big event to restful evening to frantic activity to shared meals and squabbles and back, and it gives equal time and attention and detail to each of these things.
Like @earlgreytea68 said, “There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.”
Fic plot moves at a pace similar to the life of whatever character it’s about. Not the other way around. There’s a fundamental difference in prioritization in fic.
I think this only adds to the case of ‘fic’ as its own, distinctive genre. Stylistic choices of writing that would never work in traditional, mainstream fiction novels work for novel-length fic. Fic adventures spend as much time fleshing out the little moments between romances and friendships as they do on that plot twist. The sleepy campground conversations are as important to the plot as the kidnapped princess, because that’s how the characters are going to grow together by the end of the story. It’s not a grace note, it’s not a side episode or an addition or a mention - it’s integral and equal.
That’s just accepted as fact by fic writers and readers. It’s expected without any particular mention. And it gives a very unique flavor and pace to fic that makes a lot of mainstream stories feel like stale, off-brand wonderbread. They are missing something regular fic readers take for granted (and it isn’t just the representational differences, because we all know that’s a whole different conversation). There’s a fundamental difference in how ‘fic’ is written, detailed, and paced that is built on its foundations as a ‘character driven’ genre.
And it isn’t only action/adventure/mystery plots that have this difference in fic. Those ‘everybody’s human in today’s world’ AUs, those ‘friends to lovers’ slow burn stories have it too. They have a plot, but it’s the life - the grocery shopping, the dumb fights and sudden inescapable emotional blows, those moments of joy with that person you click with, managing work and family and seasons - that’s the whole plot on its own.
And that’s almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t really experienced fic as a genre, who’s used to traditional person A and person B work together/overcome differences/bond to accomplish X. In fic accomplishing X might be the beginning or the middle, not the end result of the story, and A & B continue to exist separate from X entirely. X is only relevant because of how it relates to A & B, not the other way around.
Fic is absolutely its own genre and it has a lot to do with plot. I’ve been calling this ‘organic plot’ in my head for months, because I knew something felt different about writing this way, how long fic plot ebbs and grows seemingly on its own sometimes. ‘Dual plot’ could be another option, maybe, though the character plot and life experience plots aren’t really separate. Inverted plot? Hm. I’m sure a good term will develop over time.
OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THIS.
I was always fond of saying, about my own fics, that my plots show up about two-thirds of the way through, because it takes me that long to figure out where I’m going, and then I would lol about it, because, ha, wouldn’t it be great if I organized it better.
And now I read this and I’m like, WAIT. YES. THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENING. IT’S BEEN HAPPENING ALL ALONG. I NEVER REALIZED IT. The idea that the primary importance is the throughline of the characters, and that’s what we’re following, and the plot is what’s dangling off the side of their story, that is SO IMPORTANT. You’re right, that usually we’re told as writers to construct stories from the plot outward. “Here are the beats your plot needs to hit, here’s the rising action to the climax to the falling action, now make sure your Character A makes this realization by Point X in order to get your plot into shape for Point Y to click in.” It’s *such* a plot-centric way to write and I am *terrible* at it. And I’ve always said, whenever I sit down to “outline” a story, like, How do you this? How do you know where the characters are going until they tell you where they’re going???
But it’s not that I’m “bad” at this, which is what I’ve always thought, it’s just that I’m coming at it from the opposite angle. I can’t plan the plot before the characters because I’m sticking close to the characters, and the traditional “plot” is secondary to whatever’s going to happen to them. And that’s not a wrong way of writing, it’s just a different way of writing. And it’s wrong of me to be thinking that my stories don’t get a “point” until they’re almost over. THEY’VE HAD THE POINT ALL ALONG. What happens when they’re almost over is that the characters come to where they’ve been going, and then the traditional “plot” is what helps shape the ending. The traditional “plot” becomes, to me, like that epilogue scene after the biggest explosion in an action movie, where you’re told the characters are going to be okay. I spend the entire movie telling you the characters are going to be okay, and then my epilogue scene is tacked on “oh, p.s., also they saved the day.”
There is so much here that I want to say I don’t even know where to begin. @earlgreytea68 you’re not alone. Hit me up. I’ve studied plot and structure forever. Fics are pure, uncut, internal-motivation-drives-everything storytelling and they are so very different from the monomyth that drives most commercial fiction these days that they almost have to exist in a liminal space like fan fiction. I could go on…
LET’S BE FRIENDS.
Hahaha, this is my week to just want to be Tumblr friends with everyone, all the FOB people, all the fluff people, all the fandom anthropology people, LET’S ALL BE FRIENDS.
<3 <3 <3
@earlgreytea68 and @glitterandrocketfuel and OP and everyone else who contributed - this is beautiful, and I’m saving it to read and consider again later. probably with a glass of wine or something. <3
Smart idea. ;-)
earlgreytea68:
bigblueboxat221b:
notjustamumj:
earlgreytea68:
glitterandrocketfuel:
earlgreytea68:
meanderings0ul:
earlgreytea68:
nianeyna:
earlgreytea68:
fozmeadows:
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why - it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
This is such an awesome conversation, but I think there’s even another layer here that makes ‘fic’ its own genre. And it is the plot.
Everyone who’s experienced in reading fic has their little ‘trope plots’ we are willing to read or even prefer in order to spend time with our favorite characters. We know how it’s gonna end and we genuinely don’t care, because the character is the whole point of why we’re reading. And that is unique. That’s just not how mainstream media publication does things.
But there are also hundreds of thousands of fics people might call ‘plot driven’ and they have wonderful, intricate plots that thrill their readers.
But they’re not at all ‘plot driven’ in the same way as other mainstream genres.
The thing about ‘plot’ in fic is that it tends to ebb and flow naturally. There’s not the same high speed, race to the finish you’d get from a good action movie. There’s no stop and start of side plots you get in TV genre shows. The best fic plot slides from big event to restful evening to frantic activity to shared meals and squabbles and back, and it gives equal time and attention and detail to each of these things.
Like @earlgreytea68 said, “There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.”
Fic plot moves at a pace similar to the life of whatever character it’s about. Not the other way around. There’s a fundamental difference in prioritization in fic.
I think this only adds to the case of ‘fic’ as its own, distinctive genre. Stylistic choices of writing that would never work in traditional, mainstream fiction novels work for novel-length fic. Fic adventures spend as much time fleshing out the little moments between romances and friendships as they do on that plot twist. The sleepy campground conversations are as important to the plot as the kidnapped princess, because that’s how the characters are going to grow together by the end of the story. It’s not a grace note, it’s not a side episode or an addition or a mention - it’s integral and equal.
That’s just accepted as fact by fic writers and readers. It’s expected without any particular mention. And it gives a very unique flavor and pace to fic that makes a lot of mainstream stories feel like stale, off-brand wonderbread. They are missing something regular fic readers take for granted (and it isn’t just the representational differences, because we all know that’s a whole different conversation). There’s a fundamental difference in how ‘fic’ is written, detailed, and paced that is built on its foundations as a ‘character driven’ genre.
And it isn’t only action/adventure/mystery plots that have this difference in fic. Those ‘everybody’s human in today’s world’ AUs, those ‘friends to lovers’ slow burn stories have it too. They have a plot, but it’s the life - the grocery shopping, the dumb fights and sudden inescapable emotional blows, those moments of joy with that person you click with, managing work and family and seasons - that’s the whole plot on its own.
And that’s almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t really experienced fic as a genre, who’s used to traditional person A and person B work together/overcome differences/bond to accomplish X. In fic accomplishing X might be the beginning or the middle, not the end result of the story, and A & B continue to exist separate from X entirely. X is only relevant because of how it relates to A & B, not the other way around.
Fic is absolutely its own genre and it has a lot to do with plot. I’ve been calling this ‘organic plot’ in my head for months, because I knew something felt different about writing this way, how long fic plot ebbs and grows seemingly on its own sometimes. ‘Dual plot’ could be another option, maybe, though the character plot and life experience plots aren’t really separate. Inverted plot? Hm. I’m sure a good term will develop over time.
OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THIS.
I was always fond of saying, about my own fics, that my plots show up about two-thirds of the way through, because it takes me that long to figure out where I’m going, and then I would lol about it, because, ha, wouldn’t it be great if I organized it better.
And now I read this and I’m like, WAIT. YES. THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENING. IT’S BEEN HAPPENING ALL ALONG. I NEVER REALIZED IT. The idea that the primary importance is the throughline of the characters, and that’s what we’re following, and the plot is what’s dangling off the side of their story, that is SO IMPORTANT. You’re right, that usually we’re told as writers to construct stories from the plot outward. “Here are the beats your plot needs to hit, here’s the rising action to the climax to the falling action, now make sure your Character A makes this realization by Point X in order to get your plot into shape for Point Y to click in.” It’s *such* a plot-centric way to write and I am *terrible* at it. And I’ve always said, whenever I sit down to “outline” a story, like, How do you this? How do you know where the characters are going until they tell you where they’re going???
But it’s not that I’m “bad” at this, which is what I’ve always thought, it’s just that I’m coming at it from the opposite angle. I can’t plan the plot before the characters because I’m sticking close to the characters, and the traditional “plot” is secondary to whatever’s going to happen to them. And that’s not a wrong way of writing, it’s just a different way of writing. And it’s wrong of me to be thinking that my stories don’t get a “point” until they’re almost over. THEY’VE HAD THE POINT ALL ALONG. What happens when they’re almost over is that the characters come to where they’ve been going, and then the traditional “plot” is what helps shape the ending. The traditional “plot” becomes, to me, like that epilogue scene after the biggest explosion in an action movie, where you’re told the characters are going to be okay. I spend the entire movie telling you the characters are going to be okay, and then my epilogue scene is tacked on “oh, p.s., also they saved the day.”
There is so much here that I want to say I don’t even know where to begin. @earlgreytea68 you’re not alone. Hit me up. I’ve studied plot and structure forever. Fics are pure, uncut, internal-motivation-drives-everything storytelling and they are so very different from the monomyth that drives most commercial fiction these days that they almost have to exist in a liminal space like fan fiction. I could go on…
LET’S BE FRIENDS.
Hahaha, this is my week to just want to be Tumblr friends with everyone, all the FOB people, all the fluff people, all the fandom anthropology people, LET’S ALL BE FRIENDS.
<3 <3 <3
@earlgreytea68 and @glitterandrocketfuel and OP and everyone else who contributed - this is beautiful, and I’m saving it to read and consider again later. probably with a glass of wine or something. <3
Smart idea. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-11 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 08:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 09:53 am (UTC)And YES, this is something that I've noticed, and which (unpopular opinions ahoy!) honestly bugs me about a lot of fanfics. If the canon is fleshed out enough that all that's left are the in-between spaces, I can understand wanting to fill them in with thoughtful character exploration. I appreciate it very much, when it's well-written and the characterization is on-point.
But - and this is very much a personal preference - if you take characters from an emotionally-charged canon and plop them in the middle of a coffe shop AU, I'm probably not going to read it. Not because it's badly written, or because I don't care about the characters, but because I care about the characters IN CONTEXT. I get invested in them if they are people with integrity, or especially compassionate, or clever, or just very entertaining narratively. (Looking at you, SHEEV PALPATINE. And cackling.)
How would they behave in adverse circumstances? How do their convictions clash against the world? How does the world work, and they within it? The slice-of-life moments are great for me when they set up my understanding of the characters and their relationships, behavioural patterns, ideals etc. for WHEN THEY ARE IN A DIFFICULT/UNWINNABLE SITUATION. Or even have to make a choice important to their lives, and the lives or others.
Otherwise, it's just... The epic 90% slice-of-life fics, especially if they focus on romance, do not have high enough stakes for me to get invested emotionally. In the fic itself, not necessarily the characters. At least not unless they also have fantastic style and interesting world-building outside of characterization going on for them.
Then again, I don't particularly like most positivist novels, modern "obyczajowe" (slice-of-life - is there an English literary term for it?) novels and TV dramas. It's all just "life goes on". Yes, it does, and I have enough of that IRL, I can ask for different things in my fiction. Such as, oh, the narration having a point, and the characters being capable of making important things happen. That's missing pretty much everywhere else.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 10:48 am (UTC)But for me the high concept concept has to be something I've genuinely never thought of before if I'm going to forgive a book for having flat characters in it. Otherwise I'm reading for at least one character that I love, or who intrigues me enough to need to see what they'll do next and why. And yeah, I can get that in a coffee-shop AU *if* the author has put real thought into how that character would behave in a coffee-shop.
If it's just 'insert today's fair-haired twink of choice/insert today's dark haired hunk of choice' then I'm not interested. Probably because that's a specific plot structure being re-enacted rather than an examination of my fave's deep character traits.
Ugh. I wonder if this is the reason that so much of fanfic is based on SF/F franchises? Most 'literary' canon already has that intense focus on character, but it has it without enough focus on plot. Most SF/F tends to have an intense focus on plot but sacrifices character to get it. Fanfiction is there to re-introduce a character-focus into the material that already has the good plot?
I think 'slice of life' probably is the term. Or 'literary fiction.' But it's a genre I don't know anything about, so don't take my word for it :)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 09:15 pm (UTC)Anything in-between I mostly give a pass, unless someone whose taste I trust implicitly. Life's too short for mediocre books.
Which Neal Stephenson book? Sounds promising.
You're definitely on to something. But it's not just the sci-fi fandoms - shows and books about crime, war, superheroes (I DO NOT CONSIDER THEM SCI-FI, FIGHT ME), basically anything with enough conflict/dramatic events as opposed to relationship drama actually makes people care about the characters faster, and get more deeply invested. *Then* cue the fanfic. Or at least so it seems to me.
There's also the part where a lot of sci-fi shows have the plot moving forward fast, but not necessarily make any sense, so fixing the moments of WTF can be another motivation for writing.