Fanfic, Egoboo and Character Voices

[jeriendhal]

Like every non-professional and many professional writers, I've got two factors driving my writing bug. The first is just getting the damned story out of my head and onto paper/pixels, so I can see and shape it into coherence instead of letting it float nebulously around in my brain like rest of the hundred or so story fragments I've got in there.

The second of course is the ego boost a writer gets when someone leaves feedback and you can read those magic words, "I loved this story!" Because for that brief moment you know that the idea that was once alone in your head, that you dared to commit to and release to wider world, has connected with someone. That's what makes writing (and by extension acting, medicine and other emotionally involved professions) so satisfying. For that one brief moment what you did made an emotional connection, inducing pleasure, happiness or even sorrow. There's no better feeling for a writer to know that their story was able to do that.

As a fanfic writer, there's a secondary but for my money almost equally important bit of praise you can give, that goes beyond merely pleasure, and it's the line, "You really know the characters." For me it's of paramount importance because it makes the difference between a good story and Diana Gabaldon's suggestion that all you need to do is global replace her character's names with your own. When I write Miles Vorkosigan he's not going to act like Tez, and not just because one lives in a sci-fi universe and the other a fantasy one. Likewise Sgt. Taura would never act like Maria, even if their backgrounds could be argued as being similar.

I absolutely loved writing the crossover fic A Slight Detour just because the characters were so different from each other. Leeza working with Sam Carter was neat, and writing Teal'c going into Mentor Mode with the always troubled Terinu was marvelous. But if I had changed the names around it wouldn't have been a story worth reading because the characters would have been pulled out of their respective worlds and plopped together willy nilly, and the only reaction I would have induced in the reader would have been the Eight Deadly Words. [1]

For that reason, it's for characterization's sake that I don't try to write in some worlds, because I know I couldn't capture the characters' voices and personalities properly. For example: For almost a year now I've had a story set in M.C.A. Hogarth's (haikujaguar) Kherishdar universe that's been demanding to be put down. I'm not going to write it for two reasons. For one I don't know her position on fanfic. Since I have interacted with her on LJ I feel closer to her than say Lois McMaster Bujold, and I wouldn't want to play in her sandbox without permission. Even more importantly I know I can't match her lyrical and contemplative writing style in these stories and I'd be damned fool to try. My own prose can be politely described as "workmanlike" and I don't pretend otherwise. I wouldn't be satisfied with the results and neither would any reader who has appreciated Mrs. Hogarth's original work.

I suppose in the end it's a matter of love and respect. I love and respect LMB, chaypeta and haikujaguar's worlds and characters so much that I want to play in their sandboxes. But I also love and respect them enough that I want to do it right, and not make a mockery of what they've written.

[1] "I don't care what happens to these people."

Comments

[mehhayperson.livejournal.com]

I pretty much only skim-read her first article and haven't yet really gone into the second one you linked, but I found Gabaldon's suggestion that only the writer can really do justice to the characters insulting, to be honest. If I don't understand them, why am I so emotionally attached to some people? How is it I feel connected to them, and sympathy, and anger for them? Not to mention her idea that all fanfic writers are bad - the fact that, in rare occasions, a fanfic writer becomes a regular for a show seems proof that there are some authors out there who write, and /understand/, the characters. There are two Doctor Who fanfiction authors out there that I LOVE, I can't even describe it, and their writing is fantastic and evocative, but I much prefer their fanfiction to their original fiction because they both understand the Doctor and Rose (my favourite pairing). And Martha. And Donna (also my favourite). I might love it because I'm already emotionally invested in the characters, and I am, but mostly I love it because it's THEM. Right there on my screen, the Doctor, Rose, Martha and Donna come to life again.

(Sorry for ranting. It just annoyed me a lot.)

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Regarding your first point, well, I wouldn't feel comfortable writing someone else's characters because I think I don't know them well enough to know how they'd react to new situations, no matter how much the original author's descriptions draw me in and make me feel with the characters. (And writing only situations very similar to those that came up before seems really pointless to me.)
Going from that, assuming that other people could not do my characters justice is only logical.

The main reason, which seems obvious to me, is limited access to information: About my well-developed characters I have things in my head (or maybe even written notes somewhere) that I never posted publicly, so other people cannot know about these things. I assume this is true for other authors, too.

For an example that happened to me recently when talking to a collaborative writing partner of mine: He was worried about a suggestion he had, because he guessed my character would throw a fit over it. In fact there was no problem at all, but he couldn't know because the relevant cultural and personal attitudes to the topic in question had never come up before.