Meme answers
Aug. 28th, 2014 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamySo here are some answers to the questions asked by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sunclouds33, slaymesoftly, rbfvid and brutti_ma_buoni:
A. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.
Hmmm. I'd say on average, it's a oneshot fic with either Willow or Faith as protagonist, based either around existential dread and guilt, or around a premise so silly that they have to play it straight if they want to survive. Whichever it is, it'll contain on average
0.43 Bob Dylan references
1.12 more-or-less veiled comments on canonical events in which characters faced similar issues
1 pun
0.69 completely gratuitous sexual references
1.82 lines of dialogue intended to be very ambiguous
0.31 situations intended to critique somethingorother in canon or real life, or at least look at it and go "...huh."
0.14 references to other films/series the actors have appeared in
0.22 crossovers with other 'verses, noticeable or not.
B. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
I don't think I've ever written time travel fic. (Well, not in the Buffy fandom.) Huh. You know, that's not a bad idea.
C. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?
Sure. I... never got A/B/O, for instance. Not a problem with those who do like it, I just sort of never saw the point of it. All human AUs and RPF don't (usually) grab me either. I'm sure there are others. For the most part, though, it's more that those plots don't interest me than that I find them SICK AND WRONG. Anything can be written well if it's well-written, IMO.
D. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
Two or three, which may or may not pan out. One of them is Spike/Angel or William/Angelus, set both immediately after the events of "A Hole In The World" and a while after William's siring, on the subject of Silence. How would newly-vamped William, grown up in a quiet London home, react to the noise of the East End and to the palpable silence of the countryside (vampire hearing can hear Nothing) and then contrast that with the moments after letting Fred die, stumbling out of that tree into the quiet foggy night? I'm still not sure how to fit it together, but I have some lovely scenes that I need to write down. I always love fic that remembers how old these characters are, how the world has changed, and yet hasn't.
E. Share one of your strengths.
I like to think I'm good at combining comedy and seriousness. IMO, all good tragedy has a sense of humour, and all good comedy has a core of gravitas. Pretty much any fluff or crackfic I've ever written, there's probably a moment in there somewhere that would fit right into a serious tearjerker fic, and pretty much any solemn character piece will have some ironic twist or cosmic joke. Humour doesn't necessarily mean gags; it's a way to point out the unexpected, the ridiculous, the unavoidable, the on-second-thought horriffic - y'know, the things that make good drama.
F. Share one of your weaknesses.
Easy: long-term planning and execution of said plan. Most of my attempts at longer fic have gone off the rails at one of two points: either I realise that I have no idea where a fic is going and it ends with the characters standing around, looking at their watches and waiting impatiently for me to tell them what to do; or I do know where a fic is going but just can't be arsed to write all the boring stuff that needs to happen for that neat ending to be justified.
M. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?
Kurt Vonnegut once summed up 8 basic rules of writing. I don't always live by them but this one is spot on: "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water." Any good story, especially when you're writing short fiction, depends on character motivation to advance the plot. If a character doesn't have a stake in what's going on (or what they think is going on), then they don't belong in the story.
Also, it's not technically writing advice, but this quote from Miles Davis: "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." Fanfiction is based on a canon that most writers and readers are more than passingly familiar with. If you deviate from canon, know where you deviate and what those changes mean. Readers won't forget canon as if "AU" is an amnesia spell; play against that. Let the readers' preconceptions do the heavy lifting and tweak it your way.
S. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?
I think Stephen King also said that all his stories start with "Wouldn't it be fun if..." That's pretty much where my best thoughts come from as well - this one idea that I just have to get at somehow. So yes, I have a muse, meaning a part of me that I write to please... and he's a fickle, unreliable, foulmouthed type who refuses to be prodded into action but occasionally needs to be held back or the plotbunnies will start turning into Night Of The Lepus.
W. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?
Probably my very first one, The Hardest Walk. I still find myself fascinated by the days after "The Gift", by everything that had to happen at a time when everyone would just have wanted to lie down and grieve, and all the ways it could go disastrously wrong. But that fic tried way too hard (see F). I've ended up cannibalizing several chapters into other fics, but I still wonder...
AB. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
This is hard, because it feels like listing favourites (well, it is) and I'll leave so much out. But just to tick some obvious boxes:
snowpuppies because she has such an amazing handle on characters' darkest moments, and how they reflect and clash over time. There's a reason I've tried to establish the phrase "to snowpuppy an episode".
brutti_ma_buoni because she's so ridiculously productive, and yet consistent, that I could never hope to keep up even as a reader, let alone writer; good thing she's branching out into fandoms I'm not in or my dayjob would be in danger.
And a blast from the past: Alex Wert, who helped me realise how in fanfiction, reverent/irreverent and respectful/disrespectful can be sort of like flammable/inflammable: You can put characters through hell and make them look ridiculous as long as you love them enough.
AM: Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?
I do like getting criticism that challenges me, I don't see anything rude about that, but I have got the occasional off-colour remark, ranging from harmless knowitalls ("That would never happen in canon, let me tell you how stupid it is to think so") to outright bigots and assholes. Mostly I ignore them or make some non-committal comment and then post to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fanficrants. I figure anyone who either doesn't realise they're being rude, or chooses to be rude to a complete stranger, won't change much because I point out why they're wrong and I'm right. I did get into a lengthy dialogue with this one reviewer once, who was outraged at something I'd written and demanded that I a) let him write a fix-it fic for it, and b) write him some incest fic to compensate, or he'd use me as an example in a long meta he was writing about how people who don't write Joyce/Dawn are weird. That was fun.
AN: Write an alternative ending to a fic you’ve written (specify by title, link or general description).
Besides the one I already wrote? >:) This is interesting; since I mostly write oneshots, the stories are written to fit a specific ending, so changing an ending without rewriting the whole story is tricky. But let's see what I can do with a drabble.
This is Survival, a drabble about Kendra and her watcher that I always liked because there's a fair deal of ambiguity in what the characters want (see?). So depending on where I put the emphasis of the ending, we should get a slightly different tone, slightly different characterisation...
Survival: Take 2
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
She could move. On a whim, he incorporated dance into her training. It made her a better fighter. But she never again listened to music in her free time.
Survival: Take 3
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
He pretended to be busy and shooed her back. He remembered the dusty roads of Nairobi, walking to the English school in unfamiliar shoes. Life is short, let her dance.
Survival: Take 4
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
He shooed her back, then watched her dancing from afar.
For years afterwards, he would wonder if that was the afternoon he might have taught her the right defensive move.
Survival: Take 5
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she grinned at him and kept dancing.
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto found Kendra in a crowd. He’d never known she could smile like that. He hoped she enjoyed it while it lasted.
Survival: Take 6
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
All the way home there was a twist in her step.
Years later she staked a vampire, maybe two years her senior. She didn’t recognise him. Zabuto never told her.
sunclouds33, slaymesoftly, rbfvid and brutti_ma_buoni:A. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.
Hmmm. I'd say on average, it's a oneshot fic with either Willow or Faith as protagonist, based either around existential dread and guilt, or around a premise so silly that they have to play it straight if they want to survive. Whichever it is, it'll contain on average
0.43 Bob Dylan references
1.12 more-or-less veiled comments on canonical events in which characters faced similar issues
1 pun
0.69 completely gratuitous sexual references
1.82 lines of dialogue intended to be very ambiguous
0.31 situations intended to critique somethingorother in canon or real life, or at least look at it and go "...huh."
0.14 references to other films/series the actors have appeared in
0.22 crossovers with other 'verses, noticeable or not.
B. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
I don't think I've ever written time travel fic. (Well, not in the Buffy fandom.) Huh. You know, that's not a bad idea.
C. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?
Sure. I... never got A/B/O, for instance. Not a problem with those who do like it, I just sort of never saw the point of it. All human AUs and RPF don't (usually) grab me either. I'm sure there are others. For the most part, though, it's more that those plots don't interest me than that I find them SICK AND WRONG. Anything can be written well if it's well-written, IMO.
D. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
Two or three, which may or may not pan out. One of them is Spike/Angel or William/Angelus, set both immediately after the events of "A Hole In The World" and a while after William's siring, on the subject of Silence. How would newly-vamped William, grown up in a quiet London home, react to the noise of the East End and to the palpable silence of the countryside (vampire hearing can hear Nothing) and then contrast that with the moments after letting Fred die, stumbling out of that tree into the quiet foggy night? I'm still not sure how to fit it together, but I have some lovely scenes that I need to write down. I always love fic that remembers how old these characters are, how the world has changed, and yet hasn't.
E. Share one of your strengths.
I like to think I'm good at combining comedy and seriousness. IMO, all good tragedy has a sense of humour, and all good comedy has a core of gravitas. Pretty much any fluff or crackfic I've ever written, there's probably a moment in there somewhere that would fit right into a serious tearjerker fic, and pretty much any solemn character piece will have some ironic twist or cosmic joke. Humour doesn't necessarily mean gags; it's a way to point out the unexpected, the ridiculous, the unavoidable, the on-second-thought horriffic - y'know, the things that make good drama.
F. Share one of your weaknesses.
Easy: long-term planning and execution of said plan. Most of my attempts at longer fic have gone off the rails at one of two points: either I realise that I have no idea where a fic is going and it ends with the characters standing around, looking at their watches and waiting impatiently for me to tell them what to do; or I do know where a fic is going but just can't be arsed to write all the boring stuff that needs to happen for that neat ending to be justified.
M. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?
Kurt Vonnegut once summed up 8 basic rules of writing. I don't always live by them but this one is spot on: "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water." Any good story, especially when you're writing short fiction, depends on character motivation to advance the plot. If a character doesn't have a stake in what's going on (or what they think is going on), then they don't belong in the story.
Also, it's not technically writing advice, but this quote from Miles Davis: "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." Fanfiction is based on a canon that most writers and readers are more than passingly familiar with. If you deviate from canon, know where you deviate and what those changes mean. Readers won't forget canon as if "AU" is an amnesia spell; play against that. Let the readers' preconceptions do the heavy lifting and tweak it your way.
S. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?
I think Stephen King also said that all his stories start with "Wouldn't it be fun if..." That's pretty much where my best thoughts come from as well - this one idea that I just have to get at somehow. So yes, I have a muse, meaning a part of me that I write to please... and he's a fickle, unreliable, foulmouthed type who refuses to be prodded into action but occasionally needs to be held back or the plotbunnies will start turning into Night Of The Lepus.
W. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?
Probably my very first one, The Hardest Walk. I still find myself fascinated by the days after "The Gift", by everything that had to happen at a time when everyone would just have wanted to lie down and grieve, and all the ways it could go disastrously wrong. But that fic tried way too hard (see F). I've ended up cannibalizing several chapters into other fics, but I still wonder...
AB. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
This is hard, because it feels like listing favourites (well, it is) and I'll leave so much out. But just to tick some obvious boxes:
snowpuppies because she has such an amazing handle on characters' darkest moments, and how they reflect and clash over time. There's a reason I've tried to establish the phrase "to snowpuppy an episode".brutti_ma_buoni because she's so ridiculously productive, and yet consistent, that I could never hope to keep up even as a reader, let alone writer; good thing she's branching out into fandoms I'm not in or my dayjob would be in danger.And a blast from the past: Alex Wert, who helped me realise how in fanfiction, reverent/irreverent and respectful/disrespectful can be sort of like flammable/inflammable: You can put characters through hell and make them look ridiculous as long as you love them enough.
AM: Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?
I do like getting criticism that challenges me, I don't see anything rude about that, but I have got the occasional off-colour remark, ranging from harmless knowitalls ("That would never happen in canon, let me tell you how stupid it is to think so") to outright bigots and assholes. Mostly I ignore them or make some non-committal comment and then post to
fanficrants. I figure anyone who either doesn't realise they're being rude, or chooses to be rude to a complete stranger, won't change much because I point out why they're wrong and I'm right. I did get into a lengthy dialogue with this one reviewer once, who was outraged at something I'd written and demanded that I a) let him write a fix-it fic for it, and b) write him some incest fic to compensate, or he'd use me as an example in a long meta he was writing about how people who don't write Joyce/Dawn are weird. That was fun.AN: Write an alternative ending to a fic you’ve written (specify by title, link or general description).
Besides the one I already wrote? >:) This is interesting; since I mostly write oneshots, the stories are written to fit a specific ending, so changing an ending without rewriting the whole story is tricky. But let's see what I can do with a drabble.
This is Survival, a drabble about Kendra and her watcher that I always liked because there's a fair deal of ambiguity in what the characters want (see?). So depending on where I put the emphasis of the ending, we should get a slightly different tone, slightly different characterisation...
Survival: Take 2
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
She could move. On a whim, he incorporated dance into her training. It made her a better fighter. But she never again listened to music in her free time.
Survival: Take 3
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
He pretended to be busy and shooed her back. He remembered the dusty roads of Nairobi, walking to the English school in unfamiliar shoes. Life is short, let her dance.
Survival: Take 4
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
He shooed her back, then watched her dancing from afar.
For years afterwards, he would wonder if that was the afternoon he might have taught her the right defensive move.
Survival: Take 5
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she grinned at him and kept dancing.
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto found Kendra in a crowd. He’d never known she could smile like that. He hoped she enjoyed it while it lasted.
Survival: Take 6
Once when she was 12, Sam Zabuto lost Kendra in a crowd.
He found her staring at a group of dancers in front of a flatbed truck with an old-fashioned sound system blasting bass-heavy music; Marley, Tosh, Burning Spear. A boy, maybe 14, took her hand with a smile and pulled her into the throng. She danced for a few moments; when she saw Zabuto, she obediently returned to him.
All the way home there was a twist in her step.
Years later she staked a vampire, maybe two years her senior. She didn’t recognise him. Zabuto never told her.
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no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 12:34 am (UTC)PS 4 episodes into Twin Peaks at long last!
ETA: Sorry if asking you to do a meme you've just answered in the post where you answered them is presumptuous and/or obnoxious!
no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 07:26 pm (UTC)Also, yay re: Twin Peaks. Dare I hope for some commentary in the future? I'm just about to start a rewatch as soon as I get my hands on the new blu-ray box, so...
no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 08:07 pm (UTC)I'm a little sad I didn't start a few weeks earlier though, since there is a Twin Peaks reunion at the Toronto fan expo this weekend (Ray Wise, Sheryl Lee, Sherilyn Fenn) and while I might be able to finish season 1 in a day or two, finishing season 2 before then is not really in the cards.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 02:57 pm (UTC)He also thought no writer should ever be allowed to kill off Buffy or Dawn, because that would make a happy ending impossible and everything must have a happy ending. (All other characters were fair game, though, since if you killed Willow you could always just have Amy take her place in the gang. Yes, that's the example he used.)
no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 02:30 pm (UTC)You win!
no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 02:39 pm (UTC)And rewrites of Kendra drabble are awesome.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 03:03 pm (UTC)ff.net really sucks. I haven't posted anything there since they started randomly deleting fics every time they changed their TOS.
And rewrites of Kendra drabble are awesome.
Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2014-08-28 09:37 pm (UTC)I may have to add a caveat to my own 'all rules are bad rules eventually' rule because that character motivation idea does pretty much work across the board. Unless someone's going for surreal, like the cheese man, I suppose. But he's not exactly a 'character'.
...and thank you! *blushes*
no subject
Date: 2014-08-29 01:18 pm (UTC)I may have to add a caveat to my own 'all rules are bad rules eventually' rule because that character motivation idea does pretty much work across the board.
I think so, yeah. I mean, you could have a character who doesn't really Want Something - say, someone stuck in a really bad depression, or an AI unable to articulate any wishes of its own - but even then, the readers are going to interpret their actions in the terms that they want nothing.
(Come to think of it, I once wrote a fic in which Tara is thoroughly unnerved by the realisation that the Buffybot doesn't want anything - "She just picks up on what others want and agrees with them." And Vonnegut himself once had a character stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk for days because he realised he "had absolutely no reason to move in any direction whatsoever.")