Fan fic taught me everything I need to know. (Introductory post.)

[rsadelle]

There were two points at the WisCon slash panel that I've been mulling over, and the discussion I'm having with hederahelix is adding another spice to the mulling. (Or something. Fan fic may not have taught me how to properly construct a metaphor.) This is an introductory post, with a series of at least three posts full of content to follow.

The two points:

1. ceciliatan, who was one of the panelists, said that fan fiction teaches you everything you need to know about writing, except how to rewrite.
2. Someone asked: How has reading fan fiction changed your reading habits?

I'll let you ponder while I go to copy and paste my first entry on the subject from GoogleDocs (where I'm writing these at work - scandalous!) to an LJ posting window.

Comments

Randomly found this through LJ's new "Culture" feature...

[bessyboo.livejournal.com]

...and I hope you don't mind me butting in! This topic's really relevant for me. *^^*

Both points you bring up are really interesting things that I've actually thought about before, although not in such a really direct way. I've thought a lot about the effect of fanfiction & fandom on my life in general, because I got into the fandom world at the start of the Harry Potter craze--at the tender age 10!--and never looked back. Since then, I've wondered exactly how much it really has affected my adult life, since I got into it at such a young age, and the pre-pubescent/early teen years are known to be very formative ones on peoples' personalities, and such.

I've especially wondered about your second question, as applied to myself. I certainly have read FAR fewer novels in the last almost-decade than I did in the first ten years of my life (in my "pre-fandom" life, I was an avid bookworm), but since I was just hitting puberty when I discovered fandom, I often wonder if a large part of that change can be attributed to changing interests as I got older. I honestly can't say I know the answer, and I'm not sure if there's really any way to know or test it. (Although my mother certainly blames fanfiction for my diminished interests in novels. I can partly see why--after all, I kind of did my reading habits backwards; I went through as many novels, both large and small, serious and written-for-kids, as I could when I was young, and as I've gotten older--aside from the plays, musicals and technical manuals I read for job & career purposes--I've mostly ended up reading graphic novels. >.>)

As for the first question, I, A) question her definition of "rewrite"--because for every definition of it that I can think of, fandom has definitely helped me with it, and B) see your claim in the following post about describing characters, and raise you "describing worlds/settings" (for anything in the fantasy or sci-fi genre). I find that, especially when dealing with fics of sci-fi TV shows that have such intricately planned-out and developed worlds (such as Firefly), it's easy to just refer to some random detail about the given 'verse that your fellow fans would surely know. However, if you're dealing with original fiction, you can't just casually mention some detail of a universe that's in your head without explaining the detail (at least eventually)--or can you?--and that's where the trouble begins. How much do you tell them at the beginning, right off the bat? How much should you hold back? What's really important for the reader to know? What isn't? How do you decide which is which? How do you weave in details to the story so that the reader is getting information about the world, but so they don't feel like they are? SO many questions, and none of which can really be answered/taught by fanfic (excepting one specific example involving AUs which I'm not going to go into, because this comment is long enough!)


...I'm sorry, I've totally gone off on a RIDICULOUSLY long meta rant in your journal, and this comment is at least three times longer than I meant it to be, so I'll just leave it off here. XD

Re: Randomly found this through LJ's new "Culture" feature...

[rsadelle]

Well, to pull a bit from a piece of fan fic (specifically, Anna S.'s "Your Horoscope for Today"), "How do you know it's not real? You don't know what's a spell and what isn't--it's like once a cake is baked. You can't cut it open and pull out an egg or a cup of sugar." In other words, we can never know how we would be if we hadn't become involved in or experienced whatever it is we're wondering about.

For reference: I started reading fan fic about 12 years ago. For the last 7 years, I've been tracking the books I read, and in all that time, I've read at least 40 books per year. In other words, I don't think I read fewer books because I read fan fic, so while that may be true for you, I'm not sure it's a constant.

On the topic of rewriting, see the rewriting entry in this series.

Someone at the panel brought up the worldbuilding piece, and Cecilia (I think; this might have been someone else) countered with the AU, which I think is actually an excellent counterargument. There are a hell of a lot of AUs out there, with a large number of them being long, drawn out affairs that require some explanation and set-up.