W2 Was Here

I don’t think there’s anyone left around these parts that doesn’t know, but: I’m the editor-in-chief at Shousetsu Bang*Bang, and we’ve got a new issue coming out Monday, so I’ve been spending this week with my head half in my books for school, half in original gay pornographic fantasy fiction. There are a lot of new authors this time around, which is always delightful — and interesting in a self-reflective way, because I remember when I started writing for SSBB, back when I was a pretty good fanfic author and a terrible original fiction author. It’s not that one is better than the other, or necessarily easier than the other, but they require two skill sets that are more difficult than a lot of people give them credit for being, and just because you’re good at one doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be good at the other.

Thus, both as someone who’s learned to hone these skills and as someone who gets to see other people grow and improve, I have made a list of some things that tell me, the reader, that you, the author, haven’t quite made the transition from fanfic to original storytelling yet.

1. The blonde. Or ‘the redhead’, or ‘the tall man’, or ‘his lover’, or ‘the lonely half-giant’, or any other not-immediately-relevant description instead of someone’s name. It’s an easy way to shorthand familiar characters — if I’m reading Iron Man/Captain America fanfic and I see ‘the billionaire’, I know who that is — but if I haven’t memorized every detail you’ve dropped about your original characters, at best I’m confused about which is which, and at worst it sounds like a third person has appeared in the room. Names are basically invisible; use them. If someone doesn’t have a name, or doesn’t have one yet, pick one description and stick to it. (More on this here.)

2. Writing talking about what just happened instead of writing what just happened. In fanfic, pretty much everyone knows the big events — if you’re writing, say, Star Wars fanfic about the time the Death Star blew up, you could do so without ever describing the Death Star’s blowing up, because, presumably, if I’m reading Star Wars fanfic, I’ve seen the Death Star blow up in the movie. If I haven’t, though, I’d be both bored and alienated by all the characters’ going, ‘Wow, that thing that just happened was impressive!’ Some gloss of more mundane events is necessary, but if the big action events are the point of the story, you can’t get by with leaving them out.

3. Scenes strung together. I have no objection whatsoever to stories where nothing happens, as long as something happens while nothing’s happening — otherwise, why are you telling me the story in the first place? Fanfic can get away much more easily with little vignettes because they’re parts of a larger whole, so an author can use fanfic to describe an event without tethering it to a larger narrative. For a visual representation of this problem, look at movie adaptations of books — some of the Harry Potter films come to mind — and look at the ones that are coherent narratives accessible to people new to the franchise versus the ones that are just a bunch of familiar scenes now with human actors and CG. I’m not making the argument that every story needs conflict, but every story needs a reason to be a story, to start and stop where it does, to wind up in the place that’s different from the one it started in.

4. Assuming I care about the characters. I don’t. I’m thrilled you do, but I don’t. You have to give me a reason to care about these people before you dump a ton of information on me. Fanfic has the luxury of a sympathetic audience; original fiction has to earn my interest. Related to this: flooding me with everything about a character, having only a tenth of it be relevant later, and expecting me to remember that specific tenth is not a winning strategy. If you want to tell me a lot, you need to telegraph what’s plot-important and what’s color commentary.

5. Present tense. From a purely editorial standpoint, I hate present tense because most people can’t do past tense inside of it correctly. From a reader’s standpoint, I hate it because it’s too often used as a cheap substitute for drama. If you have to ramp up the tension by turning your story into a radio announcer’s play-by-play of a football game, you may need to examine your choices.

May I also note that all of these things (well, except maybe for #1) can be done well! In fact, let me give specific examples: On Earth My Nina is spectacular at describing only what just happened because the entire point of beeblebabe’s story is about missing things; drmoonpants uses all the short scenes in The Wilderness to approach tragedy from the side instead of head-on; Her Lamp Does Not Go Out at Night is an example of relvetica’s amazing gift for making me care about characters through initial exposition; and my story that’s coming out on Monday is in present tense because of a very specific, story-related, and (I flatter myself to think) funny reason. But we’ve all been doing this for a while.

So! Now I have made a list and made examples with exceptions that prove their rules instead of doing schoolwork, because that is the way I like to waste my life. And now I have extra-wasted it by reposting this to tumblr! …Today has not been my finest day.