This takes much more thought than I've got the time to give it right this instant, but I wanted to share this NaNoWriMo pep talk from Mercedes Lackey on the benefits of writing fanfiction. It's usually a knee-jerk rejected thing, but it's always been interesting to me as a writer (good place to experiment with character and dialogue and prose without getting bogged down in world-building), as an academic (communal writing, the-author-is-dead, textual ownership), and as a teacher. Four of my students did fan novel this year or last. One has now written something like 200 pages of "Magical Starsign," a DS game, and the character development she's adding to this game and the description she's pouring into it are impressive, and I've definitely seen her confidence in her own writing grow, or so it seems. She's putting out great work for any new writer, let alone a twelve-year-old writing in her second or third language, and is that really diminished because her jumping-off point was a video game?
NaNoWriMo Pep Talk
When we're both not tired, should that ever happen, we should discuss this. It gets hilarious for me right up at the beginning when she suggests fanfic if "all you have is plot." Hahahahahaha...plot? Hahahahaha.
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't know; I think even the smallest of drabbles or post-episode-ficlets do have some sort of plot to them, if we can define plot as the most basic rising action-climax-falling action. I mean, the good ones. That's the challenge of a 100 or 200 word drabble, creating some kind of emotional or story arc in such a compressed space. It's not a whole big story with lots of different scenes, but it's basically an addition or addendum to the regular plot, something that you think, for one reason or another, was missed or mishandled in the source text. (Often economy of story makes it a good thing that this scene was missed, since it's unnecessary or redundant, but I still think it's fair to say that you have a plot when you write one of those. It's just that your plot for this one scene requires all this set-up, and so you borrow the set up from the book or movie or TV show. )
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