Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’ve always been unduly fond of editing, so I’m enjoying revising Colony.
I’m not sure I’ll be quite as excited when I get to those twenty or thirty missing
scenes, but so far, so good. I revised the first section (out of a former six
and current seven), and though the additions were a great improvement, I keep
having ambitious ideas about theme and supporting characters that will someday
mean working back through the beginning again.

I confess, I had one of those Really Bad Structural Ideas, which was to drop
every single name in Roll Call somewhere along the way. I’d only have to drop
an average of one name a scene. So far I’m breaking even, I think.
I’m also keeping close
track of the sexes of all my characters - when your first name is Crewman or,
alternately, Tazise, it’s hard to remember after a while.

Things will be simpler once I pair a few characters off. Then, if you know
one, you know the other one is the opposite gender. It’s not so much that
they’re heterosexual as that they’re only interested in reproduction. Babies!
Everywhere! But it’s not babyfic - babyfic doesn’t involve anything like the
massive daycare organization I’m planning.

It’s not all about the Original Aliens, either - I’m enjoying writing the
Voyager characters again, as well. I’m especially looking forward to making
trouble for Tuvok, both on the “Resolutions”/”Galileo 7″ level of logical
Vulcan trying to command illogical Humans, and on the “UMZ” level of…some
kind of life-threatening of Tuvok. That subplot is to be filled in later.

I’m taking things one scene at a time. I find that I can write from a plan -
most of my plans for Colony involve taking a few sentences of
tell, moving them the appropriate spot (usually earlier in the
story), and turning them into a full scene of show. I had my
doubts when I started, but it’s working pretty well so far.

I’m hoping to lure the muse back in time to threaten Tuvok’s life. Maybe
she’ll kill Harry while she’s at it - Kimicide is all the rage. At the very least,
I need to pair him off with an OC and get him in trouble, a la…well,
every K/f episode. Maybe I’ll let him have the first baby.
I’m branching off from “Shattered”, so he could even beat P/T to the Lamaze
class if he tries hard enough.

I didn’t realize, when VS7.5 did it that “Shattered” was such a natural
break-point. I was going to go all the way back to “Drive”, but nothing of the
real Season 7 weirdness happened until “Lineage”. I may be stocking up on the
babies, but there will be no Klingon messiah child.
Not again. The line must be drawn *here*. This far, *no*
farther.

Thanks to Sara, all the sad, lonely plot bunnies of the world have a place to
hang out and multiply. Hop on over to
The Breeding
Ground and watch the fic fly!

Writing fanfic is like speaking a language. The vocabulary of that language
depends on the style of fanfic - for some, the language is the events of canon as
broadcast. For others, the language is the infectious ideas of fanon. Canon people
may denigrate a fanon story in which the characters are stunningly out of
character. Fanon people more often express a sentiment of boredom when reading
canon stories in which none of their own familiar chords are struck.

To make a random analogy, canon fanfic is like historical fiction, where the
challenge is to fit a story to the historical record. (An AU would be like alternate
history.) Fanon fanfic is more like
romance novels, in which the overall plot and emotions are rather standardized,
and the challenge is to do that popular turbolift theme in your own personal way.

Neither canon nor fanon is much like the mystery novel; that much
concentrated, mandatory plotting would be hard to reconcile with the
language of either fanon
or canon. Science fiction and fantasy depend upon writing a new language
(for the new world) and then convincing the reader that she speaks it. That’s
the opposite of fanfic, even for sci-fi shows.

I meant to blog about communication in fandom more generally, so
let me see if I can connect the dots. The language of fanfic is similar
to the language of general fannishness - a canon writer knows the nits as
well as any nitpicker would. A fanon writer knows the classic episodes for
her preferred fanon pairing, even if only second-hand. A complaint about the
show itself leads to a fanfix.

There is no question of civility in fanfic itself - you can snark to your heart’s
content, and as long as you phrase it as a story, there is no arguing with you
directly. Someone might write her own counter-story, but such exchanges
are rarely violent. There’s quite a lag in writing stories, and there’s a bigger
one in reading them - if you read them at all. What J/C fan would read our
C/7 fic to find out what we’re saying about J/C? There’s a dialogue going on
there, but it’s between the writer and the fanon, not the writer and the reader.

There’s no question of civility when talking about the show, either, because
such discussions are always a bloody (and I mean that literally, not Britishly)
religious war. Kill them all and let Roddenberry sort them out.
Just walk into
#jetc and start talking about C/7 and you’ll see what I mean. Or read the
TrekBBS on any topic. These are topics on which we agree to disagree
violently, repeatedly and irreconcilably.

Sometimes, we’re not writing fanfic and we’re not talking about the show.
Those are the meta and the diva times - talking about fandom itself, or
talking about our lovely selves. Meta and diva cause the most controversy
(as opposed to formalized name-calling).
Is someone else’s ideas about, say, the Muse a legitimate meta discussion or
a claim to divine standing?
Is an email about your important diva doings, when crossposted to a generous
smattering of lists, just helpful information or annoying mass-marketing? Is
meta interesting at all? Is snark cruel? Does merely having opinions turn you
into a diva?

At the meta-diva level, we’ve lost our common tongue of Trek or Vamp
or whatever it might be, and we’re thrown back on our native languages.
Where I come from, sarcasm is never a faux pas, but
self-promotion always is. If someone is clearly stupider than you are, you don’t
point that out. You never, ever, ever condescend. It’s fine to go slumming but
you can’t rub his face in it, and
you’re not going to get any sympathy from your friends after the breakup.

But I digress. The point is that there’s a grammar. Some of the rules
are national, some local, some class-based, some individual. It’s not a matter
of print coming across differently than voice would - the sentences themselves
mean different things in different languages.

The Basic English of fandom is always to say thank you for feedback and
never to voice a negative opinion. It’s a starveling tongue, but I doubt there’s
a bigger intersection between the various languages out there. As I get older,
I find that not much can be conveyed in Basic Fannish, and not much of what
can interests me. I’d rather talk to someone who speaks my language than
dance around someone who doesn’t.

Disclaimer for speakers of foreign languages: Note that
I never said canon was better than fanon, or that New Englanders were better
than midwesterners. Nothing I said means that canon is better than fanon or
that I am better than you, not even if you would
have meant exactly that if you had written the above.

I’ve been accused of writing “canon” and I don’t object to the label, partly
because I don’t believe canon and fanon are mutually exclusive. The way I see it,
writing canon means writing that has a significant relationship to the show as
broadcast - speaking a language that anyone who watched the show could
understand. Writing fanon is writing with an eye to the traditions of fanfic. How
deeply you delve into canon or fanon determines how “canon” or “fanon” the
resulting story is.

They’re not quite symmetric, because fanon is both easy to ignore, easy to
stumble into, and easy to create. Fanon spreads like a virus - you
pick it up somewhere, without quite remembering which fic it came from, and
incorporate it into your fic, spreading it to others. Canon is hard to ignore,
hard to get right, and impossible to create unless you’re TPTB.

Writing fanfic is always a dialogue with canon - sometimes it’s shouting
“you should have been this way,” and sometimes it’s whispering,
“you really were this way.” The quality of the fanfic is determined
by how convincing the argument is - people who prefer to shout down their
opponents like their fanfic over-the-top. Readers with a more
hermeneutic approach will prefer a convincing moment of characterization or
fanfix to an arbitrary chapter of familiar but unfounded fanon plot.

To give a specific example: a fanon story tells you that
Janeway finally saw the light and told Chakotay how she really felt about him.
A canon story tells you how Janeway saw the light. There’s no
good reason one story can’t do both, though there are bad reasons.
Fanon-leaning people tend to be angry at canon and refuse to deal with certain
events, or deal with them in a hasty, out-of-character way. Canon-leaning
people tend to shy away from any consequences, as if TPTB themselves
were leaning over their computers insisting that the characters be returned
unaltered for next week’s episode. Fluff worn on your sleeve or angst hidden
in your heart…

I really was going to write about communication in fandom, but it’s late so
that will have to wait until tomorrow.

I distributed the couplets somewhat evenly through Colony, but I’m still
rather short on subplot scenes. I was thinking of dragging in the Borg - I have my
own bad guys who could, presumably, make a subplot of trouble,
but the Borg are so much more accessible. Tuvok plus Borg post-UMZ seems
like a promising combination.

Throwing the Borg at every minor lull in my writing is the sort of thing TPTB
would do. We’re supposed to be above all that, but I need to do something
about the
whole issue of dropping a moon into a sun. It takes too long, and my aliens have
to be pretty darn dense to fall for that one.

If not the Borg, maybe an ion storm… This is why I don’t write VOY
anymore - I used up all my good plot ideas.

As usual, I’m late linking the latest
zendom article, on lovin’ fluff.

Jungle Kitty said
something on-list about fanfic shortcuts that I just can’t get out of my mind.
She was kind enough to quote a whole article:
It’s
Like a Movie, But It’s Not, which otherwise you have to log into the NYTimes
page to read. In it, Neal Gabler claims that movies today skip all the work of
entertaining and expression, replacing it with cues that the audience knows -
so that you get the outline of a movie, rather than an actual movie.

So yes, sometimes you have the outline of a fanfic - formulas that
substitute for a story of a more traditional form. This is where I lost track of the
conversation, though. I’m still not sure what a formula is or how to know one
when I see one. Does shortcut mean that anything classifiable under the
Borg Plot Classification is a formulaic
story? Do you have to write a new plot to avoid formula, or is it enough to
write a certain way?

I gave as an example the
tried-and-true J/C formula of Janeway finally realizing after an unspecified
number of years that she can’t live without Chakotay any longer. I think
those who said that formulas no longer satisfy them would dislike
such a story because of the formula itself. My only criticism of the
Sudden Realization formula story is that the Sudden Realization itself is rarely
justified. If someone makes me believe that Janeway can’t live
without Chakotay any longer, then I consider it a good story, however
popular the plot.

On the other hand, you can fail to motivate an original plot - it’s not only
formulas that get sent out into the ether without sufficient verisimilitude. I’m
rewriting Colony because it’s the outline of a novel, rather than the novella
I wanted it to be. Yet some people liked it - sci-fi fans more than others, I
suspect, because sf is a genre where originality vs. formula has long been more
important than showing vs. telling. You can, in other words, tell
all you want as long as the story you’re telling is new - Foundation,
a novella-long set of dialogues, is a good example of just what you could
get away with once upon a time.

Well, that was a roundabout and oxymoronic way of saying I can’t blog
right now because I’m busy rewriting Colony.

Yet more demands of poor fanfic writers - Bjorn wants less tunnel-vision:

An unnamed SG-1 fan wants scientific accuracy. Others want more style,
or less style, more plot or less plot, a sprinkle of this and a dash of that.
Lori responds to some of these demands with her diplomatic
version of my favorite saying, Have you ever seen TOS?
For Bjorn I’ll translate it, Do you read sci-fi?

Yes, it would be nice if we
could all plot perfectly, write like the poets, display a perfect understanding of
human nature, know every last factoid about our subject matter, and predict
the cultural impact of science down to painting the moon blue. There’s just
one little problem - it’s impossible.

No one omits plot because of a personal prejudice against it. Writers write
bad plots because that’s the best they can do. No one says, today I’ll
make my prose dull and leaden - they do the best they can. If a writer
seems to get by on just plot (as many genre novelists do), that means they’re
being read despite their disabilities, not because of
them. If a fanfic writer does the Mary Sue, it’s not because she’s decided that
being reviled by fandom would be a nice change of pace - she merely lacks
the skill to conceal herself.

Bjorn takes the failure of fanfic writers at what is arguably the hardest
challenge in
fiction today, that is, inventing and conveying future cultural changes caused by
scientific innovation, and equates it with tunnel vision. It’s these
outright demands for genius that are the real tunnel vision of the genre
discussion. Bjorn is far from the first to demand it; he was just the
most recent with his roundabout way of asking,
Why aren’t you Ursula LeGuin?

There need be no deeper reason for the deficiencies of genre and fanfic
than the simple one that writing is hard. No psychoanalysis or classification is
necessary. If you want it done better, you’re going to have to do it yourself.

Lori is still quoting Minisoo, and I now see that according to Minisoo’s definition,
I would be a cathartic writer, because I don’t care about my audience in her sense
of caring. But I am not actually cathartic, according to
the dictionary definition Lori provided. Although I wouldn’t choose to write without
the muse, the muse is by no means forcing me to write; it is not the monkey on
my back Lori portrays her muse as being.

I usually am quite literal about the muse, but when I say the muse made
me write my first fic, that’s not quite true. The muse came up with the story and
pestered me with thoughts of Ymn for a few nights before I took out the laptop
and typed it up for her, but that was not true catharsis. I didn’t feel relieved.
I just started more stories and the muse snowballed. If I wanted to get the
muse off my back, I would never have let her near a keyboard. I would have
gone cold-turkey. I’ve written
enough in my life to know that writing is not something you can do just
this once, as an experiment. Writing is like thinking - once you start,
you can’t stop. One doesn’t normally try to exorcise thoughts.

Tracing it back to the source blog, there isn’t much left to the distinction
between the alleged storyteller and cathartic writer.
Either one can write well, either one can write badly, either one can write
because of the muse, either one can feel catharsis. The only distinction that
Minisoo holds up the whole way is that she, in the guise of
storytellers, has a dynamic going with the audience that the
other camp does not. First off, this isn’t true - the main dynamic for most
writers is not with
the audience but with the fanon and possibly a beta reader or two.
Minisoo makes clear that she has some sort of cultural ideal of storytelling
behind her statements, but she doesn’t make a good case for a real
feedback loop in writing.
Fanon, as in the general written body of fanfic,
tells you much more about what is and isn’t an appropriate story than the
audience does directly. Secondly, the storytelling/catharsis split cuts straight
across Sarah T.’s distinction between aesthetic (good) and
social (bad) writers.

Yes, good and bad again. Whether it started out this way, this discussion
has turned into a game of peg the badfic writers. In Minisoo’s
scheme (as filtered through Lori), the badfic writers are a subset of the
cathartic (antisocial) writers. On Sarah’s continuum, the badfic writers are at
the social end.

Just that part alone tells me that this is a personality debate, not a real
discussion of fanfic. It is, therefore, not going to end, as someone else
mentioned. But at least it’s made me think once again about motive in fanfiction.
(I have had the feeling since the whole muse blog blowout that the
misinterpretation of my statements about the muse had a lot to do with
statements I made in Zendom a while back about ulterior motives in
fanfiction.)

The current debate is about fanfic writers’ motives for writing. I believe
that if someone can tell your motive for writing your story, then it’s a bad
story. If someone can tell your motive for writing fanfic in general, then
you’re a bad writer. In a way, this is what people are saying. When Sarah T.
can tell you’re writing in order to socialize, she calls that bad fic. When
Lori can psychoanalyze you based on your writing, she calls that bad fic.
If I even suspect certain ulterior motives, I’m outta there.

I’ve never said that my reason for writing is the real reason,
because as far as I’m concerned, the writer’s motive is irrelevant unless it
happens to reach out and hit the reader on the head with an anvil (bad!).
From the reader’s end (and in judging fic, we do it as the reader), there is
only one good reason for writing a story: the story itself.
Not the audience, not catharsis, not your social set, not aesthetics, not
dysfunction, just the story.

If you have another motive, keep it to yourself. I get enough anvils
on the head from Joss.

Lori blogged about
motivation
in fanfic, and I said: You said someone said, “For storytellers, it’s all
about the dynamic between writer/speaker and audience.” Then you went on to
say how the catharsis was also a cry to the audience. Where do people who
don’t write for an audience at all fit in?

I don’t have time to go back to the original blogs, since I’m going away to
a keyboardless place for the weekend, so I’m probably misinterpreting some of
this blogversation. I’m not aiming for accurate representation; this is just my take
on the words and phrases being tossed around. You have been warned.

It looked to me like the source bloggers
were saying that good writers want to communicate with their audience and bad
writers are just doing a brain dump onto the keyboard without regard for their
audience. Lori did a little analysis of the more godawful and oversensitive of
the bad writers, saying that they also were communicating something to the
audience - a plea for approval, perhaps. I noticed that no one acknowledged
doing it purely for yourself as a legitimate (source blog) or
possible (Lori’s blog) option. (I’m sure Lori would have defended the introverts
if she’d had the time.)

I don’t think you have to be doing some “dynamic” thing with your
audience in order to be a good writer, and I don’t think that literary merit is
determined by anything but the audience’s enjoyment of the work. In fact,
a work that both rabid ’shippers with “no feeling for language
& no love of prose” and English professors slumming here in fandom
can appreciate has more true literary merit than
Pulitzer material that the average fan doesn’t enjoy. Shakespeare wrote to
both levels, and if we can’t do it, that’s our fault, not our readers’.

And Shakespeare is dead now, so he’s not doing anything dynamic with
his audience. It makes no difference today whether he was interested in his
audience or in his dysfunctions or in his next paycheck. Only the words
on paper matter.

I felt like a how-to-write book, so I browsed through the library shelves. I didn’t spot the book Mike recommended, but I did find Novelist’s Essential Guide to Creating Plot by J. Madison Davis. I’d barely started it on the T when I found the section on Spectacle and decided this was the book for me. Spectacle is one of the six basic dramatic elements, according to Aristotle. Aristotle rates it the least important.

Spectacle is the flashy stuff, like invisible rabbits slamming doors or helicopters landing on stage, or, as I tried to explain on a mailing list once, basic biology lessons:

Again, that was J. Madison Davis, award-winning novelist, not yours truly. If it had been me, all that qualification (”might be,” “usually,” “may be,” “may,” “usually” again) would be replaced with definite, vigorous absolutes.

Speaking of public vindication of previously unpopular opinions of mine, the recent VVS9 implosion was quite gratifying. You wonder (if you’re an INTP) how so many people can be so clueless about so obvious a pattern over so long a time, especially when you saw the writing on the wall (or you were the writing on the wall) so early on. I admit, another disgruntled VVS8 writer egged me on to make some less-than-over-it comments on the issue, but I don’t feel vindictive about VVS8 this long after the fact. I’m just happy to see clues sprouting up all over. And it’s hard, too hard, to pass up the opportunity to say…

I told you so.