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or Origifying FanFiction (OFF)
This was originally posted in my blog. If you'd
prefer to read it with all the nifty and insightful comments, it can be
found here:
http://storm-grant.livejournal.com/17783.html
Thanks to
unovis and
Jenny Saypaw for their wisdom and input.Note: This is not a how-to-write post. In order to get published you will need to know how to write, including, but not limited to: a) original stories, both long and short, may to be structured differently than your fanfiction; b) short stories are structured differently than novels, e.g., more vs. less character development, and the need for greater vs. lesser amounts of backstory.
Writing links are welcome in the comments, as are, well, comments.
GRAND OPINING EVENT
So you’re reading something off the NY Times’ Best Seller list or Oprah’s Book Club or Heather’s Picks, and you find yourself struggling to finish the third chapter. “This is utter crap!” you say. “I can write better than this!”
The room gets a little brighter as the [energy efficient, ecologically friendly] light bulb appears over your head. “I can write better than this,” you repeat. “And I already have.”
You do a little wild book tossing as you go through your shelves and realize some of the books that are big sellers (or published at all) aren’t as good as those stories you and your friends are writing and posting online. In fact, the only difference between those books and yours is that the published ones, by and large, don’t feature characters named Ronon, Methos, Aeryn, or Willow. That and the fact that those authors are getting paid for their hard work, while you? Are not!
This is your epiphany moment. You suddenly realize you want to see your name in print (quit your day job, win the Man Booker prize, have Angelina Jolie play you in the movie of your life). So you start to think about becoming a published writer.
The best thing to do at this early stage is look into it a bit more to see if you actually want to do this. Remember, being a successfully published writer is hard work, loss of control, and more hard work. Right now, you write what you like, when you feel like it, have control over where it goes and who reads it, and get lots of shiny feedback.
Professional writing involves lots of hard work. Did I mention the hard work? The work itself is comprised of three major components: The writing, the publishing (including the dreaded contract, and also? The Rejections!), and the marketing. Don’t imagine you can skimp on any one of these time-consuming areas. Don’t think you’ll just write the book and someone will magically publish it. Or market it. Each component requires a different skill set. Even Stephen King goes on book and media tours. Neil Gaiman blogs daily. And these guys have agents and publicists.
Read about the publishing market. I like The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published. I only read the chapters that are relevant to the step as I come to it. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter from “Publishers Weekly”. Subscribe to various publishers’ and agents’ blogs. Get a feel for the marketplace. Decide where you want to be.
Talk to writers, read Stephen King’s On Writing, (or Writing Down the Bones, or Bird by Bird). Read my livejournal and the posts of my friends. Join some lists, lj communities, whatever. Do the due diligence. Then, should you decide you’re up to the challenge, I have a seven simple steps that will help you along that path.
The Significant Seven: A Twelve-Step Program
Minus Five
Step 1. Metaphors Be With You
Step 2. Let’s Get Ready To
Grumble
Step 3. Hostile Makeover
Step 4. The Ego Has Landed
Step 5. An Embarrassment Of
Bitches
Step 6. Lust in Translation
Step 7: A Band in all Hope
You've decided to go pro. You think a lot about writing a big new novel or some original short stories. And that’s great. Go, you. But it’s slow going. A bit discouraging, perhaps. Maybe you find the blank page intimidating. Suddenly, you remember you have an entire website full of excellent stories (all those LoCs can’t be wrong!) So why reinvent the wheel? You already have a body of work, you just need to file off the serial numbers so you don’t get sued for copyright infringement and get your agent and publisher fired, be hounded by the press and crucified by the fans and… well, first you need to figure out if your stories will convert. Then you need to do it.
Welcome to Stormy’s quick and easy way to figure out if you can turn that fanfiction into original fiction.
You’ve slaved over your fanfiction stories to make them so accurate; very show-specific; the characters spot-on. You can’t imagine that they’ll stand alone without all the canon behind them. And you may be right. Or you might not be.
Do you think you’re objective about your own writing? Raise your hand. Hmmm. Can’t type with your arm up like that. Let’s put that opinion to the test.
The best thing about this little seven-step program is that:
a) It’s a very small investment of time and effort, so if it reveals that your story will not convert successfully*, you haven’t lost much; and
b) Should it turn out that your story is convertible, most of the work is already done.
So let’s get to it. Find the first story you are thinking of. DO NOT READ IT!!! Save a new copy; heck, let’s save it as “Bestseller1.doc”. Can’t hurt to be positive, eh?
------------------------------------
*Your brilliant fanfiction writing is still not wasted. If the story as a
whole doesn’t convert, do not hesitate to plagiarize yourself, re-cycling
that great plotline, that wonderful dialogue, that hot sex scene.
------------------------------------
Step 2. Let’s Get Ready To Grumble
Now, think of some great character names, because we’re going to do search-and-replace. Yes, we are. Bear in mind you can change them any time.
Character names are important, especially when writing romance when your characters must be called Sapphire Jet or Montana St. Mystique, Drake Fortune or Hayden Van Mussel. But the importance of character names is a writing topic, so it won’t be dealt with here. Just remember, that if the name needs various diminutives, that you’ll need to expand your search-and-replace to include them. For example, when converting Sentinel stories, I chose to keep the James / Jim / Jimmy / Jimbo thing, so I picked Cameron / Cam for one story and Daniel / Dan/ Danny /Danny-boy for another. Now you use your word processor’s search-and-replace function: James to Daniel, Jim to Dan, etc. Now do it for all your characters. Keep a list at the top of the page. Here’s mine for my shapeshifter (formerly Sentinel) novel:
Det. James Ellison, Army Ranger = Captain
Daniel Forrester, US Marine
Blair Sandberg, anthropologist = MacKenzie Thorne, photojournalist
Simon Banks = John Warren
Darryl Banks = Delroy Warren
Kurt Riescher = Basil Deerborne
Chopec Tribe = Perquas (not a real tribe)
Incacha = Yuyaychaj (Quechua for “counselor”)
Enqueri = Qollpa (Quechua for “salty”)
Guide = Yanapaj (Quechua for “helper”)
Peru = Bolivia
Cascade = Buffalo (why not Buffalo? I just need somewhere for Forrester to
be from)
“But wait!” you cry. “When I write a character, it’s true to the show. You can’t just do search-and-replace!” < /affrontedness>
Well, yes. That may well be true, but a lot of the time, what our show’s writers are drawing on when they create their characters are archetypes and tropes. For instance, Sentinel and Stargate: Atlantis use the soldier/scholar dynamic. Some mix it up a bit. Due South is a mixture since Fraser is both the soldier and the scholar, and Ray (pick a Ray, any Ray) is a scholar of the streets. Their main character dynamic is more “fish out of water,” as is Keen Eddie or Life on Mars.
Check out the rest of the archetypal cast. Is Methos not your consummate Trickster? How ‘bout Stark on both FarScape and Eureka? Are Clark and Lex not variations on the Good vs. Evil theme (well written in that each has an element of the other). Redemption, vengeance, temptation: all classic themes containing classic characters. Okay, so I’m not an academic. I’ve barely cracked my copy of The Power of Myth. Someone with classical training should jump into the comments and make sure I’m getting my point across with some degree of accuracy.
So you’ve changed your character names, now change your place names. Think about why you used Cascade / Port Columbia / Seacouver / Smallville. What aspects of these places do you need to keep for your plotline? The weather? The harbour? The rolling Rockies of Kansas? Most of our genre shows are set in the Pacific Northwest because Vancouver has relatively cheap labour and since the Rockies are in the background, might as well say it’s the Cascades. I’ve turned Chicago back into Toronto for no good reason, and Cascade into San Francisco because I needed it to be rainy but mild. Had I needed mountains, I could have used Seattle.
The next change I’m asking you to make is a biggie: earth-rocking for those of us who are invested in our slashy pairings. Can you change one half of our OTP into… a girl? This will really distance you from the TV show, not to mention avoiding copyright infringement lawsuits. If you are writing romance or erotica, most publishers insist on a female protagonist, even if you switch POVs to that of one or more male characters throughout your story. Check the submission guidelines of places you would like to write for.
Remember why you wanted to do this in the first place? Your story probably needs to be het in order to reach the widest possible audience—both in terms of selling your novel to an agent and/or publisher, and in terms of selling the greatest number of copies.
Here’s Harlequin’s submission guidelines for
their new erotica line (novels, published as trade paperbacks, and short
stories, e-published):
http://www.eharlequin.com/articlepage.ht
They only accept female POV.
When I converted my Due South novel, I kept my lead characters male but in doing so, I limited both my potential publishing options and my audience. (I sold to a gay press, though, as I did with two short stories.) I’m currently working on a converted Sentinel novella that I’ve turned into a het story, with the POV character being female. I tried it both ways, figuring since it’s not a romance per se, I could get away with a male protagonist and female love interest, but it worked better with a female protagonist and male love interest/partner. (Yes, that means I undertook Origifying FanFiction twice, before settling on the right gender dynamic.) As the novella has grown toward novel length, I’ve long since let go of Blair Sandberg and become emotionally invested in Mackenzie Thorne. She still has shoulder length curls, but her eyes are brown.
Now search-and-replace to change as many gender pronouns as possible, still without reading the story! (Don’t worry about the sex scenes; they get their own section.)
Go ahead, make me gay
Don’t want to change your story to het? No problem. You’ve still got choices. If you are a very fine writer, a general publisher will no doubt want your novel. There’s always a market for good fiction; a well-written, queer-themed story will find a home. Also, There are a number of gay-only publishers out there. My own first novel, Gym Dandy, has been contracted by Haworth Press.
There’s a big demand for erotica, including gay erotica, and there are dozens of e-publishers out there looking for a continual stream of novels. The advantage of e-publishers is that they will take shorter works, right down to short stories. You don’t need an agent, and many are adding traditional hard copy books to their business model, so if your e-book sells well, it may end up in book stores, after all.
The third solution is to remove all sex from your story and keep it gen. Many anthologies, especially sci-fi, want their stories squeaky clean, which begs the question: what do those geeks who live in their parents’ basements jerk off to? Maybe there’s a market there. Hmmm. Sexy sci-fi anyone?
unovis
reminded me that buddy stories with homoerotic subtext are what drew many of
us into slash in the first place.
BTW, if you are writing horror--many places consider vampires and werewolves horror--and your story is in first person, you will want to change to third person. Horror publishers have been overwhelmed with first person stories and some even have it right in their submission guidelines. That’s another job for search-and-replace.
I've decided to call this process "Origifying
FanFiction" or "OFF". I think that's pretty memorable, since we're all
filing the serial numbers OFF our fanfiction! Alternatively, if it's all
too much bother, you can always tell me to fuck OFF! There. See how
memorable that is?
Now, you haven’t read your story in a while. What are the key points you recall about the plot? You might even want to write down a brief plot outline at this point. Of these major plot points, what show-specific things do you need to drive the plot? Does the character need super-strength? Enhanced hearing? The ability to come back from the dead? Remember, an idea cannot be copyrighted, so you’re probably safe with super-powers, they’ve been part of our culture so long no one can lay claim to super-strength or X-ray vision. But a character with all five senses heightened, hmmm. Better not. Do you need all five to make your story work? Is the enhanced hearing scene really necessary to the plot at all or is it just about the hero/heroine getting information? Why can’t she just use a sophisticated listening device? Or have a stool-pigeon squeal the evil plan?
Need your love interest to come back to life? Why not turn your Highlander into a vampire? (Vampire novels are hot!) Or invent your own mythos: be-spelled, cursed, touched the wrong alien device, born a genetic mutant, or member of a secret long-lived race.
Some shows make use of pretty similar plots. How many shows feature demon hunters? Soul collectors? Characters in need of redemption? You could probably have an eclectic group of alien hunters working out of an underground lab/bunker as long as you set it somewhere other than Cardiff.
Why couldn’t you have an American astronaut sucked into a wormhole and send him off to meet a bunch of archetypal aliens? And speaking of traveling via wormholes to a variety of planets? Why not? If you can’t copyright an idea, you most certainly can’t copyright physics.
Mix your shows (steal from a broad universe). In my brothel story, I needed a reason why Jim Ellison had been arrested, then released into his mother’s care. I couldn’t use “zone-outs due to over-stimulated senses”, so I borrowed Rodney McKay’s citrus allergy and had him attacked by an over-zealous perfume boy that resulted in a store being destroyed.
These kinds of changes are a little harder to work using search-and-replace, although “wizard’s wand” to “hockey stick” would be fairly easy. If you can, just go in and rewrite those show-specific (read: copyright infringing) scenes, still without reading the story.
Better yet, get a friend to go through and straighten out some of the rough spots for you. Or even do this entire process for you. I just did one for
cjandre and
she was surprised at how well her story converted. (She also thought I’d
done a whole lot of work. Shhh! Don’t tell her how easy it is.)
I think you might be ready to read your story now. Remaining rough spots and gender issues aside, how’s it read? Huh. Well, we already established that many of us are not objective when it comes to our own writing, so give it to someone else to read, preferably someone outside the fandom, or outside of fandom altogether but reads within the genre. (Don’t ask your mother to read a BDSM alien mpreg story. Okay, then, just don’t ask mine.)
So you’ve read it. Your friends have read it.
What do they think? Does it work for them as a stand-alone short
story/novel? If not, why not? Is it something you can fix? If they’re asking
questions about specific things, that could be good. If it’s real life
things like “what’s string theory?” then you can just write in some
exposition. If it’s more show-specific, like “what’s ‘the Game’?”, then you
need to decide if immortals going around chopping each others’ heads off is
integral to the plot. Can you replace it with something else, like an
ancient curse or a vengeful enemy? Can you cut it altogether and still have
your story make sense? Much of what we write is referential, sometimes just
for the sake of invoking canon. Can we lose the fact that Sam Tyler
our hero is in a coma and just have him step through a wardrobe instead?
If you’re writing a short story, then that
whole “in media res” thing applies and you may find the story works without
a lot of context around it. But if you’re writing a novel (and that’s were
the wee bits of money are), then you’ll want to do some world-building
and/or character backstory. I find character charts useful: helps me get to
know the new guys and obtain emotional distance from my OTP. I’ve done a
post on character charts, here:
http://storm-grant.livejournal.com/10915.h
So now you need to write some backstory. Depending on the setup of your story, you may need to write a few introductory chapters that stand in for five seasons' worth of character history, or you might want to weave the character’s backstory throughout your story, revealing only the bits needed to move the plot along. (Helps you make minimum word count, too.) Remember, these are your characters now-- just because Blair Sandberg didn’t know martial arts doesn’t mean Mackenzie Thorne can’t. Being a writer is like playing God; you can just assign characteristics, possessions, and skills wherever your story needs them. Sometimes I envision myself dealing talents out like cards to the waiting minions. Pretty cool, eh?
Step 5. An Embarrassment Of Bitches
We’ve had three, five, seven years of a show. (Thirty-something if you’re writing Doctor Who.) We’ve virtually ingested the text, context, and subtext. We dream about the characters: they’re our friends, allies, enemies, lovers. So a fanfiction story might feature everyone who ever worked at the Oswald State Correctional Facility, CI5, MI5, MIB, or UNCLE, or every companion The Doctor ever had. No problem. Your readers are as familiar with the text as you are.
Now, in employing the OFF process, you’ve changed all their names and possibly their jobs. And you find, that 17 secondary characters is very confusing.
Let’s go back to our friend search-and-replace. Go through and change Officer Meagan to Officer Fred, then change Officer Joel to Officer Fred. Then change Officer Henry to Officer Fred. This will take some judgment. (Can Fred be in two places at once? Can Fred have that many skills? Why does Fred sometimes talk like an Aussie and sometimes like a Southerner?) More smoothing required. You probably need not more than two secondary characters unless they are defined roles, and then, it’s probably clearer for the tiny amount of time they put in an appearance, to just call them by their roles. In addition to Officer Fred, the Hero might also require a boss (who gives two orders but is referred to only as “Captain,” a bomb squad guy who rushes through, and a helpful file clerk. Do these people really need names? Can’t any exposition they offer be given by their role? “While visiting the morgue, the coroner explained…” Readers of original fiction don’t care about secondary characters; secondary roles are mostly there for exposition and to advance the plot. If you must fall in love with Dr. Radek Zelenka, or Richie Ryan, give them their own story, but they’re not the stars of this one.
Step 6. Lust in Translation: From Chest To Breast In Three Simple Letters
If you’ve decided to leave your slash story as gay or to make it gen, read this anyway. Why not? I spent time writing it. But if you’ve decided to make your slash story het and you’ve one or more sex scenes, they going to read very funny now: “She grabbed her penis while simultaneously stimulating her prostate.” Uh, yeah. Well, there’s some good genderfuck stories out there like that, but this probably isn't one of them.
You’ve heard this before: sex scenes aren’t
about sex, they’re about other things, a large part of which is what’s going
on in the character’s mind. I was quite surprised to find how little
rewriting needed to be done to convert a sex scene. After all, everyone has
nipples, and there’s at least one penis or pussy here already so you’re only
changing 50% of the stuff anyway. A het couple is probably less likely to
rub off and more likely to go for penetration, but everybody moans, sighs,
and hates a condom regardless of gender. Don’t believe me? Go grab a sex
scene from anyone’s story and do a search-and-replace for one of the
partner’s names. Then fix the pronouns (and holy fuck (heh!) is it ever
easier to write a sex scene with partners of different genders; you don’t
have to put the name on ever line.) In most cases, if it was decently
written sex scene in the first place, it’ll convert easily. Sex is between
two people, regardless of gender.
I grabbed one of
resonant 's
stories, Res being arguably one of the finest writers of sex in fandom. I
did a quick search and replace and voila! Because it was all about feelings
and actions without naming a lot of body parts, I found the only words I had
to "file off" to smooth out the origification and convert it to het were
"his cot at the consulate." Huh. Now you try.
Step 7: A Band in all Hope
Now rewrite your story until it’s the best original story it can be. Start
thinking about where you’d like to submit it.
Here’s a great post on getting started in getting published from a site you
should read regularly:
http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2007/05/vi
Go back through my lj posts and check out all the places to find markets.
Join / subscribe / check regularly. Once you have a body of work, it’s just
a matter of waiting for calls for submission to come to you.
Good luck.
~ Stormy
Feel free to comment back in my lj, here:
http://storm-grant.livejournal.com/20173.html