Fan Fiction–The Good, Bad, and Ugly

A number of years ago, I was involved in fandom for a TV show, which of course, generated it’s own fan fiction.  That’s stories written by the fans based on the series, using their favorite characters.  I even tried that when I was a teenager–all of three stories–but, because I had been writing regular fiction beforehand, I found that I much preferred creating my own characters.  Though I did continue reading the stories off and on because some of them were pretty good–and others were pretty awful.  Eventually I stopped reading them because none of them seemed to be any good, and then I dropped out of fandom entirely.  Too many DOTs (Definitely Over the Top).

Writing fan fiction always comes up among writers.  Sometimes the fan fiction writers want critiques from real writers (at least they think they do; they’re often looking for praise or to be welcomed into a more professional standing).  Sometimes some writers writing for publication are still writing fan fiction.  Since I’ve seen both sides of the fence, here’s the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of writing fan fiction:

The Good:  Because it is writing stories, fan fiction can build the skills same as any other form of fiction writing.  Better still, if the writer is having a confidence problem, no matter how bad the story is, everyone will tell you it’s great anyway.   There are some science fiction writers professionally published today who got their start writing fan fiction.

The Bad: There are many aspects acceptable in fan fiction that you were never seen in published fiction because they don’t make for a good story.   No publisher is going to take a story that has the characters get hurt (it’s called Hurt-Comfort), and then spends the next 70 pages describing in excruciating detail the medical procedures done to them.   At times, I honestly wondered if the writers actually read any real fiction, because sometimes it seemed like their world view was only other fan fiction.

The Ugly: Writing fan fiction can become a trap if the writer wants to be professionally published.  Getting praise can end up like an addiction.  I remember one writer who wanted to be professionally published.  She started writing fan fiction, created a site to collect stories, and feeds on the praise.  Her stories initially were pretty good, but later, the quality was poor because she was rushing the next one out for more praise.  That was twelve years ago.  She’s still got the site.  Still writing fan fiction. And still not professionally published.

Do you think writers should write fan fiction while they are trying to write for professional publication?

ABCs of Writing – A is for Action

When I did one of my earlier projects, a Civil War thriller, I’d seen the advice “Start with the action” and opened the book with an action scene.  In this, I threw eleven characters into the first chapter and in the middle of a fight.  Critters–and agents–had a hard time with it because I didn’t start out with what was going on.

“Start with action” is probably one of the most misunderstood pieces of writing advice because everyone tends to think of an action scene like a fight or someone being murdered.  Movies are probably a big influence, too, because they often start with an exciting action scene to hook the male viewers, then start the story.

It really means start with something happening in the story because so many people don’t:

• Character wakes up and goes through their boring and ordinary morning routine
• Introducing all the characters (sounds like the first act of The Cat and the Canary!)
• Describing the weather
• Explaining the backstory
• Putting a dead body on page one, usually for shock value (problematic because the reader doesn’t care about anything yet)
• And just generally taking their time to work their way into the story (three or four chapters later)

The “action” needs to introduce the reader to a hint of the story, as well as the characters.  That’s almost like an art form in itself, trying to pick the right elements to immediately involve the reader with the story, and it’s not like fixing a typo where the solution is obvious.   I think of it like being a tightrope because everything has to be perfectly balanced–get the piece in that suggests the story is starting, avoid the backstory until later (no always an easy feat).  To “start with the action” seems like it requires not just thought about the first chapter but also the structure of the ensuing chapters.

What’s your favorite opening?

Is Fiction Writing Art?

Several years back, I went to see a play that an actor friend was starring in.  The lead character was writing a literary novel and was perfectly happy that the book made utterly no sense, to the chagrin of the other characters. All that mattered was that she was being literary and artistic, and part of this seemed to be that the book shouldn’t make sense!  So is fiction writing art?

I’m in an area where we have a lot of art museums.  I’ve been up to see Renoir’s Little Girl With a Watering Can and Monet’s Starry Night.   A woman smeared dirt all–well, imported sand–all over the floor in circles, and people came to see it.  And I’ve seen a painting in the National Art Gallery that’s a blank canvas.  Hmm.  You think I could type a header and page numbers for a 300-page manuscript, give it a one word title like Obscurity and call it a literary novel?

What would qualify calling a book art?  That it’s merely a literary novel seems kind of a cop-out, and to some degree, a put down of books that aren’t in the literary category.  Is it because the author used language to convey mood and setting well?  Or because the author used metaphors and similes?  How about themes?  What if a mystery novel uses all those elements?  Does it become art because of that?  Or how about a science fiction or fantasy novel?  Or is it because the author decided to use dashes instead of quotation marks for dialogue?  I still think that the characters in Cold Mountain were communication telepathically!

I don’t think there’s a clear cut answer to this, though I do think it’s easy to get lost in the artsiness of techniques and gimmicks and miss the point of telling a good story.

Do you think fiction writing can be art?  If so, how would you define it?

Things About Writing No One Told Me

Writing a book for the first time is like jumping into a pool without knowing if it’s going to be cold, hot, or comfortable.  It’s easy to find lots of information about how to write them, but there are a few things that no one ever told me that I had to learn along the way.

Finish the book.  When I started my first novel, I ran into trouble about 100 pages into the story.  I couldn’t figure out how to get past it, so I revised the existing pages.  Still got stuck at the same spot.  What I should have done: Skip to the next part I could write and finish a first draft.  Every problem is fixable–if the manuscript is completed.

Revise Only if There’s a Good Reason. When I ran into the roadblock, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was.  But I concluded I’d find it by revising the work already done.  Revising can fix problems, but only if you what they are in the first place.  Otherwise it’s just spinning wheels.

Sometimes You Gotta Give Up A Project.  Okay, okay, I know this is an odd one–especially with everyone saying you must finish the book–but there is also a time when this advice is bad.  Like when continuing with the book is like beating a dead horse.  I’d run into the wall on it so many times that I hated the book, and yet, I didn’t want to just give up the time invested in it.   The problem was that if I wanted to finish a book, I had to give up the first one.  I couldn’t quite do it–I set it aside with a promise to myself to return to it after the second one was done.  When I finished the second one, I trunked the first one.

Do a Really Different Project Next.   With the second book, my then cowriter and I launched into our next project as we started making the agent rounds.  The project was quite similar, and we eventually realized that we were repeating all the patterns of mistakes that were in the finished one.  For the next one I’m doing, it’s going to be completely different from MAGIC STUD.  MS was in omniscient and humorous; next one is in first and more serious.  Also a much smaller cast.

What things did you learn that no one told you?

What Writing Queries Taught Me

It’s hard to believe that I’m about to launch into submitting queries to agents for MAGIC STUD.  I’m finishing up the edits now and am working on the query letter.  You know, everything I learned about how to do this project right from the start was from writing query letters for the last projects–and the rejections I received.

The projects were written with a cowriter.  On the first one, we finished up the manuscript and launched right into writing the query.  Sounded great, so we submitted it to ten agents.  Rejections started coming in.  We thought something must be wrong, so we started revising the query, and continued to do so as we got more rejections.  We tried or considered:

• The Summary.  We revised the summary over and over, trying to find the right combination that would get the agent interested   I was certain that if they saw the first three chapters, they would love the writing!
• Bullet points.  We considered doing the summary as bullet points–pretty much a gimmick–hoping it would attract attention. Wiser sensibilities prevailed.
• Omitting the title.  At the time, I read in a writer’s blog that sometimes agents reject a story solely based on the fact they don’t like the title of the book, so we left it off for a while.  Now I realize this is one of those urban legends writers pass around to explain rejection.

We even pitched to an agent at a conference and had a hard time defining what the story was about in one sentence.  It wasn’t until we ended in a critique group and got comments on the first three chapters that we realized why the query was so difficult to write:  We didn’t have a story.  We had a collection of events–things that happened, but nothing tying them together.

The problem was not in the query letter, but in the book itself.

So, on MAGIC STUD, the first thing I did was identify what the story was about.  It did change a bit over the course of the writing, and earlier this year, I tried another query letter.  Didn’t feel right.  This time I listened to that and discovered that I hadn’t quite nailed down the story well enough to make the query work.  Now I’m tackling the query again, and this time, it’s like magic.  Having a solid story helps.

What has writing queries taught you?

The White Horse King

The White Horse King, by Benjamin Merkle, is the story of Alfred the Great, the king who fought against the Vikings and introduced other significant changes that are still present today.  One of the things I particularly noticed–as a former solder–was that he restructured the military into an “army of professional soldiers”–not an easy feat!

I got this book expecting, as one reviewer put it, a “mythic adventure story.”  Instead, I felt like I was sitting in on a history class that’s so dry I walk out not remembering a thing.  We have Vikings and battles–things that should be exciting stories to tell, and the book just failed to engage me with an interesting story.

The graphics in the book are surprisingly sparse, and those that are photos don’t seem to be of very good quality (though that may have to do with the paper).  None of the graphics are captioned.  People read captions for information, so I was surprised the publisher left this out entirely.

There are some footnotes scattered  through the book that explain some additional information–but no footnotes identifying sources of information.  The bibliography is only three pages long (in large font), so it seems a little scant for a book on a significant piece of history.

A disappointing read.

—

I got this book free from the publisher, Thomas Nelson to do this review.

The Cost of Books

Rachelle Gardner, a literary agent, put into perspective how much it costs a publisher to create a book–before they’ve even sold a copy.  This is what went into the trade paperback cookbook I picked up at the bookstore the other day:

Editorial: $6,000
Packaging (cover design & production): $4,000
Typeset & Interior layouts: $2000
Printing & binding: $13,000
Marketing: $8,000
Warehousing: $4,000
Sales: $6,000
Author royalty (a typical advance is calculated in this model): $15,000

TOTAL: $58,000

Better Writing–Handwriting, Typewriter, or Computer?

When I started my first novel, it was on an electric typewriter.  I’ll tell you, I hated the process.  I can type pretty fast, but even when I type slowly, I make typos.  I used the correction tape on the typewriter, White Out, and even cut and paste.  The worst for me was revision, because that required me to retype the words.  I often made significantly more typos retyping.   I moved onto a word processor the first chance I got, and then to a computer.

Some say stories written on a typewriter–or handwritten–are better, such as in Do Computers Hold the Keys to Fine Writing?  Not for me though.  I’ve found that handwritten material tends not to be as good as what I produce on a computer–not to mention the thought of having to retype it into the computer.  Even with a typewriter–well, I still remember how frustrated I got every time I made a typo.

In fact, I used to drive one person crazy with how I typed on the computer.  When I make a typo, I just backspace over the problem word and then type the correction.  Don’t even think about it.  He thought I was wasting keystrokes the way I did it–his process was to tab back to the word, highlight the word, delete it, and the type the new one.   By the time he had gotten to highlighting, I would be writing the next paragraph–and probably making another typo!

What do you prefer?  Handwritten, typewriter, or computer?

Common Sense Ideas for Organizing Novels

When I was in the army, I worked in a training room as a training clerk.  Lots of paper.  I didn’t think I was that messy, but my then boss kept harping on being organized–equating perfect neatness with being organized.  Everyone has their own idea of organization, and their own methods.  On my followup of my post on How to Stay Sane Organizing Novels, I try to follow along the lines of common sense with some more ideas:

Save a master file:  When you finish a draft, immediately save a good, clean copy of it and save it in a folder for that draft.  Backups can go into a separate folder.  After I finished my first draft, I left it with the backups–and every time I had to reference that file, I had to dig through a hundred files to get to it.  The draft I needed to refer to often, but the backups I didn’t.

Periodic Reviews.  Do periodic reviews of the files in your novel’s folder.  If the files are dated, this will be quick and easy to because you’ll see a file dated from a year ago that you haven’t touched.  Anything that you’re not going to use, put it in an archive folder.  Still accessible should you need it, but out of the way.  If you want to later on, do a review of the archive folders and delete anything you discover you really don’t need.

Keep a Quick List.  Anything you need a quick reference to–like character names–make a quick list.  At one point, I was having trouble remembering one name and kept having to scroll back in the book to get it, a nuisance at best .  I thought about character worksheets, but doing a page for each character would require just as much time consuming searching for just a name.  So I did a quick list on the names and any relevant information–about two pages.  This could be customized to whatever is needed for each individual book–place names, terminology, military rank, etc.

What common sense ideas do you have for organizing your novel?

How to Stay Sane Organizing Novel Files

When I first took an organization seminar–you know those one day things where they say “Find out the five secrets of organizing”–I thought organization wasn’t for me because I couldn’t use ticklers or planners.  I’ve since learned not every method of organizing works for everyone.  Plus, organizing a novel project is different than standard business files.  I thought I’d come up with a great method of keeping track of everything when I started MAGIC STUD, but it fell apart when the revisions started.  I’m still trying to think what will work best for the next book so that I don’t spend time trying to find things once I start revising.  But these are some things that will start out making the writing a lot easier.

1.  Establish a naming convention and use it.  Sometimes I get lazy and name a file Doc1, which is the default in Word.  Bad idea.  The name doesn’t tell me anything about the file, and that’s the file I’ll need later–which I won’t be able to find because of the name.  What I use: 2008-11-29_NovelTitle4.doc.  The date comes first so that it will sort chronologically if I need to search for something.  The four is the draft number.

2.  Make backups.  I resave the file every day, in case I get a corrupted file.  You can never have too many backups.

3. Don’t keep your backups in the same folder as your primary document.  Because I do make regular backups, I end up with a lot of files. which can make it hard to find the current file.  In each draft’s folder, I create a subfolder called Backups.  About once a week or so, I move the backups into the folder and out of sight.

4.  Avoid folder overlap.   It’s very easy to create a file structure that encourages overlap of folders.  For example, Antiques folder and Collectibles folder.  There will be some research notes that could fit into either one, and that creates a problem because it can be in two different places.  Make sure your folders are set up so there is only one logical place.

I’ll be posting more on this topic this week.  What are your methods of organizing your novel’s files?