Today's Post is About Writing AUs
Dec. 4th, 2013 09:29 pmAnd written in response to a question from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
st_aurafina which I shall now reproduce: Any day that suits you - you write a lot of AUs, especially in Game of Thrones, with lots of contradicting premises (which I love!) but do they ever clash in your mind?
That's a good question, I think, and not just because it says a nice thing about me. Short answer: no.
Long answer: no, but--
I am envious of people who can work on more than one story at a time, and I know they exist because I've seen them answer those "post one line from each of your wips" memes. I can't do that, I can only focus on one thing at a time; I have to pick an idea, and let it percolate in my hindbrain till at least the first two thirds are mapped out pretty well. The last third I tend to make up when I get there, which is why that's the bit where a lot of my stories start to wobble. If I try to work on more than one thing I do get confused, and not just about the details of the AU, but about the tone of the fandom, and the tone of the fic, and the style I'm writing in. Also, I'm an epic procrastinator, and given the option of more than one thing to do I'll panic and do nothing.
About ASOIAF/Game of Thrones -- I know the wait for The Winds of Winter is getting ridiculous, and while I'm a lot more positive on the show than a lot of book fans, I don't want the show to overtake the books in terms of plot either. But I do think the narrative is stalled at a really, really interesting point, where you can see the overall direction the story is going in, but there's still so many things that plausibly or conceivably could happen. Which makes it a heaven for future AUs or canon divergence AUs.
The other thing that helps, is that all my future AUs take place in a very similar future for Westeros. Unless the fic is actually about someone unlikely taking the Iron Throne, or for plot related reasons I need her somewhere else like the Wall Daenerys is always queen. Stannis is always in exile or dead offscreen. Aegon is always a fake. Jon is either not a Targaryen, or has no interest in leaving the Wall and interfering with my plot. Sansa always emerges from the Vale of Arryn relatively unscathed and free of Petyr by methods fair or foul. And that gives you the basic shape of a world where the ice zombies have been defeated, there's no-one squabbling over the throne, and Dany's dragons have convinced everyone to simmer down a bit, and once you've got that you can write any number of AUs within that future.
The really interesting thing - and the one that does trip me up, is that I always try to obey the established rules of the world. So, although I can never get enough of "Sansa's courteous and inevitable rise to power" stories I'm leery of anything that makes her Queen in the North without explaining what's going on with Bran and Rickon, because whether I like it or not, she's not the heir. I mean, it's pretty easy to get round by having Bran stay north of the Wall, and Rickon being too young/missing/feral to rule. But, still. And sometimes I want to do away with one of the fundamental rules entirely. I wrote an AU once where Westeros had abolished male-preference primogeniture but I could never make it work the way I wanted it to, because it changed too many things and I couldn't make a cohesive world out of it, so I ended up with five mutually-exclusive AUs.
Similarly, I want to write an AU where the Night's Watch is a Sisterhood-- and I got stuck because why would the Night's Watch be a women only organisation? And I eventually worked out that it wasn't always, but by the time GoT starts it's basically considered pointless, isn't it? So send girls, why not. And Westeros is a world with no place for baseborn girls other than the sex trade, or for highborn girls who don't fit into their traditional roles, and I was sure some of them would choose the Wall given the choice. I've also got Lyanna Stark filling the Benjen Stark role in the Watch, having been sent to the Wall as punishment for her role in provoking Robert's Rebellion. And I got stuck there again, because why would Robert send Lyanna to the Wall, as far as he was concerned she was the wronged party, and if Rhaegar won, he loved her, so again why would he? I eventually went with it being Aerys who sent her, and Rhaegar tried to rescind the order when he became king, but by then Lyanna (who is a lot like Jon) had already taken her vows for good or ill. And the really, really silly thing is... none of this is relevant to the plot of the story, which is to be about Arya Stark petitioning her Aunt Lyanna to join the Watch, experiencing the same short sharp shock as Jon did in canon, female friendships, bonding, and background lesbianism.
I just like logic and internal consistency, even if it's only within my own mind, you know?
st_aurafina which I shall now reproduce: Any day that suits you - you write a lot of AUs, especially in Game of Thrones, with lots of contradicting premises (which I love!) but do they ever clash in your mind?That's a good question, I think, and not just because it says a nice thing about me. Short answer: no.
Long answer: no, but--
I am envious of people who can work on more than one story at a time, and I know they exist because I've seen them answer those "post one line from each of your wips" memes. I can't do that, I can only focus on one thing at a time; I have to pick an idea, and let it percolate in my hindbrain till at least the first two thirds are mapped out pretty well. The last third I tend to make up when I get there, which is why that's the bit where a lot of my stories start to wobble. If I try to work on more than one thing I do get confused, and not just about the details of the AU, but about the tone of the fandom, and the tone of the fic, and the style I'm writing in. Also, I'm an epic procrastinator, and given the option of more than one thing to do I'll panic and do nothing.
About ASOIAF/Game of Thrones -- I know the wait for The Winds of Winter is getting ridiculous, and while I'm a lot more positive on the show than a lot of book fans, I don't want the show to overtake the books in terms of plot either. But I do think the narrative is stalled at a really, really interesting point, where you can see the overall direction the story is going in, but there's still so many things that plausibly or conceivably could happen. Which makes it a heaven for future AUs or canon divergence AUs.
The other thing that helps, is that all my future AUs take place in a very similar future for Westeros. Unless the fic is actually about someone unlikely taking the Iron Throne, or for plot related reasons I need her somewhere else like the Wall Daenerys is always queen. Stannis is always in exile or dead offscreen. Aegon is always a fake. Jon is either not a Targaryen, or has no interest in leaving the Wall and interfering with my plot. Sansa always emerges from the Vale of Arryn relatively unscathed and free of Petyr by methods fair or foul. And that gives you the basic shape of a world where the ice zombies have been defeated, there's no-one squabbling over the throne, and Dany's dragons have convinced everyone to simmer down a bit, and once you've got that you can write any number of AUs within that future.
The really interesting thing - and the one that does trip me up, is that I always try to obey the established rules of the world. So, although I can never get enough of "Sansa's courteous and inevitable rise to power" stories I'm leery of anything that makes her Queen in the North without explaining what's going on with Bran and Rickon, because whether I like it or not, she's not the heir. I mean, it's pretty easy to get round by having Bran stay north of the Wall, and Rickon being too young/missing/feral to rule. But, still. And sometimes I want to do away with one of the fundamental rules entirely. I wrote an AU once where Westeros had abolished male-preference primogeniture but I could never make it work the way I wanted it to, because it changed too many things and I couldn't make a cohesive world out of it, so I ended up with five mutually-exclusive AUs.
Similarly, I want to write an AU where the Night's Watch is a Sisterhood-- and I got stuck because why would the Night's Watch be a women only organisation? And I eventually worked out that it wasn't always, but by the time GoT starts it's basically considered pointless, isn't it? So send girls, why not. And Westeros is a world with no place for baseborn girls other than the sex trade, or for highborn girls who don't fit into their traditional roles, and I was sure some of them would choose the Wall given the choice. I've also got Lyanna Stark filling the Benjen Stark role in the Watch, having been sent to the Wall as punishment for her role in provoking Robert's Rebellion. And I got stuck there again, because why would Robert send Lyanna to the Wall, as far as he was concerned she was the wronged party, and if Rhaegar won, he loved her, so again why would he? I eventually went with it being Aerys who sent her, and Rhaegar tried to rescind the order when he became king, but by then Lyanna (who is a lot like Jon) had already taken her vows for good or ill. And the really, really silly thing is... none of this is relevant to the plot of the story, which is to be about Arya Stark petitioning her Aunt Lyanna to join the Watch, experiencing the same short sharp shock as Jon did in canon, female friendships, bonding, and background lesbianism.
I just like logic and internal consistency, even if it's only within my own mind, you know?