netgirl_y2k

ambyr asked What's your process, when it comes to fanfiction? Do you start with a character arc, or a what-if question, or an image, or a snippit of dialogue? Do you outline, and if so, do you always reach the end you expect?

I apologise in advance for how self-indulgent I'm going to be in my answer.

Mostly I write from prompts, sometimes more successfully than others. I do a lot of exchanges and begging-for-prompts type memes; I sometimes scour kink memes and the like for ideas, but I find it much harder to get motivated without someone specific to write for, even though I feel like that's stupid, especially because increasingly I just use the prompt as a jumping off point to go off on a tangent of my own.

At their best exchanges can force you to write some really innovative fic. I think the best fic I wrote this year was probably Kiss The Boys And Make Them Cry (Dany/Jon, Dany/Aegon) which is a fic I never would have written if I hadn't received the prompt in an exchange. I'm endlessly fascinated by Dany; I might be one of the few people in the fandom who're actually really into the fact that she's a rubbish queen at the moment and that her massive messiah complex has hugely backfired on her, without using it as an excuse to character bash. But while I think her story and Jon's are running on parallel tracks, and doubtlessly destined converge, the idea of them as a ship leaves me less than cold. And as for Aegon - I tend not even to include him in my future fics, assuming that he died offscreen like the giant and obvious red herring that he is; on the other hand, if it's a plot twist, and he's not "the mummer's dragon" then I will be genuinely and lastingly cross at the narrative choices that have led to that. So not a fic that I would have written on my own, but one I'm ultimately rather proud of.

The fic I had the most fun writing this year was Keep the Bouquets, Throw Away the Grooms (Sansa/Margery). Okay, the surprisingly delightful arranged marriage of Sansa Stark and Margaery Tyrell is the stuff of my id, and something I might have told myself to amuse me on a long walk or lull myself off to the land of nod. But I never would have written and posted it if I didn't have a prompt giving me implicit permission, or I don't know, validation, to write it. Stupid, I know.

Of the things I've written that didn't come directly from some kind of prompt: there's The Sisters Black (the Night's Watch) and while I would love to take credit for the idea of an all female Night's Watch AU, it's actually the result of my becoming obsessed with this graphic and not being able to believe that nobody had written it yet.

There's also This Is What You Will Wear To The End Of The World (Gwen, Morgana). To give you some context, the tagline for Merlin in my head is, Merlin: the show and fandom so toxic and sexist it makes Game of Thrones look like the feminist utopia. And that was something I wrote mostly to work through my residual feelings on that fandom and give myself some closure; silly as an may seem to need closure on an excessively stupid teatime beeb show.

The main difference between those two and the stuff I write for exchanges is how long they took. They were both, not in progress, because I wasn't actually writing them, but I was thinking about writing then, and working them through in my head, for more than a year apiece. In the absence of a deadline it takes me a long, long time to write anything, and mostly I'll write nothing. There's a sequel to The Sisters Black that I've been thinking about writing since March, so you know, expect it next July, maybe.

I outline a lot in my head, which is fantastic, right up until the point where you come to write anything down, where you might as well not have bothered.

Many years ago I had a crack at being a standup comedian, and I never wrote my routines down in their entirety; I had a list of beats I wanted to hit, where the laughter should be if I was doing it right. I don't know why, because I was a terrible comic, but I use the same approach for writing. I approach a story as a series of vignettes. If it works it should go like... section one reveals this about the characters and packs this emotional punch, the next section reveals this other thing and packs this different emotional punch. When it doesn't work, and it often doesn't, it looks like you've got the skeleton of a story rather than an actual story.

By the way, the last time I think I did this well was The Quiet Ones (Sansa/Myrcella).

The other thing, I think, that can make my writing look a bit barebones is that when I work out scenes in my head I do it dialogue only; I think, I hope, I'm getting better at remembering to colour inside the lines when it comes to actually writing.

This is why a lot of my fics have numbered sections, and even the ones that don't were probably written that way and just had the numbers edited out later. When I first started writing fanfiction the five things format was a huge thing, and I think I found it formative. Also, it's good for motivation, I think, to break things down; tonight I will write section ii, which consists of scenes a,b, and c, makes point y, and includes line z, which I've been proud of since I thought it up and should write down before I forget.

Endings suck, especially my endings. I tend to have the first two thirds of a fic reasonably well worked out before I start writing it. Not coincidentally, the two thirds mark is often where it all falls apart. That's not always the case, sometimes I come up with the ending first. Everything in The Game of Courtship (Sansa/Margaery) from Sansa's crush at first sight on Margaery, to their sweet romance at Highgarden, to Margaery's declaration of love, was written to spiral towards the last scene where Margaery gives Sansa the purple amethysts. My whole thing with Margaery is that she might genuinely care for Sansa but she'll never shy away from using her.

Sometimes an obvious ending presents itself. Abu el Banat (Oberyn Martell) was written for a prompt about Oberyn and his daughters, Oberyn has eight daughters, but in the writing it morphed into a fic as much about Oberyn's relationship with his sister Elia as anything else. I'm really fascinated by sibling dynamics, is the thing. So it seemed obvious to end it after Elia's death with Oberyn naming his fifth daughter after her.

More often I don't end fics so much as just... stop.

Speaking of just stopping.

2. Something new - talk about a new fanwork of yours!

Well, this is timely, because my fic for this round of got_exchange was posted today, and you can't get much newer than that.

A Westeros Fairytale (ASOIAF; Lyanna Stark/Elia Martell)

The prompt for this was: a situation where Lyanna chooses Elia over Rhaegar, and my original idea was for an AU where Rhaegar defeated Robert, took Lyanna as his second wife to appease the North, but became disenchanted with her when she gave birth to Jon Snow rather than the daughter Rhaegar expected. I saw a glorious fan wank somewhere that the woman's name Rhaegar said when he was dying might have been Visenya. The whole thing was going to be about Lyanna and Elia learning to live with one another, raising their children together, and hoping no-one had noticed that they were the ones running Westeros as Rhaegar became increasingly fixated on prophecy and dragons.

And it would have been... fine, probably. But I was writing it in stilted fifty word bursts, and not enjoying it at all. So, I deleted what I had and started from scratch.

There's a chapter in, I think, Storm of Swords, where Meera Reed tells Bran a thinly veiled story about the tourney at Harrenhal and how Lyanna met Rhaegar. I used that as a framing device to have Meera tell Bran about the time that Lyanna Stark dressed up as a knight, crowned Elia Martell the queen of love and beauty, and ran away with her. Thus sparing everyone a great deal of trouble and upset.

I go back and forward on whether I think Lyanna Stark was the knight of the laughing tree. On the one hand I want her to have been, because lady knights are everything I want. On the other, basically two of the very few things we know for sure about Lyanna is that she was scrappy like Arya, and that she was a brilliant horsewoman. But I feel like she would have needed more than that to beat three even mediocre jousters. And I doubt jousting is a skill she could have picked up in secret, and it's so outside the feminine sphere that it would have been mentioned.

So, yeah, I wish the mystery knight had been Lyanna Stark; I think he was Howland Reed.

But, hey, it's my fairytale, so of course it has girl jousters, and female characters rescuing themselves, and happy Starks!

Two different remixes that I'd written over the last month or so de-anoned this weekend, and I thought I would self-indulgently talk about them. Because I think they're both kind of interesting in that I don't think they're as obviously by me as a lot of the things I write. I have a very distinctive style, I've been told.

So for remix_redux I remixed an ASOIAF five things fic called I Believe The Children Are Our Future, which is about various characters (Lyanna, Bran, Cersei, Arianne, Jon) being fostered out young and brought up in a different house. And each segment is basically a ficlet of a few hundred words (nothing wrong with that, I've written stories in that style myself) so my idea as to how to remix it was to expand every section into a longer fic; because why write one remix when you can write five?

The biggest change was that one of the sections (Arianne being raised in the Targaryen court in exile as Viserys' intended) was exorcised completely. Partly because I ran out of time/fannish energy, and partly because I had a lot of trouble with the idea of writing a sane future King!Viserys; I guess the you are the chosen one vibes I get off Dany are too strong, even as the narrative itself actively works to undermine those vibes. And I know it smacks of excusing my own laziness, but I think the remix works better as a four things than a five, because this way it's all about the Starks, really: three Starks who were brought up by other families, and one Lannister raised by wolves.

Hence the funky remix subtitle.

Live For Just These Twenty Years (the wolves in sheep's clothing remix)
ASOIAF; PG; 7527 words; Lyanna Stark, Bran Stark, Jon Snow, Cersei Lannister

Political fostering, yea or nay?

(Lyanna Stark, fostered at Sunspear; Bran Stark, a ward of Pyke; Cersei Lannister, a lioness in Winterfell; Jon Snow, a southron knight)


I also signed up for the Merlin fandom remix, which could have easily gone very wrong, because Merlin fandom is even more overwhelmingly Merlin/Arthur centric than it was in my day. And it's not that I particularly object to remixing M/A, it's that my interpretation of the M/A relationship is So Very Different to the majority of fandom's that nobody who ships them really wants me remixing their fic.

For the curious, my take on their relationship can be summed up thusly: the only thing creepier that Merlin's canon obsession with Arthur, is the way fandom romanticises it.

Anyway, I was very lucky with matching that I got someone's who's oeuvre included Lessons Learned which is a post series fic where Arthur has returned, and Merlin is pre-emptively killing Arthur's enemies (Mordred, Morgana, etc.) as they rise again; only it's strongly implied that these aren't the old foes come again, they're just random people, and Merlin is just violently paranoid.

So, I made my remix explicit that these weren't the reincarnations of anybody, just innocent bystanders, and I split my remix between two perspectives. Between the boys; Arthur, and Merlin teaching him about the modern world, which I'm sure has been done in 1001 fics before, and the detective who's investigating Merlin's killing spree.

I am weirdly proud of this remix. Mostly because I don't like Merlin as a character, nor do I like M/A as a ship, but I think I managed to respect the original fic, and the ship, while making my problems with it (not just the dead women, but the co-dependence, the way that Merlin manipulates Arthur, and how Arthur doesn't realise how much Merlin controls his life) pretty explicit.

Lessons Learned (a little bit of history repeating remix)
Merlin; R; 3200 words; Merlin/Arthur

Merlin has always killed for Arthur, ever since Camelot, but they're not in Camelot anymore.

In 2013 I wrote 40,000 words across 13 fics. Um.

( Fic links )

( and a hell of a lot of blether )

And written in response to a question from 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?

A year ago there was a meme going round where you posted your top ten fics by AO3 hit count and then navel gazed about the stats, and I did that, and now some people are repeating it and talking about what has changed, and because I am nothing if not a sheep, I am going to do that too.

Also, I find AO3 stats nerdily fascinating.

( List of Fics )

( Navel Gazing )

For the fic commentary meme mcdoh1902 asked for a commentary on Walk Softly and Carry a Magic Sword, which, it has just occurred to me, is kind of a crap title, so it shall henceforth be known as The One Where Kahlan is the Seeker and Cara is Foiled by Evil Geography.

The version without all this nonsense lives here.

Walk Softly and Carry a Magic Sword (DVD Commentary Edition)
Legend of the Seeker; Cara/Kahlan; PG-13

( In which I have feelings about Cara's feelings, shipping in the LotS universe, and appropriate things to wear when sword fighting )

I love this time of year because I don't actually have to think up my own entries, I can just do endless time-wastey memes.

( fandom in 2011 )

I usually do the year in fic meme as a post of its own, but, then, I've usually written enough to justify it.

( 11 fics, 22,000 words, and that's only if I include the Squid Thing, plus questions )

Bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land, because victory is mine!

By which I mean my yuletide fic is finished, and finished ludicrously, ludicrously early. Not only that, but I am actually quite proud of what I've written.

Honestly, yuletide this year has been so easy that it's almost felt like cheating.

Right. Done gloating now.

Today contained much exciting plumbing. I popped home for lunch to find the bathroom under an inch of water. At times like that there are two voices in my head, the first of which points out that I am a calm, competent, grown up woman and I can deal with it myself, the second of which goes, Da-ad! Help! There's stuff everywhere!

On the plus side, I did manage to get the leak fixed on my own without needing to call in a plumber. Admittedly I did have my dad on speakerphone telling me what to do the whole time. Still. Not bad, eh?

Speaking of things that are mad and stressful, NaNo starts tomorrow, which I'm not doing because you could add up everything I've written in my entire life and I doubt you'd get 50 000 words. But I do like to try and write a fair few fics during November as a way of joining in the fun a bit. And this is the point where I ask you lovely people to do the hard bit for me and tell me what to write:

Leave me me a prompt. Characters, pairing, general scenario, whatever you like, and I will work my way through them over the course of the month.

Suggested fandoms, for the sake of variety: Classic Doctor Who, Warehouse 13, Lost Girl, Game of Thrones/ASoIaf, Being Human, Discworld, Legend of the Seeker.