Hello! Wow, there's lively discussion in here.
(When I saw people talking about a Fan Fiction Mafia, I thought it meant mafia the game and was like WHY WAS I NOT INVITED. But a club is fine too!)
Well. I'm Dragonfree; I write the hellishly long silly ten-year-old trainer fic in my sig, the weird experimental deconstructiony Pokémorph fic also in my sig, and a Pokémon one-shot once in a blue moon. I've also written a couple of original short stories and started a lot of longer original stories when I was younger. Technically I've dabbled in short stories for a few other fandoms too, but I tend to be unhappy with them and not finish them or post them anywhere because I'm wayyyy too perfectionistic about characterization and when I try to write canon characters I usually don't feel like I'm getting their voices quite right.
I also mod the fanfic forum and occasionally write extremely nitpicky reviews or host contests or, best of all, write extremely nitpicky reviews for entries in contests. (Speaking of which, we're going to have the next contest soon, I swear! I'm waiting for the awards to be over so they don't overlap.)
Why I like fanfic/writing
Because fiction is pretty much my favorite thing in the world. Wrenching real emotion and investment out of real people by telling stories about imaginary things happening to imaginary people is
magic. The human capacity for doing that sums up everything I love about humanity. People who don't see the magic of pure storytelling and think fiction is only good for making points about the real world make me sad.
Fess up, kitties. What was your first story about?
The first proper story I wrote was when I was seven and was obsessed with horses; it was about a horse named Faxi. At the beginning, his father died and he inherited a bunch of things it made no sense for a horse to have that were never brought up again. Then he was suddenly captured by two men who just walked up to him (IT WAS A TRAP!). Then he was going to be shot because he couldn't work anymore, but was saved by a tiger. Then it turned out a rock had gotten stuck in his eye! But soon it fell out. Then he met a mare who loved him and had a foal. One day she discovered his two horse enemies were going to kidnap their foal, and he swore that would never happen! But he was kidnapped anyway the next day. Then he went to save the foal, but when he did, his enemies captured him (IT WAS A TRAP!). They made him work all day carrying his enemy's foal around. Then the mare came and saved both of them, after realizing that they were making Faxi keep watch during the night while they slept (totally no security hole there). Then I wrote a ridiculous dramatic poem about Faxi and his enemy dueling. I was writing stories about horses named Faxi for years; they were supposed to be the same horse, but the continuity didn't make much sense (its free-standing sequel was about him being best friends with a squirrel and fighting the evil weather-controlling Lightning Horse and his Thunder Gang, with neither his family nor his enemies from the first story anywhere in sight).
The first
fanfic I wrote was when I was eleven and was mostly an essay about how amazing my terrible fake legendary hybrids Molzapart and Rainteicune were. I thought I was a total genius for thinking up the concept of writing
stories about
Pokémon. Although a few years before that, I'd been making up a story about a boy bamfing into the Warcraft II universe and making friends with one of the paladins while basically going through the story of the game, but I never wrote that down.
Which authors do you look up to?
There are lots of books I like, but I don't really tend to think about the authors much. I look enormously up to several fanfic authors, but for proper book authors I'm mostly just like "oh, I like what they write." Probably because for the most part I don't know much about them other than what they've written.
Did you ever write a story to tell a story, or to make a point about whatever, or both? How subtle were you? Did it go well, or did you slip?
I wrote a silly short one-shot called "The Forum" in 2005 because I was annoyed at the silly rules at another forum. It was not subtle at all; it was written in a kind of satirical heavily lampshady bedtime story style and was about an Abra who founded a forum, evolved as he got more members, and stabbed rule-breakers with his spoons, eventually forgetting all about the image of a perfect community he'd started out with and continuing to blindly enforce the rules he'd written down without regard for whether they made any real sense.
It was a really childish thing to do, but I'd still endorse the general message of it. It wasn't really a proper work of fiction at all, though; it was just a ranty analogy formatted as a story, which made random use of an inside joke I have with a friend of mine about crazy Kadabra stabbing people with spoons. I wouldn't post it as fanfiction today, but I'm still kind of fond of it. Parts of it.
How did you get an idea for a fic? Does it come to you? Or if you get inspired?
Usually I just get ideas from random things I've been reading/thinking about that seem like they would be interesting to write about.
Because I actually went and read/skimmed the whole thread, some comments on the organically emerging discussion topics we've had:
I didn't read Redwall or Animorphs or any of the things that made up everyone's childhood, because I live in Iceland. My favorite books growing up were Icelandic children's fantasy by a friend of my mom's that she introduced me to, and (Icelandic translations of)
The Neverending Story and
Momo by Michael Ende, which my best friend introduced me to and are some of the best children's novels ever written. It makes me sadface when people think The Neverending Story is a movie (note: the movie covers the first half of the book, grossly misses the point and tacks on an ending that's about as antithetical to the point of the book as possible).
I did also read Artemis Fowl, a bit later; today I recognize that it's anvilicious and not well written and the toilet humor made me cringe even at the time, but it's actually still a guilty pleasure because for some reason the parts where characters are horribly mutilated and/or killed
really press some of my buttons in ways that even similar scenes in objectively better stories don't. So basically in my memory the series goes something like this:
- Fairies! Also ENVIRONMENTALISM.
- That scene where Butler gets beaten into a bloody pulp by a troll, and is magically revived because somewhere in the splatter of gore his heart is still technically beating
- Something about Artemis's dad
- The scene where Butler is shot and stuffed in a freezer
- The scene where (spoiler) is slowly crushed to death while his magic keeps automatically healing the damage and prolonging his agony until it runs dry and he dies
- Something Opal Koboi something
- Something with imps and Artemis becoming annoying and getting a love interest
- Lemur! Also ENVIRONMENTALISM.
- Time-traveling shenanigans!
- ENVIRONMENTALISM.
- And also something where Artemis has several broken bones. I don't remember what was going on in that scene exactly but I enjoyed it.
...granted, the last one I read was The Time Paradox several years ago.
I'm on board the not-liking-most-romance boat. I find it really tedious when people decide there has to be a romance in everything and the main character has to have a love interest. Which isn't to say romance is bad in itself - love and attraction are important and interesting aspects of human emotions and behaviour, all sorts of fun things can be done with them in fiction, and sometimes characters organically have great romantic chemistry. It's just it keeps getting stuffed in where it doesn't contribute anything.
The actual romance genre isn't my thing generally - if it's all or mostly about the characters getting together, it tends to fail to actually hold my attention and get me to care, so I tend not to seek it out. Shipping fic is actually at an advantage in that regard because then I may already care about the characters and their chemistry and be sold on the idea of the romance before it starts, which means it can just be short and sweet instead of trying to wring a whole novel out of the relationship (which I suspect I'd find horribly tedious even if it were about characters I already ship like nobody's business). Sadly, as I said above I'm very picky about characterization, and most shipping fic feels horrendously OOC to me, so I still don't read much of it.
Meeker said:
My first story was Auðn (pronounced: eye-ethn
But... it's not pronounced even remotely like that. D: It's one syllable!