Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, November 22, 2003
 | How to Relax on a Saturday
I spent a lovely Saturday morning working on a Doctor Who story that has languished since early summer. It's short---a two-parter, featuring the Doctor, UNIT, and Liz Shaw. I'd tell you more about it, but if you want to read it, I don't want to spoil it for you. By the way, amateur fiction based on a television series is called fan fiction. A lot of it is perfectly awful, as I learned when I tried once to make a web compendium of good fanfiction for Doctor Who. In fanfiction, only a minority of writers try to create stories that faithfully depict the series on which it is based. (You could call us Fan Fiction Fundamentalists, I suppose.) It's far more common for fanfic writers to throw in romance (and often sex) that doesn't occur in the original, and the stories tend to be grossly sentimental, cloying, or contrived. |
| Fan fiction succeeds when it makes the reader go "WOW!" That's the only payment the fanfiction writer gets. Here's a list of fanfiction terms for you:
retcon - when the series itself makes a goof, a fanfiction writer remedies the problem by adding bits and pieces to the original (or re-explaining it with new information in a sequel) to correct the error. The best retcons don't alter the original script but just supply more explanatory detail to smooth things over. |  |
Mary Sue - Male and female characters alike can be Mary Sue characters. A Mary Sue character is an authorial presence in a new character created by the writer who either satisfies fannish longings to be a part of a story (usually in an overblown way) or else hammers some pet idea of the author's into the story. In some ways, Wesley Crusher of Star Trek NG was considered a Mary Sue character because he was too obviously an insert of what the writers considered a typical viewer mixed with the ideal they thought the typical viewer was aiming to become. In my own fanfiction, Anne Thomson runs dangerously close to being a Mary Sue (or already is).
fanwank - This term has its roots in very crude slang. It describes a story in which the writer is showing off intricate knowlege of the series by pulling in as many threads from the series continuity as possible and tying them together. Fanwank pays homage to the writer (rather than the series) for being so clever. Other, non wankish stories can artfully weave new ideas in with series continuity and tie them all together in a way that makes the reader go "Wow!" But fanwank relies on cleverly arranging continuity rather than creating a good plot.
For Episode One of my new story, Click here
