Rec: writing meta

[resonant]

I don't know if y'all are following Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer's online writing community. I try to look into it a couple of times a week, but I hadn't really been connecting with it -- for a long time they were chiefly writing about things (like POV) that fandom teaches better than anyone, or things (like goal and motivation) that I've been struggling with for so long that it makes me tired just to read about them.

Today, though, there's a post on something I've never seen discussed: The protagonist's community, and how to build it.

One thing that particularly struck me was the way she stresses involving the reader in the community by starting out with no community, so that the reader is in on it from the start:

That emotional connection is even stronger when the reader reads the creation of the community or the protagonist’s entry into a existing community through the course of the story (”bonds developed over time”), participating vicariously in the struggles of the characters to bond.

I tend to connect most strongly with the characters who are the most lonesome -- not just isolated but longing for connection. (Benton Fraser was the absolute archetypal Res-love in that respect.) So I don't know whether following this advice would make a story moving for everyone, but it would certainly work for me.

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this link! I didn't know about this. I am looking for this kind of writing resource and discussion.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping it will move more in this direction, where it tells me stuff I've never thought of before.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I think this is really interesting, b/c so much of slash to me thrives on the closet model, the total focus of two people on one another at the expense of (or in the absence of) a community. So often we don't see much of the other characters, b/c the story focuses on those two but also because they're not that much outside contact.

So I wonder how much that advice actually works for much slash...

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

In a sense, it's done for us -- slash stories are written against the background of the canon community, whether or not they make more than cursory use of it.

What slashers do a lot of, though, is take a character who might be peripheral to the canon community (you could argue that Rodney is like that, at least in early episodes) or isolated from it (like Snape) and focus on his gradually growing connectedness -- either with that community, or with one other person, or with a whole new community of OCs.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that can happen, but I when I read this I had to think of the shack phenomenon, which to me is kind of the epitome of a certain A and B are everything for one another, where we collapse the best friends and the lover and everything in between and kind of near claustrophobically push them onto one another and if they're in the closet it's even worse, where we have stories where literally noone else ever appears...and then I had to think of LiviaPenn's criticism to me when I posted a rec list that all of the stories were excessive McShep with no other real characters...

anyway...I think the community can work, esp for alienated characters, but I do think there's a large number of fairly community of two only stories as well...

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Is that really a closet model, though? Or is it a Canadian shack?

I mean, closets don't just exist in isolation; there has to be a larger world to be closeted from. Stories that are about two characters against the world, or two characters and their secret love, are profoundly about community-- the community is just drawn in negative space.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

That's a really good point!

But then the community rarely gets created but rather is what the source text or we fill in, right???

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

This may explain the appeal of coming-out stories: first you establish the bond between the two of you, and then you go and establish that bond as a reality in the eyes of your community.

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

This is why I cannot seem to say anything in less than 20,000 words anymore. Making those connections takes time and development. Agree with you about Fraser (and certainly Snape). If you have a character that is alone, then if you don't want it to become contrived or artificial, it takes a body of work to establish realistic connections.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I know! And those stories are really satisfying when they work, but they're a pain in the neck to write.

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

It sort of depends. This Boy's Life took *years* off my life to finish. Snape: the Home Fries Nazi? I finished that sucker in three weeks. I wonder if it has to do the fact that I wrote one in first person and the other in third. Interesting.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I'd never heard of this workshop before. And also interesting what you say about what fandom teaches us. Maybe it makes sense that fandom doesn't think about community much because canon furnishes a ready-made community, as it were. We can just sketch it in as background: all the fans know the community; they want the individual. So maybe the community is more something to occupy origfic writing?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Probably so. In fanfic we have the luxury of ignoring the community, or of just making gestures at it. Zelenka walks through a SGA story, waving his hands, and something in my subconscious goes, "Yeah, OK, they're all still there. Now about John and Rodney ..."

[china_shop]

Ooh, thanks for the link! Interesting. I hadn't thought about that before.

Maybe having a pairing connect with their wider community in a meaningful way (as well as with each other) brings extra warmth and hope to a story. It's like we're not just saying, "Look, you have a relationship now, yay!" -- we're also saying, "Look! You have a whole life!" :-)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

It does. Many of the stories that have most warmed my heart over the years have been this kind of stories. cesperanza does them especially well, I think.

Even among my own stories (which are much more pairing-oriented than community-oriented), the ones that get the most comments for the longest time (Higher Education, Transfigurations) are usually the ones with more community.

[julchen56.livejournal.com]

Having nothing really intelligent to say - but listening very interestedly to you all talking - I just wanted to tell you that I absolutely *love* Transfigurations for even that aspect that *all* the characters I know and love from the books are in it and that I still read it once or twice a year although I don't follow HP fandom anymore.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Aww. I'm so glad! I'm not so much reading HP stuff any more, either -- if nothing awful happens to Snape in the next book, my interest may return -- but I'm always happy to hear that people are still enjoying the story.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

One reason I like gr0n, or porny gen, or whatever you want to call that kind of story is precisely because it situates the relationship(s) in the context of a community--e.g., Mal and Simon are lovers, and they're also keeping Serenity flying and smuggling things or stealing things or fighting epidemics on Planet Zorg, and hassling with Wash and Zoe about who gets the night off in the hotel room and trying to make River better and having arguments with theology with the Shepherd and...

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

And what little I know of Firefly fandom suggests that it's one of the ones that are especially hospitable to that kind of story. (By contrast, Due South lends itself to you-and-me-against-the-world, and the Stargates are very team-oriented.)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

replying to resonant8: I don't know much about DueSouth fandom (and much of what I do know was in the service of a Firefly crossover!) but Fraser knows approximately every little old lady in Chicago, and if it's a Fraser/Ray V story then in effect he inherits all 7,000 members of the Vecchio clan. RayK does seem more of a loner than RayV.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link! That's a fascinating topic, and one I need to think more about. Particularly as someone who is part of several loosely overlapping communities, I often have trouble suspending my disbelief for story worlds in which everyone seems to have a neat, tight, reciprocal circle of Important Folks, and then relative strangers, and not much in between.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Now that's something I don't think I've seen in fanfic -- maybe because it's the tendency of ensemble shows either to start out with everybody together or to move gradually in that direction over the life of the show. But it's true to my life, too. My parties tend to be disasters because my friends like me but they don't know what to say to each other.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*nods* It makes a lot of sense from a show creator's perspective, and I think it is even harder for a fanfic writer to fight that inward pull because introducing original characters has a tendency to dilute the interest of the audience even if they are not Mary Sues (unless the character is a Villain of the Week). I don't know how well it would work to introduce that dynamic in fanfic into a canon world that didn't have it to start with. But it does make me want to at least acknowledge the possibility in original stories, if I can figure out how -- and not just with the "fixer" archetype who knows everyone but doesn't actually do anything besides make connections between them.