Original fiction
Apr. 21st, 2003 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyblossomI'm posting about original fiction because ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
blackholly said she wouldn't mind.
Okay. I've been ignoring my original manuscript like...well, like a big thing that you ignore. I do this from time to time when I need to refuel, which is why you see ridiculous amounts of fanfiction pour out of me. Generally I use fanfiction to work out certain problems I run into with original fiction.
Lately: I've been worried about my hero. I've never written Harry very well, and lately I've been trying to explore Harry to see how to write a hero who is human but still, well, heroic. Which probably accounts for the fact that I take a lot of liberties with the canon in order to do this.I find everyone else easier to write, everyone else. Heroes are tough.
So to date I have 82,680 words on the original manuscript. I keep an excel worksheet for this, which is why I know exactly how long it is. I'm a bit disappointed with that number because I was hoping to keep it under 80k, but no luck. I'm sure a good edit will help some, but I'm not sure where the market sits on the size of a manuscript these days. If it went over 100k I would pull out all my hair, but I don't see that happening.
What I have left to do: one scene (ONE!) and apparently it needs a last chapter. I thought it was finished where it was, but I've been told by very intelligent people that it needs one more, and I can see their point. That will probably add somewhere between 5 and 6k to the total. So I'm still looking at a manuscript under 90k, which I suppose could be worse.
The first chapter probably needs more work. Other than that, I think it's pretty much good to go. Since it was me who wrote it, it needs a line edit, because I'm sloppier than a very sloppy thing. But I've edited the entire manuscript twice myself so far. I had to entirely rewrite the middle of it, and I'm fairly happy with it now.
What to say about it. I'm tragically bad at summarizing these things, I get too caught up in the details. It's the story of a highly-stratified society on the brink of collapse, a myth that turns out to be true, and a 16 year old boy who turns out to be the proof of both of those things. And if you think that sounds just like Harry Potter, you don't read enough fantasy fiction; it sounds like a helluva lot of stuff, actually.
Hopefully tonight I can crank out that last chapter, and that one stupid scene. It's not even a complicated scene, really. I don't know what stalled me for so long. Fear, I think. Fear that I really can't accomplish this.
Original fiction is a lot harder than fanfiction. You know why? It's not even in the characters or anything like that. It's not even the world building exactly. I think original fiction is harder beause you can't bet on ANYTHING. When we write fanfiction we get to fall back on stuff; I know I love to write stories that are a reflection of how I feel about the way certain characters are protrayed, or the stereotype that they are, or the way the fandom views them. I've written fics about Millicent because she's supposed to be the big brutish girl; about Ginny, the obvious marriage material; Harry, the near-perfect hero, the dandelion child who will, in the end, always make the right choice. I mean, you get to riff off that stuff when you write fanfiction, people know what you're talking about. You have more room to move because people know where you're coming from.
My first draft of this manuscript was really a very elaborate outline, as it turns out. This is a bit of an education for me; the need to explain everything is so great that it's hard to skip the exposition and jump into your story. Possibly this is just a problem for sci-fi/fantasy writers, since they have an entire universe to communicate within the first few pages. I found that I actually had to go through, write out the exposition for the first oh eight or nine chapters, work out who these characters were, what their backgrounds were and their motivations, and then figure out what needed to happen when, and then GO BACK and actually write the story. I didn't realize I was doing this at the time, but it's chapter eight or nine before the story really starts to unhitch itself from all that static explanation, which I went back and replaced.
And even now I feel like I'm writing an introduction all the time. At first I thought this was just because this is actually an introductory story, in my mind; I mean, it's a prequel to something else I've already sort of written. It's a separate story in and of itself, it's a very traditional structure; sort of the inverted check mark, but with a first climax and the a second. It is a self-contained story, but I still think of it as introductory, because my goals in writing it are to set up certain key things, certain probabilities, to carry along the stories I have planned for later. To ensure that certain characters are in place so that the next shoe can drop. I blamed my own goals for that prelude feel I have, but now I think it's not that. I think it's just the fact that it's not fanfiction. I really do have to explain all these people, there's no meta here. There's no way to add the adjective!name here. When you write Harry or Hermione or Lex or Clark or Draco or Edmund Pevensie you write from a base of knowledge; everything you add is on top of that. When you write original fiction you just start from zero, you can't rely on you audience to know anything other than what you tell them.
I hadn't guessed that that would be such a difference, but I still find fanfiction to be relatively easy, even when I'm totally outside the canon. Even when I'm writing them OOC. Because even then it's a commentary, it's still meta-canon. Original fiction is harder because of that, I think.
But I still find it easier to write a good sequel than to write a good new story; I'm all about building on top of other things, long story arcs with lots of references back, pulling details forward, that sort of thing.
I can't decide if this will help or hinder me from this goal, I mean, the goal of being an actual writer and not just a fanfiction hack.
blackholly said she wouldn't mind.Okay. I've been ignoring my original manuscript like...well, like a big thing that you ignore. I do this from time to time when I need to refuel, which is why you see ridiculous amounts of fanfiction pour out of me. Generally I use fanfiction to work out certain problems I run into with original fiction.
Lately: I've been worried about my hero. I've never written Harry very well, and lately I've been trying to explore Harry to see how to write a hero who is human but still, well, heroic. Which probably accounts for the fact that I take a lot of liberties with the canon in order to do this.I find everyone else easier to write, everyone else. Heroes are tough.
So to date I have 82,680 words on the original manuscript. I keep an excel worksheet for this, which is why I know exactly how long it is. I'm a bit disappointed with that number because I was hoping to keep it under 80k, but no luck. I'm sure a good edit will help some, but I'm not sure where the market sits on the size of a manuscript these days. If it went over 100k I would pull out all my hair, but I don't see that happening.
What I have left to do: one scene (ONE!) and apparently it needs a last chapter. I thought it was finished where it was, but I've been told by very intelligent people that it needs one more, and I can see their point. That will probably add somewhere between 5 and 6k to the total. So I'm still looking at a manuscript under 90k, which I suppose could be worse.
The first chapter probably needs more work. Other than that, I think it's pretty much good to go. Since it was me who wrote it, it needs a line edit, because I'm sloppier than a very sloppy thing. But I've edited the entire manuscript twice myself so far. I had to entirely rewrite the middle of it, and I'm fairly happy with it now.
What to say about it. I'm tragically bad at summarizing these things, I get too caught up in the details. It's the story of a highly-stratified society on the brink of collapse, a myth that turns out to be true, and a 16 year old boy who turns out to be the proof of both of those things. And if you think that sounds just like Harry Potter, you don't read enough fantasy fiction; it sounds like a helluva lot of stuff, actually.
Hopefully tonight I can crank out that last chapter, and that one stupid scene. It's not even a complicated scene, really. I don't know what stalled me for so long. Fear, I think. Fear that I really can't accomplish this.
Original fiction is a lot harder than fanfiction. You know why? It's not even in the characters or anything like that. It's not even the world building exactly. I think original fiction is harder beause you can't bet on ANYTHING. When we write fanfiction we get to fall back on stuff; I know I love to write stories that are a reflection of how I feel about the way certain characters are protrayed, or the stereotype that they are, or the way the fandom views them. I've written fics about Millicent because she's supposed to be the big brutish girl; about Ginny, the obvious marriage material; Harry, the near-perfect hero, the dandelion child who will, in the end, always make the right choice. I mean, you get to riff off that stuff when you write fanfiction, people know what you're talking about. You have more room to move because people know where you're coming from.
My first draft of this manuscript was really a very elaborate outline, as it turns out. This is a bit of an education for me; the need to explain everything is so great that it's hard to skip the exposition and jump into your story. Possibly this is just a problem for sci-fi/fantasy writers, since they have an entire universe to communicate within the first few pages. I found that I actually had to go through, write out the exposition for the first oh eight or nine chapters, work out who these characters were, what their backgrounds were and their motivations, and then figure out what needed to happen when, and then GO BACK and actually write the story. I didn't realize I was doing this at the time, but it's chapter eight or nine before the story really starts to unhitch itself from all that static explanation, which I went back and replaced.
And even now I feel like I'm writing an introduction all the time. At first I thought this was just because this is actually an introductory story, in my mind; I mean, it's a prequel to something else I've already sort of written. It's a separate story in and of itself, it's a very traditional structure; sort of the inverted check mark, but with a first climax and the a second. It is a self-contained story, but I still think of it as introductory, because my goals in writing it are to set up certain key things, certain probabilities, to carry along the stories I have planned for later. To ensure that certain characters are in place so that the next shoe can drop. I blamed my own goals for that prelude feel I have, but now I think it's not that. I think it's just the fact that it's not fanfiction. I really do have to explain all these people, there's no meta here. There's no way to add the adjective!name here. When you write Harry or Hermione or Lex or Clark or Draco or Edmund Pevensie you write from a base of knowledge; everything you add is on top of that. When you write original fiction you just start from zero, you can't rely on you audience to know anything other than what you tell them.
I hadn't guessed that that would be such a difference, but I still find fanfiction to be relatively easy, even when I'm totally outside the canon. Even when I'm writing them OOC. Because even then it's a commentary, it's still meta-canon. Original fiction is harder because of that, I think.
But I still find it easier to write a good sequel than to write a good new story; I'm all about building on top of other things, long story arcs with lots of references back, pulling details forward, that sort of thing.
I can't decide if this will help or hinder me from this goal, I mean, the goal of being an actual writer and not just a fanfiction hack.
