This arose out of a conversation that mithingthepoint, pyrrhiccomedy, wizzard890, and I had. Many things were said, but some of the most salient stuff was about the differences between writing original fiction and writing fanfic, and the topic’s been percolating in the back of my head ever since.
I’ve been doing a lot of both lately, and what struck me most is that original fiction builds forward, while fanfic builds outward.
Original fiction is, for the most part, linear — particularly in genre fiction (which I’m using here to refer to mystery/horror/romance/science fiction/fantasy. The stuff that usually doesn’t get labeled as Real Litrachurr). People play with the form, but there’s a core structure: an initial problem (or more than one, sometimes) or break in stasis triggers a series of events, which lead to some kind of resolution. The story might be told from one point of view or from sixteen points of view (hi, George R. R. Martin); it could have a cast of two or a cast of thousands; it could take place in a tiny leaky shack or across an entire galaxy. But no matter how broad the scope, the core narrative moves forward with each scene, and in a well-constructed story the subplots also advance the main action, though sometimes you don’t seehow until later. An original story is an arrow, essentially. It can be of any width, but it’s still moving forward. If it’s not, you don’t have a story, you have an encyclopedia.
When you’re writing fanfic, that core narrative already exists. Sometimes it’s a shaky core narrative, but it’s there. The canon’s given you the essential action; you don’t have to come up with it on your own. So you expand outward. You delve into backstory; you explore other points of view; you flesh out the world; you expand missing moments; you continue a plot thread the author set up or take it in another direction; you draw focus to relationships; you set the entire damn thing in a coffeeshop. You can write fanfic with narrative resolution, of course. I have, and so have a lot of other fanfic writers. But you don’t need that level of resolution for the reader to feel satisfied, because the reader has the canon for the narrative payoff, even if they don’t necessarily like how the canon ended up resolving. The payoff of fanfic is emotional — it doesn’t have to set out the narrative context or resolve a plotline or answer a question, it just has to elicit a response from its audience. It’s a different way of storytelling. Not better, not worse, just different.
So what happens when someone who’s used to writing fanfic transitions into writing original fiction, and that underlying structure isn’t there anymore?
It’s a harder shift than it looks. When you’re used to building and looking outward, it’s easy to come up with rich and fascinating characters and incredibly detailed worlds, and find yourself completely unable to tell the core story because everything has a story attached to it. Fandom can give us the desire to know a character completely and fully, to search for pages and pages of meaning in the smallest moments, to turn the briefest of interactions into thousands and thousands of words. And you can’t give original fiction that same microfocus, no matter how cool or interesting those explorations could be, because the forward motion of your story will grind to a halt if you try to expand every moment and explain every detail.
Another way of thinking about it: every character in a story, every sequence, every setting serves a function in the larger narrative. I’ll use Inception as an example of this, because heist movies have such clear roles for characters to fill. Ariadne’s function in the story is to serve, at least in part, as an audience surrogate. When Dom and Arthur teach her the rules of extraction, they’re letting the audience know how this world operates, too. She also serves as Dom’s confidante and conscience of sorts, which lets Dom slowly reveal his backstory and helps give him the impetus to confront Mal and break her power. Is that the entirety of who she is as a person? Of course not, and the way she fills her plot functions tells us a lot about her personality. But we don’t get to see what Ariadne does between when she leaves and when she comes back. We don’t see her wowing Miles with her architectural savvy. We don’t see her panicking over the thesis she’s abandoned, or hanging out with her friends, or talking firearms with Arthur or disguise with Eames. Presumably she does all of these things at some point, and they’re significant in terms of her personal narrative, but they don’t actually move the movie’s narrative forward. And the movie’s story is what has to be told, in the end.
(This is even true of canons where the plot arrow is EXTREMELY wide, like Homestuck. Hussie basically said as much when he explained why he killed off about half the troll cast; they’d served their roles in the narrative, and he didn’t need them around any longer to tell the story, and their deaths caused a big shift in the way the fanbase perceived the story.)
In fic, Ariadne no longer has to serve the plot functions that she did in the movie, because well, you’re not writing the movie. Ariadne can take on whatever roles the author wants her to, in whatever circumstances. But that’s only possible because we already have some context for who Ariadne is, some foundation to build all those other stories on top of.
Fandom is, in short, about untold stories — but you can’t tell untold stories if you haven’t told the basic story first.
And hey, this entire line of reasoning also explains why I can’t stand Victor Hugo.
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