For the fanfic meme ask game thing: F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it. I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)? V: If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
F. Okay, the dialogue one is kind of hard because I adore dialogue. And with 101 Stargate fics (and 33 works in various other fandoms I really don’t think you’re asking about); choosing favorites - even a short list - is kind of excruciating. But I won’t let that stop me. That’s not to say that it didn’t take me a while to choose.
From The Three Pigeons, I really like the following exchange. I particularly like it because even though we should hopefully, mostly recognize these characters, it is an AU and they’re enough different that it’s important to give the reader a strong sense of their personality traits. In this AU, Jack and Sam are police detectives in Washington D.C. They’ve been getting closer. And earlier in this story, Sam has met Sara for the first time and is having thoughts about the kind of women Jack likes and how maybe she’s just a little jealous of Sara. So she’s behaving a little uncharacteristically, Jack calls her on it, but then he backs off with:
“And I’m going to let you keep your secret, whatever it is. Because that’s just the kind of guy I am.”
She snorted. She couldn’t help it. “You are not the kind of guy to let someone keep a secret.”
He raised an eyebrow and she caught the look in the mirror that covered the back wall of the bar, despite the obscuring bottles.
“You’re a detective,” she reminded him unnecessarily.
“Bad guys don’t get to keep secrets. You wanna keep a secret from me, that’s fine.”
She looked over at him. “Yeah?”
“No line of questioning? No guessing until I flinch? No good-cop?”
“I think that whatever’s got you drinking on Wednesday night must be pretty important. And I figure you’ll talk to me when you’re ready.”
So what I hoped to do, and think I managed fairly well, was give the reader (and Sam) a sense of his ability to recognize and honor her boundaries and, more importantly, her autonomy. Especially considering their rendezvous with Jonas Hanson a few stories back, and her confession to him about that relationship. Couple that with the way he offered her the information about the death of his son a couple stories back, and, in theory, what we have here are not just two people who are nervous to make a move but who recognize that the person they are dealing with is both trustworthy and trusting.
Or, you know, maybe it’s just a sweet little scene in a fun AU. Your mileage may vary.
I. For reading, absolutely! And because I’m guilty, I’m not sharing. ;) For writing… I don’t know. Maybe? There are things I really really want to write but haven’t because I know it’s a shitty, cliched premise with no redeeming value. But I still dream about it anyway. :D
V. Oh my. Um… wow, this is hard. Because (and I was just saying this to someone else), I’m constantly blown away by the talent in this fandom. There are some really amazing stories and ideas that I’ve had the pleasure of reading over the years. And I love those stories not just because the ideas were good, but because the style of the author so perfectly meshed with their story idea and we ended up with such a satisfying read. And for that reason, the idea of tacking my personal writing style into/onto the world built by that fic writer seems like a way to just ruin something I otherwise loved. I have been near-forcefully compelled to take someone’s very clear and specific idea and re-write the details of the fic to suit my personal tastes. And that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the quality of the “source material”. Sometimes someone has a brilliant idea but my brain wants to insert specific details to highlight the things about the idea that I find particularly titillating. But generally I don’t think that would be well received, even though I don’t look at it as attempting to write something better, but just something that is better for me/my personal tastes. It’s certainly not a public indictment of someone else’s writing. But I could see how it would appear to be. So I rein in that impulse. Generally. ;) And when I don’t, I usually end up with something so distinct from the original that the person who wrote the original doesn’t realize I bastardized their idea. (Stupid, unreliable brains/muses.) But it has happened once or twice.
