Writings

“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life, or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

…

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird pp. 21-22

I did something in November.

I wrote a shitty first draft.

This is the seventh year I’ve done NaNoWriMo, and aside from the first year when I signed up but never really started, I’ve only failed to finish twice. Most of the time, what has come out has been passable, even though the format means it’s not my best. In fact, in two of the years, what came out was positively lovely for the most part. So I always figured, hey, my shitty first drafts are pretty good. I must be lucky.

Not this year.

I hated every word. Well, to be fair, some of the articles were okay, and I imagine most of the conjunctions and prepositions. But outside of that, there’s probably 47K of junk that’s going to go down the drain. Somehow, my concept found me writing women’s lit, a genre in which I feel out of my own skin, and as much as I tried to bend it back toward literary fiction, the damn thing wouldn’t go. I wanted to quit every second, even at 48,000 words when I knew one more hour would get me finished.

But I didn’t quit. Why? Because laying down the shitty first draft gives you something to work with. I have an idea where I’d like this novel to go, and now I have some characters to help scaffold it (even though several of those characters changed names and circumstances en route and I’ll have to go back and reconcile that). The conflict hit at about 40K, which will need to be shifted back a great deal to a more logical place for an 80-90K work. A lot of it is exposition and a bunch of drivel about mothers-in-law which is funny since I don’t have one. But I have a draft. I have something to which I can go, yank the characters forward, and write a novel. A good one.

I didn’t mean to ignore my fics for a whole month, and for that I apologize. Last year, I cranked out an entire 25K of fic–the longest chapter of Ithaca is Gorges and most of the chapter which followed, while writing my NaNo novel. I figured this year, turning out a chapter or two of Stregoni, which is only 3-8K would be a piece of cake.

Not so.

This novel fought me every inch of the way. The characters were dull. The plot didn’t make sense. The relationships developed too quickly and others too slowly. People spent pages dwelling on organic cotton, of all things. I kind of wanted to shoot myself, or at least spend some time snuggling with Carlisle instead. After fighting with Becca, Christine, Topher, and Matthew, I was too exhausted to write much else. I wanted to quit.

But I didn’t. And last night at 9PM EST, I hit 50,160 words.

How many of those words will last? Very few, I’m sure. I may just take one character and run with her. But I believe sincerely in using November to scaffold a little, to let myself come out of the month with something I can use. My fics are yours as much as they are mine—I don’t intend to pull them, even if that means that, if someone publishes one of my novels, I can’t tell the fandom—and I write them with the intention that I won’t do anything with them but give them away.

However, this was an eye-opening experience, and one by which I am humbled. I’m glad to know I can stick to a project I’m not crazy about, and that I can hold on even when I want to claw my eyes out. I know now that I can write 1667 words in an hour and not feel entirely frazzled by that pace, if I put my mind to it. (This bodes well for Stregoni, because that means I should in theory draft a chapter in two to four hours.)

And now I have a shitty first draft. It’s kind of a cool thing, really. Freeing.

So, thanks for not crucifying me while I abandoned you to do it.

Note: This is the author blog that was posted on Edwardville on 6/22/10.

Inspiration, Transformation, & Ownership:
Fic for the Sake of Fic

I wasn’t sure if my face betrayed my shock, but I returned to gazing at the simple, ancient cross, just in case. I quickly did the mental math; the cross was over three hundred and seventy years old. The silence stretched on as I struggled to wrap my mind around the concept of so many years. “Are you all right?” He sounded worried.

“How old is Carlisle?” I asked quietly, ignoring his question, still standing up.

“He just celebrated his three hundred and sixty-second birthday,” Edward said.

—Twilight, pp. 330-331

And that was it for me. That moment, when you see someone and you know at once they’re going to change your life. When your stomach drops, and your heart starts pounding and you suddenly feel antsy.

There was the rush of love at first sight for me the first time I read Twilight. But it wasn’t me inserting myself for Bella and falling for Edward. Oh, no. It was me, a writer since she could make letters, falling for the character of Carlisle Cullen. Three hundred and sixty-two, my mind said. All the things he’s seen! And he’s a doctor? As a vampire?

Now, I’ve written my whole life. There weren’t kids my age in my neighborhood, and as the little sister to two snarky teenaged brothers, I learned really fast that if I put my imaginary friends on paper, I could play with them all I wanted without being made fun of. Two decades’ worth of short stories, novels, and random scenes later, I have created dozens of characters of my own, and I’ve read enough books to have seen thousands more.

But no character has ever captured my imagination quite like Carlisle. In Carlisle I saw a magnificent, tortured soul, fighting to redeem himself for sins he’s never committed, and struggling to forgive himself for those he has. I saw endless possibility for this man and the family of broken people that he’s assembled around him. I loved Carlisle from the very beginning—I tore through four thick books just to get the occasional glimpse of him, and then, when it was all over, I began to write.

I posted my first story, “The Talk,” on Twilighted in mid-January 2009, about a week after I finished Breaking Dawn. And I started reading at once—looking for more of the characters I’d loved. I hate it when books end. If a story ends well, I get the sense that the characters are living on without me, and, well, I’m nosy. After I’ve been let so intimately into someone’s life, I don’t like having my access cut off. In fic I found the opportunity to keep prying into the lives of these fascinating immortal humans, to borrow Stephenie Meyer’s term, and their continued trials as a family.

And something bizarre happened. I went back to look at my story…and found that people had written back. They wanted to talk about what parts they’d enjoyed; what had made them laugh—and they wanted to talk about Carlisle. So I kept writing, kept reading, and began turning back layers of fandom, becoming more and more deeply involved.

As I did so, Carlisle moved himself off the page and into my world—a living, breathing person whose dreams and ambitions I carry just as surely as I do for any character of my own creation. I read works of others who included Carlisle, and each time my own perception of him was altered ever so slightly. I read reviews, both mine, and other authors’. I’ve often likened the process to turning a cube into a sphere: each new piece of information pulled from another or forged from my own understanding chops off one “edge” as it were, and as the edges are slowly chopped away, the character emerges rounder and rounder. By the process of reading and writing fic, we transform the characters and their world, and make them our own.

The brilliance, however, is that in this process of making Carlisle my own creation, Carlisle becomes less mine. I make no bones about the fact that I dislike the term “your Carlisle” (or “your” any other character). I welcome those who like the way I write Carlisle to say so (who doesn’t love compliments?), but he is certainly not mine, nor do I want him to be. My disclaimer says he belongs to Stephenie Meyer, but it is so much bigger than that.

When we write and read fic, we put ourselves in the midst of a giant conversation. When we re-imagine the characters to whom we were introduced originally, when we put them in new situations to see how they react, when we depict them as humans, when we transform them so that they feel as though they are coming more from us than from Stephenie, their value is increased exponentially beyond what they were in the original. Fic allows us to collectively reach into the cores of these characters we loved in the books and pull out those essences that we found so attractive so that we might grow to love and understand them even more, or to love and understand characters we never thought we would.

I love Carlisle. No question. But to pretend he is mine actually diminishes his worth. He is valuable to me only in as much as he is a manifestation of who you believe he is. Each time I explore him in writing, read your feedback about whether my portrayal meshes with what you think about him, each time I read someone else’s portrayal and leave a review about what I think of that portrayal, his value is strengthened.

Fic, for this reason, is of tremendous worth. More so, I would argue, than much of standard publishing. But it isn’t the writing, or the story, or anything that an individual writer does that gives it that worth. It is the ways which it re-imagines, transforms, and gives back to the community and the source which created it that make it what it is. You don’t need to pull it, change the names, and sell it; you don’t need to auction it off; you don’t even need to write it yourself, frankly. The mere act of participating in this conversation makes every work more valuable, without a cent exchanging hands.

People have been writing and reading works which derive from and transform other works for millennia. The Hours, Wide Saragasso Sea, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Grendel, The Canturbury Tales—I could go on and on. All these are nothing if not re-imagined versions of prior work. And like the ones we share, the values of these works are strengthened by the ways in which they respond to the original. In sharing the works we create, even in response to work of commercial fiction, we become part of this ancient folk art.

In our fandom, I often hear sentiments like, “It’s just fanfiction” or “Fic shouldn’t deal with that” or “I’m just here for fun.” It’s great to be here for fun, and I will be the first to tell you that the antics of fandom are generally not worth getting upset over. Our source material does, after all, contain benevolent, animal-drinking vampires who sparkle in the sun. But a dangerous side effect of this thinking is that we wind up undermining the inherent worth of what we do, and so authors run themselves ragged trying to publish, get the most reviews, or bring in the most money, all in an effort to gain value their fics already had simply by being fics.

Writing fanfiction can be good practice for writing original fiction. It can bolster an author’s confidence in her own work. It can be a way of bringing in tens of thousands of dollars for charity. And while each of these is terrific (and I use fic for all these things), fic need not do any of these things to be intrinsically worth doing.  That you read fic does not mean you are vapid or wasting time. That you write fic does not mean you’re incapable of producing something on your own (in fact, there’s a good argument that rendering a recognizable version of an existing character is by far the more difficult task). Throughout history, people of all ages, of all educational levels, and all levels of experience with writing have written and read transformative work. That you do it too makes you part of an incredibly rich literary tradition, one not based on an economy of ownership but rather on an economy where the more freely the goods are shared, the more valuable they become.

I write because for me, it’s like breathing. I can’t not do it for any great length of time. But I choose to write fanfiction because the process of sharing it is invaluable. It brings me closer to Carlisle, the character I loved originally, it immerses me in his world, and it puts me in conversation with others who feel the same way. The act of sharing it is itself is fulfilling, and no publishing contract, amount of money, or review count can make it more worthwhile than it already is.

So I’m issuing a challenge. Give yourself permission to take this seriously. Let yourself acknowledge that simplydoing those things gives them value. After all, none of us have more than twenty-four hours in our days. If you’re anything like me, you give up hours and hours that really aren’t “free” in order to do this.

Don’t you owe it to yourself to consider it worth your time?

It’s June 7.

The sign-ups for FGB technically end in 8 days.

I haven’t signed up so far. I keep thinking about it. I even know what my auction would look like—two 5K pieces, to the high bidder and second high bidders. But lately, I’ve been bothered. Not because I don’t want to do it, far from it. But because I wonder if much of fandom has lost sight of why auctions are fun in the first place.

Let’s back up a little. One of the main things that protects our creation of fan works is the overt decision not to accept pay for what we do. There are people fighting for fan works to be granted full legal status, and at a minimum, popular acceptance of their legitimacy (cf. The Organization of Transformative Works), but we’re not there yet.

There have always been a few people who skirted this; back in the day when fanzines were popular, it wasn’t unheard of for one to turn a profit. And it’s hard to miss that lately one of our own main FF archives seems to no longer need outside advertising support. But for the most part, money exchanging hands for fan fic in a way that someone profits is a big no-no.

Enter the charity auction.

I’m not sure how this got started (I confess, I need to spend some time with my fandom history wikis) but along the road, some people got some ideas that it we could band fan ficcers together to raise money for a charity. One of the big multi-fandom charities has been the Support Stacie Author Auction, and this was my first exposure to such an endeavor, as the spring auction happened shortly after I joined the fandom in early 2009. Recently the SSAA has come under fire for a lack of transparency, an issue which I’m not sure has been completely resolved.

However. One of the core principles on which the SSAA was built was that the bidders were making a donation to commission the author’s time. They were not paying for the end result, but rather for the right to tell the author what to do.

In September 2009, I signed up for SSAA, offering a 3,000 word fic, because I thought it was unlikely that anyone would make the $25 bid necessary for me to offer a 9,000-worder. I was delightfully, and unexpectedly wrong and I spent the whole weekend bouncing with glee that people cared about my writing so much as to offer such generous donations. In the end, AnjieNet made a lovely contribution in my honor.

Now, here’s where the fun really begins. The only hard lines I’d set were AH, rape, pedophilia, and bestiality, and that if an outtake was requested from IiG, that I get veto power if it were something that would be written into the story later. I thought for sure that anyone who requested me would ask for an IiG outtake or a piece about Carlisle—he is, after all, the one for whom I’m known.

But she didn’t. She asked for Edward. Edward, the boy I feel I don’t understand. The kid who makes me want to throw my monitor when I write him. The character I swore at for 2400 pages in the canon and then for another 250 or so in my own book.

Edward was requested. And Edward it was to be. I sketched out an idea about his rebellious period, per Anjie’s request, and decided on this winding story that would show Edward in three different time periods but all around his departure and return. The name for it came almost immediately: “Da Capo,” Italian for ‘to the head,’ the instruction in a piece of music to repeat back to the beginning.

And when I sat down at the keys, something wonderful started pouring out. I found myself grappling with Edward like I’d never known him. Gone was the cocksure man driven by his own stubbornness that I wrote in Ithaca, and out came this scared child who feared nothing more than the loss of the love of the man who had been his companion. One chapter in I revised the whole outline, two chapters in, I revised it again, and by the end the story seemed to be hanging on Edward himself, not on what I thought I’d understood of him.

I got a completely different look at Edward because someone asked me to take a second a look at him. And that to me, is the real gift of an auction—that a writer might be asked to do something she otherwise might not do, and in doing so, will produce a piece that is phenomenally her own and grow to know the characters differently in the process.

So the current iteration of FGB concerns me. Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to see such wild support for the cause right off the bat. And I love the utter transparency of FGB and the fact that it’s our fandom coming together. At the same time, however, when I see an author making a choice about what she will post, and then having a “team” assemble to “buy” access to that piece, two things pop up. One, we put ourselves at risk by making the auctioned item actually the fic itself, instead of the right to tell the author what to write. SM has been gracious to her fic writers, and I think we can continue to rely on her support. But other authors (Diana Gabaldon, anyone?) have not been so gracious. And without even having the pretense of auctioning the author’s time, the money-story link is much stronger. Another, newer author, might be bothered, and not permit fic of her stories (as is her right). We protect not only ourselves, but future fan fiction writers, by being careful about the way we treat the fic-money issue.

Two, the authors themselves are missing out. Yes, perhaps a giant team of people paying $5 a pop to read something produces more money in the long run than people auctioning for the right to tell an author what to pen. It certainly does seem that there are far more authors whose fics will be fetching thousands of dollars than there ever have been before, and that’s wonderful. I’m excited for the financial potential of this round of FGB. But to me, the gift of an auction is having someone think through what they wish you would write, and learning about yourself and your work through that process.

AnjieNet, I thank you for Da Capo. It wouldn’t have gone down if it weren’t for your request, and it’s one of the best, if not the best, pieces I’ve ever written. I learned so much from it and grew even more deeply in love with the characters I write. You donated money to help a woman with cancer, but I was the one who got the gift, and it’s one I will treasure forever.

If you’ve ever wanted to pick my brain, Tanja, over at So You Think You Can Write,  has probably beat you to it. She and I did the author interview thing about Ithaca is Gorges, my current projects, and my thoughts on everything from the actors to Jerry Springer. She asked a lot of questions other people haven’t asked (although I laughed a lot about the actor questions–I really draw a firm line in my head between the actors and the characters they portray, which made some of those questions tricky to answer). At any rate, enjoy!

Tanja’s Interview With giselle-lx

On April 23, I gave myself the freedom to do something unusual.

I let myself be a Twilight fan.

Creation Entertainment, AKA The Official Twilight Convention came more or less to my backyard, a 10-minute jaunt over the Potomac. I found out about this almost a year ago, but I thought maybe I would avoid it. But when I found out that Peter was going to be there, I thought, “Maybe I should go.”

I was sufficiently ambivalent about it that I still put off buying tickets until the very last minute, and I didn’t really advertise in fandom that I was going to go, although I thankfully found out via Twitter that some other writers would be there (CullenBabe86, IngenueFic, Izzzyy, and TrixieTropical.) Nevertheless, as the day approached I let myself go a little bit more out. I bought a t-shirt (this is partially for Comic-Con, as well) which has the words “Team Carlisle” spelled out in international phonetic alphabet, and I went ahead with something I’d been planning to do—get printed copies of Ithaca.

Now, this was something I was already doing for my beta readers and my dad. But along the way, I thought…gosh. I could print one for Peter.

And I freaked out about it. The thing is, no one in the world of Twilight would be more pleased to get a copy than Peter, probably. I suspect he’s one of the few, if any, people who actually think as deeply and as constantly about the character of Carlisle Cullen than I do. And while Peter is attractive, I don’t think of him as Carlisle, nor am I really a fan of Peter himself, although I admire his work. I more view us as two people who are fans of the same fictional character.

But there’s a lot of stigma attached to fan work and its connection to the actors, and there’s a lot of feeling that the people in fandom who want to get their work into the actors’ hands somehow think there’s a direct connection between their fanfiction and the actors’ zippers. Now, I don’t know how true that actually is, but fearing that stigma, I really agonized over whether I should just be a normal fan and have Peter autograph a photo for me, or if I should give him something I thought he’d really like.

I went with the latter, and I’m glad I did.

The event itself was terribly fun. I met all the aforementioned people, as well as some new friends who happened to be seated near me. The fans there represented the whole range of Twilight fan ages. There were women in their fifties who came alone, women in their thirties who brought their mothers, young girls who wore Twilight bangles and Team Edward t-shirts. We played trivia. We screamed at the Eclipse trailer. We listened to the ladies from The Lexicon talk about their trips to Forks. We were just fans, sharing something we all enjoyed.

And we listened to Peter. He’s a rambler—you ask him a question and he runs off talking for ten minutes and then remembers he was supposed to be answering a question. He talks about his family a lot, which is so refreshing in this age of high-profile divorces. Perhaps it’s me projecting my reading of his character onto him, but I find it hard to see Peter as anything other than a husband and father. He takes those roles very seriously, and it’s wonderful. He loves talking to his fans, and he’s very earnest in person.

I chose not to buy photo-op tickets—they were expensive, and would have been in addition to my $25 autograph, so I opted out. Around 7, they started running autographs, with the “gold pass” holders first. There were several hundred of those folks. I didn’t get in to see Peter until almost 9:30, by which time he looked so haggard I kind of wanted to tell him to forget my autograph and go get some sleep.

When I got up there, he looked up at me from the table, nodded slightly and said, “I like your hair.” (I have a super-short style.) I thanked him, and had him sign my copy of Ithaca on the half-title page, since only authors get to sign the title. And then I handed him his copy, and said, “You know how you’re always saying that Carlisle didn’t get enough face time in the stories? At the moment, I’ve pretty much devoted my life to changing that.” I explained what the story was, why I was giving it to him, and the extent to which I research the character he plays.

And he lit up. There is no other way to describe what happened right then. He asked me more about it, what the book was about, what kinds of things I look at in Carlisle’s character. Then he insisted on a photo (which weren’t supposed to be taken, since they cost extra money), and also wouldn’t let me go until I had pointed out exactly where I’d autographed his copy, which still, almost a month later, makes me smile—I went in to get an autograph from Peter, and he insisted on having mine.

We talk a lot in this fandom about the distinction between being a “fan,” and we look down on those who “fangirl.” For some reason the term “Big Name Author” has become popular in our fandom where “Big Name Fan” is used in others, because people feel so strongly that they aren’t really associated with Twilight per se—call them a big name, but don’t call them a fan, please.

There were a lot of really wonderful things from that day. I made some new friends; people I knew already from online, and people I’d never met before. I learned a lot about Twilight—how much effort goes in to a lot of things that we scoff at (I even got new insight into Carlisle’s awful scarves). And most importantly, I let myself enjoy it. I put away for a second what fandom would think, this distant relationship we’re supposed to have with the canon, the way we’re supposed to look down our noses at the screaming “fangirls.” Because I was able to do that, to relax enough to say, “You know what, I’m going to give him this book, even though people will think it’s weird and fangirly,” I’m pretty sure I made Peter’s day.  He may never read the book, and if he does, I doubt I’ll ever hear from him. But in that moment, seeing his face, hearing his excitement that someone cared that much about the person he puts a lot of effort into becoming—it was worth it all. And I had a wonderful, refreshing, reviving time that reminded me why I do this in the first place.

Hi, my name is Jess, and I’m a Twilight fan.