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Everything starts somewhere. Ideas don't spring full-grown from the ether into our heads--there's always a sparkpoint. It may be something very small--a enormously ugly yellow hat that only a certain kind of person could pull off wearing, the way someone on a bus glances up to peer at the skyline--or it may be something larger. A book you read, a movie you watched, something you absolutely loved (or that you absolutely loathed the execution of, but loved the premise) and it won't. go. away.
Some people--a lot of people--are content to stop at expressing their own ideas through the molds of other people's creations. Fanfiction of varying stripes would come under this heading, ranging from scenes and stories that are nearly indistinguishable from something the official writer might have produced, to grand epic stories with the names and basic physical descriptions of the official writer's work. It isn't entirely limited to people--almost every "Fantasy World" bears at least a passing resemblance to Tolkien's Middle Earth, and even if they don't they will often be compared as if they were so--worlds and plots can also be used. Everyone's read at least one published novel that reminded them of something else they'd seen or read elsewhere. If it's really well done, they don't mind; if it's badly done, it's loathed and avoided forevermore to prevent it tainting the earlier, better liked work.
So the trick is not finding idea sparkpoints. It's in 'filing off the serial numbers'--a description I picked up from Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, though that included changing the body a bit and crossing state lines to sell it--and making an old idea new again.
I've read a lot of fanfiction that's very, very close to that line already--if the names were changed, the physical descriptions modified slightly, it would be an entirely different story (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chronolith's Of Wolf and Man series comes to mind--it's technically still Gundam Wing fanfiction, despite the introduction of a large original cast and far more complicated and darker aspects, because the name of the main character and the central cast have not been changed. The writer described it once as not wanting to take the training wheels off) and unrecognisable as its original incarnation.
With other stories, it can be more difficult; the sparkpoint cast resonate well, the plot resonates well. There are aspects that do not fit, but that gets 'fixed' easily enough by creating an alternate universe edition of the sparkpoint story. My own current major story, the Wild Roses arc and universe, started life very much as a variant of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber series. Major plot points--a king none of his children loved, a son who decided to become king, an intrafamily feud that resulted in the youngest of the princes becoming the new king, even that the old king's father was the original creator of the way the family can navigate between different realities--were close enough that I failed to look closer, to start teasing my own story away from someone else's worldbuilding, until actually very recently.
The trick, there, was to find where Amber's plot and characters did not fit. And that didn't come from looking at the "Oberon" character, who didn't change enormously to become Aifiric Sabaey. It came from looking at "Dworkin". Ian Sabaey was not a rebel from his own culture, he was very much a part of it--his world-walking trick was not a restriction of the fundamental nature of reality, but the culmination of effectively an entire culture's attempt to escape a horrendous mistake someone else had made. And from that sparkpoint, everything else changed.
When writing fanfiction, it's necessary to find the places where the original worldbuilding fits the story you want to tell. And if the worldbuilding doesn't cover the area you need to work on, you have to dovetail your own worldbuilding with the canonical.camwyn, much to my delight and occasional O.o, has created a world that manages to put Commander Vimes (of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) into the political system of JRR Tolkein's Silmarillion. (She's also successfully crossed over the Ghostbusters with the Harry Potter series, and Hellblazer with the Harry Potter series.)
When writing original fiction, it's necessary to find the places that your sparkpoint does not cover, and to create a worldbuilding system that obscures your sparkpoint, if possible.merditha's Is'Cer work, if you squinted at the exact right moment, might be recognizable as sparkpointed from Tolkien. But as she's not retelling Lord of the Rings--and is, in point of fact very deliberately inverting several common Fantasy Archetypes--it isn't important. The worldbuilding obscures the sparkpoint (and considering how complete Tolkien's worldbuilding tended to be, this takes considerable work).
So a rabid fangirl might object to the Vimes of Numenor idea, simply because it's Not Tolkien (or it's Not Pratchett), instead of because she dislikes the story being told. And someone who isn't familiar with one or the other of the canonical sources might find things to be delighted by.
Some people--a lot of people--are content to stop at expressing their own ideas through the molds of other people's creations. Fanfiction of varying stripes would come under this heading, ranging from scenes and stories that are nearly indistinguishable from something the official writer might have produced, to grand epic stories with the names and basic physical descriptions of the official writer's work. It isn't entirely limited to people--almost every "Fantasy World" bears at least a passing resemblance to Tolkien's Middle Earth, and even if they don't they will often be compared as if they were so--worlds and plots can also be used. Everyone's read at least one published novel that reminded them of something else they'd seen or read elsewhere. If it's really well done, they don't mind; if it's badly done, it's loathed and avoided forevermore to prevent it tainting the earlier, better liked work.
So the trick is not finding idea sparkpoints. It's in 'filing off the serial numbers'--a description I picked up from Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, though that included changing the body a bit and crossing state lines to sell it--and making an old idea new again.
I've read a lot of fanfiction that's very, very close to that line already--if the names were changed, the physical descriptions modified slightly, it would be an entirely different story (
chronolith's Of Wolf and Man series comes to mind--it's technically still Gundam Wing fanfiction, despite the introduction of a large original cast and far more complicated and darker aspects, because the name of the main character and the central cast have not been changed. The writer described it once as not wanting to take the training wheels off) and unrecognisable as its original incarnation. With other stories, it can be more difficult; the sparkpoint cast resonate well, the plot resonates well. There are aspects that do not fit, but that gets 'fixed' easily enough by creating an alternate universe edition of the sparkpoint story. My own current major story, the Wild Roses arc and universe, started life very much as a variant of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber series. Major plot points--a king none of his children loved, a son who decided to become king, an intrafamily feud that resulted in the youngest of the princes becoming the new king, even that the old king's father was the original creator of the way the family can navigate between different realities--were close enough that I failed to look closer, to start teasing my own story away from someone else's worldbuilding, until actually very recently.
The trick, there, was to find where Amber's plot and characters did not fit. And that didn't come from looking at the "Oberon" character, who didn't change enormously to become Aifiric Sabaey. It came from looking at "Dworkin". Ian Sabaey was not a rebel from his own culture, he was very much a part of it--his world-walking trick was not a restriction of the fundamental nature of reality, but the culmination of effectively an entire culture's attempt to escape a horrendous mistake someone else had made. And from that sparkpoint, everything else changed.
When writing fanfiction, it's necessary to find the places where the original worldbuilding fits the story you want to tell. And if the worldbuilding doesn't cover the area you need to work on, you have to dovetail your own worldbuilding with the canonical.
camwyn, much to my delight and occasional O.o, has created a world that manages to put Commander Vimes (of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) into the political system of JRR Tolkein's Silmarillion. (She's also successfully crossed over the Ghostbusters with the Harry Potter series, and Hellblazer with the Harry Potter series.)When writing original fiction, it's necessary to find the places that your sparkpoint does not cover, and to create a worldbuilding system that obscures your sparkpoint, if possible.
merditha's Is'Cer work, if you squinted at the exact right moment, might be recognizable as sparkpointed from Tolkien. But as she's not retelling Lord of the Rings--and is, in point of fact very deliberately inverting several common Fantasy Archetypes--it isn't important. The worldbuilding obscures the sparkpoint (and considering how complete Tolkien's worldbuilding tended to be, this takes considerable work).So a rabid fangirl might object to the Vimes of Numenor idea, simply because it's Not Tolkien (or it's Not Pratchett), instead of because she dislikes the story being told. And someone who isn't familiar with one or the other of the canonical sources might find things to be delighted by.
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-31 06:09 pm (UTC)From:Now, within the structure of the Silm, Feanor is not right. He's sympathetic, sure, but he's a dipshit and he starts ugly, messy wars and turns on his kin and sets in motion events that would fuck his people up for milennia to come. Yet what I kept getting what . . .well, he was right.
Which lead to, okay - what's required for him to have been in the right, here? Short answer was "take away the gods." Ditch the Valar, and the system built on their arbitration. Take away concrete rules of right and wrong, and take away an all-encompassing moral world-system. Having done that, I took what I already knew about my elves and proceeded to try and figure out why that was - such as why, despite the fact that they're immortal, their base-line societal impulses seem to be traceable to some of the same impulses as ours. Answer being that they didn't EVOLVE as immortal, and so on.
The almighty "why". ::grin:: Tolkien could legitimately, within the world he built, fall back on "God said so." I can't, and evolution is much more pragmatic than God. The only place the birth-point is visible any more is in Sorae and his two wives and their respective sons, and the fact that his remarrying was a Bad Idea.
/babble
no subject
Date: 2005-10-31 06:35 pm (UTC)From: