Read Harry Potter, the Aenid of our times: Srsly (4 real!)
#4 of Srsly
Read Harry Potter, the Aenid of our times: Srsly (4 real!)
I love harry potter! ^-^ Do you love harry potter? SNAPE SNAPE OMG I LOVE YOU HAVE MY BABIES. YAY FANFIC!
4. Writing fanfiction is the best thing you can ever do (for me, because I don't want competition.)
Many people have knocked Harry Potter over the years, so all I am going to say on the matter is: We need to forget Potter and rally the troops against the evil influences of Twilight.
But broadly it's symptomatic of something else, which is people reading deeply into a single genre or author and assuming that by doing so they have not only discovered the best writing evar, but the single paragon whom to emulate. This is fatally stupid, and fan fiction is a related symptom.
If you're a furry author, you must read 'Of Mice and Men'. If you write romance, you must read 'Starship Troopers'. If you write science fiction, you should read 'Treasure Island'. If you write serious literary fiction, you should read 'Zig Zag: The Story'.
People will come along and be nice and fluffy and say, 'Oh, it's okay. You read whatever you like reading!' This doesn't apply to those of us who love slinging words around. Why is the popular conception that all SF is crap, all Furry Lit is crap, and all Fantasy is crap? It is because the majority of writers of SF, Furry Lit, and Fantasy, stick to their genre and chain themselves to it. This is true of all genres, actually, but Spec Fic - which SF, Furry Lit and Fantasy fall under - is particularly tarred by this brush.
Any insular artistic movement will generate concepts unique to it. But it will also be locking itself away from all the rest of human endeavour. Do not lock the door. You love your genre? That's fine, but there's a gigantic world out there waiting for you to explore it. Read outside your genre, write outside your genre. (This includes your favourite archetypes - do you write quiet fiction about a soccer mom? Read/write about delinquent children and spies. Only write about super-soldiers? Write about someone average trying to track down a childhood friend.)
Fan fiction is awful for this. Not only are you limiting yourself to the elements just in one given genre, you are limiting yourself to a given cast of characters and situations. Now writing fanfic - writing anything - now and then is absolutely fine. It's when you spend six years writing and discover that you've only really written material about four or five characters with maybe a dozen significant plot elements... that's when you'll start to realize why fanfic hurts more than helps. This is also why you should, particularly if you have a favourite couple of characters to write about, be willing to veer wildly off course and write stuff about different characters and in different genres.
This also applies to style - if you think Hemmingway Is It, write neat uncluttered prose all the time and never experiment with alternatives, that's all you'll be able to write. You need to branch out. Some stories want a different voice to tell them, and you need to learn how to switch voices. Write something in first person, write something in third person, write something in a tangled mix, write something in a perspective nobody's heard of before. Experiment.
Never, ever, look down on a genre as completely worthless. I dislike fanfiction because it seems like a particular time-sink to me, but it has valuable things to teach about working to another person's drum and from an established set of rules - and trying to find new things to do within those rules, or ways to break those rules.
Pornography is a genre people tend to look down on. Pornography, as a word, is basically Greek and at root means 'Writing about prostitutes.' (Or maybe, depending on your views, writing like a prostitute...) Written and visual pornography tends to suffer from major genre inbreeding. If art is there to reflect life, what pornography reflects must surely be the bloated egos and sexual appetites of the basest kind of man. Right?
Well.
If we view art as evoking feelings, pornography must lean pretty heavily on 'Horny', in the same way feel-good heartwarming films lean on 'Happy', or comedies on 'Funny'. So a pornography type movie dealing in 'Happy' rather than horny would look something like this:
'Joe comes home. Finds a birthday cake and a surprise party. He is voted awesomest guy in the universe. His favourite song is playing on the radio. Someone hands him fifty dollars. Someone else hands him a hundred dollars. Someone else gives him ten thousand dollars and his favourite kind of candy. Joe gets another cake celebrating his fantastic sense of style.'
In short, there's no artistic merit to it because - ultimately - nothing really happens. Or, if we are kind, something happens and nothing really changes what happened. A story is often about change, about the flies in the ointment of our happiness. About picking up the flies in the ointment and flicking them away. Pornography devoid of artistic merit isn't how it has to be, and there are people working with pornography in all its myriad forms - adult art, erotica, etc etc - trying to express something more. In short, they are going outside of their genre and bringing material back from the outside world to put into their works. Or alternately they are working in some other genre and exploring what pornography as a genre can offer them.
The point is, they explore and they experiment, and they do not treat any one work as the be all and end all of fiction or artwork. So read Harry Potter and the Aenid.
This work is hereby released into the Public Domain. To view a copy of the public domain dedication, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.
That means you can do whatever the hell you want with Srsly, from ripping it off entirely to 'quoting' it in your own guide to rewriting it. Please feel free and encouraged to make copies for your writing newsletter, blog, or anything at all. If you would like to link back to me, which is nice and polite but by no means compulsory, please use 'http://www.furaffinity.net/user/foozzzball/' or my e-mail address, [email protected]'.