What makes fanfic easier for me than original fic is my entitlement issues: I don't feel half so egotistical in writing fanfic to the demands of a pre-existing audience. Writing original work implies that I think someone should care about my own POV, which the backbrain translates as selfishness and cuts the words off dead. But that's a separate neurosis and shall be told another time, in my own journal.
I somehow missed this. I love LJ. I love the email notifications. Really. Especially when I actually get them.
I hope you do address this at another time in your LJ. Because, of course, it's a process question, and I find process fascinating.
I find writing to an existing audience vastly more constraining and more stressful. It can be argued that there's an existing audience for my original fiction -- but it's not an audience that I can easily quantify. The audience that exists for, say, Buffy or Valdemar, has expectations of a work -- and with some reason -- that places the onus on me, as the writer, to get it right. To get the tone right for the audience, as opposed to for the story; I don't have the latitude to shift tone hugely, to change the way characters talk or think, to let them grow organically. Communication being what it is, there's no guarantee of success; I can't objectively look at anything I write and say "this works for this audience". Any certainty I have, I gain after the fact, when, in fact, nothing can be revised or changed <wry g>.
I have no idea who my audience is when I write my West novels. I truly don't. I know who some of them are very well -- jediboadicea and illarphaniel being two -- because they get out of the text what I think I put into it (and this is a blessing in ways too numerous to count). But people also read these books who don't; they get other things that I'm less aware of, or they're interested in elements of the worldbuilding that would not natively interest me as a reader, but have to exist in a full realized fashion for me as a writer.
This ignorance on my part gives me the freedom to be true only to the story itself. The world can twist and events can change and characters can die as the story demands -- and there is no part of me that stops to think "this will offend the audience" or "this is so out of character". I can fret about it after the fact (and do, being a writer and all). I have a freedom in that that probably is egotistical; it's me I have to satisfy first. I can be certain of structure, for instance, and of tone, but they exist almost independent of the readers because the readers who've written to me over the years read my work for vastly different reasons; I don't have a clear consensus that emerges. If I did, I might feel more bound by it.
Whereas original fiction pretty well has to get past a gatekeeper to get anyone's attention.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2004-10-20 10:41 pm (UTC)I somehow missed this. I love LJ. I love the email notifications. Really. Especially when I actually get them.
I hope you do address this at another time in your LJ. Because, of course, it's a process question, and I find process fascinating.
I find writing to an existing audience vastly more constraining and more stressful. It can be argued that there's an existing audience for my original fiction -- but it's not an audience that I can easily quantify. The audience that exists for, say, Buffy or Valdemar, has expectations of a work -- and with some reason -- that places the onus on me, as the writer, to get it right. To get the tone right for the audience, as opposed to for the story; I don't have the latitude to shift tone hugely, to change the way characters talk or think, to let them grow organically. Communication being what it is, there's no guarantee of success; I can't objectively look at anything I write and say "this works for this audience". Any certainty I have, I gain after the fact, when, in fact, nothing can be revised or changed <wry g>.
I have no idea who my audience is when I write my West novels. I truly don't. I know who some of them are very well --
This ignorance on my part gives me the freedom to be true only to the story itself. The world can twist and events can change and characters can die as the story demands -- and there is no part of me that stops to think "this will offend the audience" or "this is so out of character". I can fret about it after the fact (and do, being a writer and all). I have a freedom in that that probably is egotistical; it's me I have to satisfy first. I can be certain of structure, for instance, and of tone, but they exist almost independent of the readers because the readers who've written to me over the years read my work for vastly different reasons; I don't have a clear consensus that emerges. If I did, I might feel more bound by it.
Whereas original fiction pretty well has to get past a gatekeeper to get anyone's attention.
And even that's no guarantee.