The Joys of Fandom

I’ve run into a couple of walls. One of them involves the writing. One of them involves the thing I did the last time I ran into such a serious wall, and why I’m not entirely sure I can do it anymore.

So I’m starting book 2, and I know where I want to go but figuring out how to get there is proving difficult. I may have to scrap everything I’ve done so far and start again. It’s only five and a half pages, so it’s not a massive deal, but … well, it’s frustrating. I’m not the first person to hit this wall and I won’t be the last, it’s not the first time I’ve hit this wall (and it won’t be the last) … but it’s still damnably frustrating.

Last year, pre-NaNoWriMo, I started doing drabble prompts. My resolve on that point lasted about a month, but while it lasted, I got some pretty good material out of the drabble prompts that people were sending in. In fact, anyone who remembers the plasticine golem incident will be interested to know that most of that chapter came from the half-line "lemonade power; that’s the way to go!" (Thanks, therealsherbs. I’d really love to do that again, because I had a blast and know that I would do again, provided that I didn’t get some overzealous souls sending in a half-dozen prompts at a time. I felt really overwhelmed with prompts last year, and that’s part of the reason I stopped doing it.

…But then there’s the other problem – fandom.

Okay, I don’t have a big fandom. I can count the people I know for sure and certain listen to the thing on the fingers of both hands. However, that counts as a fandom. This is generally speaking something to be chuffed about – it means that you created something that appeals to people. Not necessarily saying that you created something good, mind you – there’s too much evidence to the contrary in various fandoms – but it’s all a matter of opinion anyway. Therein lies the problem; fandom is a matter of opinion, and that breeds opinionated people. Then there’s the fact that this is on the internet, where people air their opinions with no thought to the consequences whatsoever. I mean, what consequences? It’s the internet! No one is getting the face-to-face telling off or smack in the mouth that results from being pushy, arrogant bastards. There was a Penny Arcade once that reduced a certain breed of online forums user to a mathematical formula: "Audience + Anonymity = Arsehole".

The internet is weird. It at once gives the illusion of intimacy and induces selective sociopathic tendencies. There are a lot of people who honestly seem to believe that they are the only ‘real’ people on the internet, and therefore anyone else they meet on the internet is just a figment of their recreation, obliged to follow their timetable and their opinions and woe betide these figments if they have other ideas.

It was bad enough when they were applying it to fanfic authors. I remember some of the shit I got in the Daria fan community, reading the entitlement in some of the "WRITE MOAR" emails I get to this day. "It’s not fair that you left it that way! You owe us!" What do I owe them exactly? Even if I believed that a royalty cheque made an author the audience’s bitch (and I don’t), the fact is that I never received dime one for the fanfic stuff. This is a good thing because I don’t want to get sued, but the fact remains that I owe them nothing. I wrote something, and had a good time doing it for the most part. People enjoyed reading it (well, some did; others abused me mercilessly and that’s a whole different kettle of fish, but critique holds few horrors for me these days so I can’t really complain). I finished before the end of the series I had plotted out because life got in the way and I moved on to something else. I was doing it for fun. I owe them squat.

That’s what I got as a fanficter. It seems to get worse when the writer’s getting a paycheque for it. I don’t really know when it started but the Torchwood thing showed me how the internet just feeds that whole entitlement complex over entertainment. People have started getting really uppity about their status as fans; they have decided that loving a show somehow makes them better caretakers of canon than the ones who made that show. It’s opinion again; people have decided how … say for example Torchwood should be, should have been, would have been if they’d had their way. It didn’t turn out that way. Instead of just squeaking miserably to themselves and writing fanfic of how it would have turned out if they were in charge (though probably a lot of sensible people are doing just that), there’s a whole bunch of people petitioning the creator to backtrack on canon because they don’t like what he did. You don’t like it? Tough! If you’re a UK resident, you pay your TV license fee to even own a television and that pays for the BBC programming. You’re not directly paying Davies for Torchwood. And even if you were, a few pence here and there do not make you the final arbiter of someone else’s creative endeavour. There’s not enough money in the world to make someone the final arbiter of a creative endeavour not their own. Unless the outside idea catches the artist’s interest, it’s just going to come out badly.

Books are kind of like blocks of flats. A city council or a development company (that’d be the publishers, I guess) commission an architect (the author) to design a block of flats so that people will have places to live. The development company doesn’t really know anything about architecture, so they give the architect size specs and how many flats they want in the building (basic length guidelines) and let the architect get on with it. The architect designs, the development company approves and builds, and then the listings are given to the estate agents (booksellers) and people (readers) rent the properties and move in. The fanfiction analogy is simple – if you want to repaint or put in new curtains or whatever, you’re generally more than welcome to do so. But you do not turn around to the development company or the architect and tell them that they should come in and tear down that wall between your second bedroom and the second bedroom of the guy next door because the guy next door doesn’t need his second bedroom and you want a nice big game room.

Okay, that’s enough of that rant: the reason I hesitate to ask for drabble prompts is because I’m worried that someone will inadvertently use the prompts as an excuse to try to nudge plot in directions they want. I don’t mind people wanting the plot to go in a certain direction provided I am left alone to go in the direction that I actually intended to go in. I don’t want attempts – blatant, inadvertent or otherwise – to steer me in specific directions. Thing is, all these drabbles are canon as far as I’m concerned. If anyone wants non-canon stuff from the HIPPIEverse … well, you know where your word processing programme is; have a blast.

I suppose I can always look over the prompts I didn’t get around to last year…