Forum:FC:Café Fanfic XXXVI



Café Fanfic is a discussion topic centered around fan-fiction. Authors are encouraged to contribute to the café's monthly discussion, which are designed to stimulate ideas and encourage engagement between members of the SWF fan-fiction writing community in a criticism-free zone.

Participants in Café Fanfic are also welcome to submit ideas for the next month's topic of discussion.

Previous topics can be found in the archive list at the bottom of the page.

There are three basic premises for Café Fanfic
 * 1) Please restrict this to stuff from your fan-fiction (written or possibly just conceptualized).
 * 2) You can suggest and make observations, but no condemning other people's work
 * 3) "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer.


 * June's topic: Why do you write fan-fiction? What do you hope to get out of your writing? Where do you see it going?

Atarumaster88
I'll start this month off, I suppose. Fan-fiction to me is a creative outlet. I love stories and it's a way to express stories that I come up with and apply my imagination to the written word in a universe I've enjoyed for years. It's a way to take all those many hours spent reading Star Wars novels and comics and playing Star Wars games and emulate some of the work that those authors did. It's a way to create my own niche inside a galaxy far, far away.

What do I hope to get out of it? Honestly, enjoyment. I've spent literal days collectively writing stories. I've seen my writing improve and my characters grow over the years. I've been able to share that writing with a few other people, gather their input and appreciation, and use that to evolve my writing to another level. It's a place where I can experiment creatively. Any kudos or awards I pick up along the way are nice, but at the core of the matter, fan-fiction is about personal satisfaction. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I also like to see my writing improve and diversify, and so if a piece feels stagnant or regressive, I'll be dissatisfied with it.

Where do I see my writing going? Over the rest of the year, I see myself wrapping up a couple of short stories and then closing out one last project. I've lost access to SolidWorks, so no more 3-D models. I have some EGTFE work I'd like to do, and then I'll consider finishing up the Yanibar Guard Sourcebook and some other reference works as well, but after laboring pretty heavily on the Force Exile III: Liberator rewrite over the winter and spring, I'm going to pace myself pretty slowly over the summer. After that, I don't have any other ventures planned. This has been a pleasant diversion for me for several years, but I don't plan to continue writing Star Wars fan-fiction long term at this time. Atarumaster88 ( Talk page ) 17:08, June 11, 2014 (UTC)

MPK
Now here's something I can actually answer.

The first reason I've written fan fiction, I think, is simply because from my earliest years I've both been a Star Wars freak and had a strong inclination toward storytelling and writing. It therefore followed that fanfics would be the first creative writing I ever attempted with any seriousness, that is, with myself really sitting down and asking, "How can I write this so it's, like, a good story with believable characters and so on?" Since my late teens I've significantly shifted my focus toward other writing projects (mostly poetry and epics), but Star Wars has yet to let go of my mind, as it were, even though I've gotten very little writing of it actually done in the past year or so. College and other real life things did that to me. Much as I often speak or think of fanfic as intrinsically more childish and unimaginitive than original fiction (I stopped actually reading other people's fanfic a long time ago (with a very small number of exceptions made for authors at this site)), I still admire the mere fact that it's possible to take another person's universe and (hopefully) do something successful with it that hasn't been done before.

The importance of doing new things with fanfic, incidentally, is one of the reasons I've scrapped major projects of mine. The whole Dark Order Continuity schtick is a fine example of this: in the end it was just another out of thousands of fan-made bigass post-RotJ wars with Sith Lords and political intrigue and so on. Even though I consciously did my best to avoid the most common tropes of that particular plot, I ultimately came to realize that it still wasn't different enough; it just wouldn't have been worth actually finishing. Another project that I never began but wrote an extensive outline for was a sort of alternate timeline of events for the Original Trilogy period, with the point of divergence being the dark-side ending of "The Force Unleashed" - and for all the interesting new characters and events I came up with for this, I came to realize that it, too, while superficially unique, simply wasn't worth slaving over a keyboard, cranking out six novels for; it would have had nothing that hadn't been done before a dozen times over.

As such, the number of projects I have any serious desire to complete, all of them in storage at the moment, is rather small. For one, the more difficult, there's a series of three novel-ish ones, dealing with some original characters during the Jedi Civil War and after; I want to finish that someday because its overall plot involves a number of random traits (two Jedi brothers, non-standard alleged turns to the dark side, putting protagonists into moral dilemmas, etc) that I've rarely if ever seen done well in fanfics. For the other, there's my "Legends of the Jedi" series, for which I have planned a dozen or so loosely-connected novellas and short stories, which are supposed to be about exploring the history and development of the ancient Jedi Order, philosophical questions about the Force, and that sort of thing. Though I still have a folder containing upwards of a dozen other storylines that I've cooked up over the past few years, it is those two alone that I really have any real hope to someday take the time to finish.

As for what I hope to get out of writing this stuff, well, that's where (for me) it gets kind of neurotic and perhaps elitist. I don't want or expect fame; if I did, I should write a novel about vampires living in the modern day or some other stupid, shameless thing. Something I learned a very, very long time ago about the fan fiction community at large is that, pretty much without exception, stories do not get recognized or receive good feedback for being original, bold, or in any other way worthy of praise. They are recognized either for pandering to the depraved mental appetites of the masses of fucked-up nerds (most commonly melodramatic emotional puke and shameless, abominable sex scenes), or for being so awfully written that they become funny. So even if I really wanted any appreciable number of people to read (let alone praise) my Star Wars stories, there would be no way of making that happen. Even you guys here, I don't consider obligated to read what I produce, and I don't blame those of you who haven't (in no small part because I'm terrible at reading yours). At risk perhaps of sounding creepy, I ultimately write fan fiction for no one but myself, and for no reasons but to make solid the allegedly creative ideas in my mind - and, I hope, to thereby purge them from that mind, because they've been dwelling there literally since my adolescence in one form or another, like a dozen-entry-long series of movies being released and played in a cinema where they are being watched, almost eternally, by nobody.

Where's it going? I've pretty much answered that question. I hope to finish the "Legends of the Jedi" series and to come up with no more entry ideas for it - by the end of those I have planned out, I think I'll have explored everything about its premise that I was ever interested in to begin with. And I hope to finish those three KotOR-era stories, which tell the tale of how two Jedi brothers screwed themselves over, but one of them managed to help play a role in the return of the Jedi Order or some shit. Every other fanfic I've thought of doing has ended up just seeming trite. As for these two, I really don't know when I'll have time to finish them. As mentioned, my main writing priorities have shifted somewhat; it has occurred to me that I may die unexpectedly one of these days, and in case that happens, I don't want fan fiction to comprise the greater part of the writings I'll leave behind - and that's not just because of my prejudice against it. In the end, my fanfic projects can't do and say all of the things that I want the most to do and say in creative writing. Nevertheless, I hope to finish what of them remains worth finishing, and that at least a couple of people will enjoy them at some time or another. -MPK, Free Man  04:41, June 12, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

 * Due to decreased interest in the café over the last couple of months, this may be the last entry in Café Fanfic. Thanks, Management. Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 17:08, June 11, 2014 (UTC)
 * Noooooooo. Keep it anyway! - Brandon Rhea (talk)  20:01, June 11, 2014 (UTC)
 * This would sadden me somewhat, as they occasionally comprise something that I'm able to respond to. Still, I can't blame you. -MPK, Free Man  04:49, June 12, 2014 (UTC)
 * All right, I'll keep it around at least until the end of the year and re-evaluate then. Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 19:05, July 9, 2014 (UTC)