Star Wars Fanon:Café Fanfic/September 2014

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.


 * September's topic: Star Wars Fanon has long included both fan-fiction and fanon (articles). While this feature is normally for the fan-fiction crowd, let's talk about the other side and how it pertains to our fan-fiction. Do you write articles? Do the articles inspire your fan-fiction, or are they driven by fan-fiction?

Atarumaster88
I don't write articles per se, but I do write The Essential Guide to Force Exile, which is similar. EGTFE is primarily a secondary source, that is, it's primarily to record topics from the fan-fictions. EGTFE is driven primarily by the stories with some new backstory. Another secondary source that I had to figure out how to treat was the Yanibar Guard Sourcebook. Where I got into trouble for some EGTFE entries was creating content in EGTFE for ships or technology that wasn't capturing anywhere. Having to record all of these occurrences in YGS made completing that document more difficult. One decision that allowed me to move forward was deciding that when it came to a hierarchy, my stories were primary, and YGS was next, and then EGTFE. In order to achieve consistency, I wouldn't add any more original content to EGTFE entries that weren't for characters, and instead just draw from YGS and the Force Exile fan-fiction universe. Does that make sense? Atarumaster88 ( Talk page ) 22:01, September 19, 2014 (UTC)

Leiamoody of Ysonesse
I've come around to writing articles because I'm trying to force myself to create a more structured background for my universe. I used to write down background information (bios, etc.) that was not very well organized. Creating articles actually forces me to concentrate on providing a narrative structure that could help me when it comes to writing stories again. Of course that doesn't prevent extended bouts of writer's block, but it does help me write something that doesn't make me feel guilty that I'm not working on the next epic whatever. (Although I still feel that what I'm putting into the articles isn't good enough compared to what I think should be going into them, so the articles aren't close to being perfect, but they are relatively comprehensible).

The articles seem to have taken the place of my stories in coming up with random bits of creative material which expands upon the characters and locations. It's very random unconsciousness stuff that I never intentionally come up with in the early stages, but those random bits seem to fit right in with the background. Leiamoody of Ysonesse (Talk) 08:27, September 20, 2014 (UTC)