E. P. Beaumont

This time we’re going to talk about every writer’s bugaboo: the Demon of Originality. That nasty little voice in your head tells you, in the sneering tones of the high-school English teacher from hell, that your idea is ‘not very original.’ That idea alone stops a lot of us cold.

And for the rest of us, it gives us sneaking doubts. There are those of us, for example, who do adaptations or riffs on other works; the writers of historical fiction; and let’s not forget all of us writing pulp fiction, whether it’s detective stories or high fantasy or romance, where most of the art consists of playing with or against traditional narrative arcs and/or character types.

Then there are the shadow worlds that respectable writers eschew: below the demi-monde of pulp lies the underworld of fanfiction. And interestingly, there are some real lessons to be learned from the descent into the underworld.

All, right, I’m going to fess up: I read the stuff, and it’s been tremendously educational in a number of respects. For one thing, it’s a sort of laboratory of genre and narrative. When everyone is starting from the same universe and characters, narratives stand out from the background as entities unto themselves, as do choices in characterization. Narratives and tropes play against each other, and generate new ones (along with endless imitations), so what we’re looking at is a miniature, hothouse version of the genesis of literature itself; it’s rather like a terrarium, compared to the Amazon jungle.

Oh yes, and you were going to say: the stuff is crap. Well, no, I’d say it’s 90% crap, according to Sturgeon’s Law. The other 10% is good stuff. It’s not curated, because just about anybody, for example, can contribute to fanfiction.net. I’ve heard it said that the big fanfiction archives resemble slush piles, in terms of the distribution of quality and the lack of curation.

This, too, is a positive, if you ever wanted to get a fix on your own relative position in the evolutionary scale of writing quality. It’s a whole lot easier to spot bad writing when it’s somebody else’s, and nowhere else on earth will you see a slushpile in the wild. They’re mostly shut away in the towering stacks of manila envelopes on the desks of hapless publishing interns. And it’s not strictly true that you can’t find the good stuff, because fanfic fans constantly create lists of their favorite stuff.

It’s non-profit, and that takes money out of the equation. You’re never going to make a cent from writing it, and it’s free to read it. It’s grubby kid stuff, with zero pretense of literary merit and all sorts of gleeful playing-about. Which means that readers and writers alike face head-on not only the Demon of Originality, but the Demon of Seriousness, which is to say, the one that whispers loudly in every writer’s (and reader’s) ear that what they’re about is silly, that they’re day-dreaming,  walking around in worlds that don’t exist, and having way too much fun doing it.

Some lessons and conclusions:

• The only difference between the daydreaming done by the reader and the writer is that the writer is in the driver’s seat.
• The only difference between the daydreaming of fanfiction and ‘original’ fiction is that the reader comes to fanfiction with some givens.
• And actually, for ‘original’ fiction, the givens are provided sub rosa by the genre label, which is why it’s such a perilous thing to play about with genre, and so very confusing to those of us who aren’t quite sure what our work is.
• Oh yes, and genres that make me happy, just because they play about with all sorts of boundaries: magical realism, urban fantasy, steam-punk, superhero romance (yay!), zombie fiction (even though I don’t write a huge amount of it), and stuff that’s full of silly-silly self-referential comments. The genres currently accepted as ‘serious fiction’ are actually a very narrow band in the traditional storytelling spectrum (but that’s a rant for another day).

What else about fanfiction: it makes you start thinking about the uses of backstory. From time to time I’ll read fanfic in a universe where I don’t know the original material—usually because I like the work of a particular fanfic writer—and often these stories hold up as stories even though I haven’t the faintest idea who the characters are or what the setup is. That gets me thinking about my own fussing, as a writer of ‘original’ fiction, about setup and exposition and world-building. What if I just assumed that my readers were fans? I’d only reveal as much of the background as was really necessary to the story, just as a fanfic writer will retell a bit of ‘canon’ backstory when it serves the requirements of her/his narrative.

A good writing buddy of mine once said to me, “Research is how you do writer’s block.” At that time, I was working on performance pieces based in history and I was getting distracted by the temptation to get it absolutely right by reading one more article. The same whispering demon of “one more footnote” assails graduate students writing their dissertations.

I joke that the unspoken subtitle of every single one of my plays is “It’s Not My Doctoral Dissertation,” because of course it is. I probably could pass a doctoral-level examination on any number of topics in literature, history, and history of technology. When playwright Tony Kushner got an honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota some years ago, I thought that they should have given him a whole pile of them, approximately one per play, because I know some amount of the territory he’s writing, and there’s a whole lot of stuff lurking under there. Playwrights’ research and beta process makes the underwater part of an iceberg look relatively skimpy: it’s more like 99%, or 99.9% below the surface, rather than a mere 90%.

My Brain Sister and my buddy Devin Harnois have been conspiring (independently and in parallel) to help me get caught up on my reading in Pulp Studies, so among other things I’ve been handed Stephen King’s On Writing, which is one of the most useful books I’ve ever read, not least because it’s confirmed my own process on a number of points, and set my mind to ease on others:

Mr. King’s take on research is that a writer writes the story first, and does the research by way of touch-up.

There’s a reverse to this, of course, is that research can be a muse.

Non-fiction obsessions can be a rich source of stories. My current work in progress, The Lost Pissarro, is the most non-fictional piece of fiction I’ve ever written, in spite of its fantastical setting in a New York City where unicorns roam Central Park and tourists feed the undines in the fountain at Rockefeller Center. My central character is a painter who’s been hired as an art forger, and I’m using a staggering amount of nonfictional lore about the materials of impressionist painting, the history of chemistry, and biographical facts about several figures from the nineteenth-century Paris art scene, including Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Victorine Meurent (Manet’s model for the Olympia, who was also a painter in her own right). The bibliography for this story runs to a full page.

On a somewhat grimmer note, my 2009 NaNo novel, The Reincarnations of Miss Anne, sprang from several decades of reading about scientific racism and sexism (a good part of it undertaken in self-defense), American contributions to the theory and practice of genocide, memoirs and biographies of survivors of slavery. The principal inspirations were Ally & Heim’s Architects of Annihilation, which was loaned to me by the playwright Ellena Schoop, (as inspiration for her short play Hitler’s Mandela), Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust and his more recent work War Against the Weak, and William Still’s Underground Railroad, a stationmaster’s miscellany including ‘exit interviews’ from ex-slaves. Characters who jumped off the page into my story included a recent female PhD in anthropology doing research on ‘inferior populations’ in Nazi-occupied Poland (from Ally and Heim); the young women collecting interviews and other data for the Eugenics Research Office (from Black’s War Against the Weak); the indignant slave-owner writing a letter to an escaped slave, full of accusations of rank ingratitude (from William Still). Those characters put a face to my own mordant thoughts about female middle management through the ages, and the effect of 400 years of chattel slavery on American notions about work and dignity. The place where history meets fiction is rich, generative and deeply scary. I think the reason that novel’s yet unfinished is that I realized that it was the real thing.

Another obsession of mine is utopias and dystopias. I collect utopias, and a number of them found their way into that novel (including More, Fourier, Campanella, and more recent writers). Another influence is the Russian Firebird folk tale, which seems to have infiltrated a number of my recent novels. (Favilla Vogel, the Citizen of Utopia in Miss Anne, stands in for the Firebird, and one of the several Miss Annes is Anne-Marie Bessmertny, a self-aggrandizing functionary who’s a female avatar of Koschei Bessmertny. In the Shape-shifter’s Tale, little Max is a lineal descendant of a conjectured love affair between Baba Yaga and Koschei Bessmertny.)

What nonfiction reading has inspired your fiction writing?