Twisted Tuesdays, The Weekly Zym Options

[zymurgy]

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

The Importance of Being G.

J.K Rowling has long since abandoned the idea that her books are for kids. Ron Weasley has ceased merely saying things “he wouldn’t if his mother were there,” and gets his French into solid print. Draco is no longer content with a mere sneer, but gets some rather brutish action in this last book. And of course, Voldemort is no longer a vague and shadowy presence.

However, Project Ferret retains its policy of child-friendly stories and posts. We may not be by kids, but we are definitely proud of being for kids. Kids with a capital K.

Now, you might ask why this is so. “JK said that in her story! Why can’t I say it?”

Because, as much as Harry Potter may have spiraled into dark times and despair, we should hope that the kids who read it have not. The point of FanFiction, as I see it, is to expand, elaborate, and sometimes straight out change what was given to us by the author.

Canon, in other words, is seen as “raw material.” Even as it is worshiped, like a lump of gold, it simply isn’t pretty enough for a smith. We’ve got to play with it, twist it around, and make something new.

And boy does JK give us a wealth to work with! We have characters, a setting, a premise, and even a time period worked out for us in advance. Simply put, the only thing a Fanfic author has to do is mix and match, adding originals as he sees fit.

That being so, why choose to use what we have, which can be put to a million uses, to write a story inappropriate for children? JK has already done that; hundreds of Fanfic authors have already done that. Why not have a bit of fun in the other direction?

None of this, of course, is to say that we should present only the happiness of Harry’s world. Clean fic is not necessarily happy, simplistic, or easy. All of Half-Blood Prince, for instance, could have been rewritten, portraying the same events, but in a way more accessible to the young – it would still be HBP, just from a different angle.

There is a place for serious fic here, for sad fic, and even for certain situations that aren’t to be avoided as canon stands. However, I don’t think there’s a place for so-called “adult” fic.

Why, after all, do we write and read fanfiction? Simply because we don’t want the story to be over – we don’t accept ‘that’s all she wrote,’ for an answer. As much as we understand that Sirius flew backwards through a veil and died, we still want to know more, to see more, to have another view.

And why have that view be one where he swears like a sailor, drowns his sorrows in fire whiskey, or commits a bloody and brutal murder of Peter Pettigrew?

Of all the angles available, the least chosen seems to be that of the first floor window we started from. And it simply isn’t fair to those of us (loosely termed ‘kids,’) who are still there, to have all the fic over our heads and beyond our reach. The stories, dangled just out of our reach, with teasing summaries or teasers, make us understandably upset.

Why couldn’t that author write the really cool story, (where Ron gets kidnapped by Death Eaters and has to escape on his own, without magic, but turns out he’s really Remus in Pollyjuice, while Harry believes he’s actually Draco because he misunderstood something he overheard in a dark corridor while he was hiding from Filch, and there’s a Basilisk who wears sunglasses so that it won’t petrify people, and Neville turns out to be a member of Arborists Anonymous… ) so that we could read it? Honestly!

Finally, the importance of being K is a question of numbers. It is better to have something that everybody can read, rather than something a few, however few they may be, cannot.





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[zymurgy]

Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Chaos and Turmoil

In a world where chaos and turmoil rein it is comforting to hold on to a few small truths:
Children will never be as obedient to their parents, as their parents were to their own.
Everybody wants to write a book.
Journalists are always on time.

Even these, however, have their rare moments of being overturned. For instance, Tuesdays have remained unbearably straightforward for a while and Norbert has been curiously narrow-minded lately.

Rest assured that neither Cat nor I have been abducted by aliens, forced into an alternate dimension, or broken another deeply held belief by swearing off writing altogether. Rather, we were distracted by an extremely large, bright and highly reflective object in the fourth floor corridor. We apologize.

Without further ado, I bring you my main subject: chaos and turmoil.

What to do, when your characters are involved in a frantic broom chase, a battle, or a never-before-seen Magical procedure? Chances are, things are happening far faster than you can conceivably explain and describe them.

Chaos is best described as experienced by your character. Harry can’t (while fighting six Death Eaters upside down from his broomstick in the rain, blindfolded) tell who is exactly where when. All he can tell is that nasty spells are coming at them and he really needs a Portkey.

Of course, just because your character doesn’t know what’s going on, doesn’t mean that YOU don’t. You need to know exactly where everything is, every last nargle. If you don’t, you run the risk of one Death Eater managing to simultaneously shoot spells both at Harry (who’s fighting six Death Eaters upside down from his broomstick in the rain, blindfolded) and run to cast Imperio on Ginny down at the pitch. That the incidents happen two pages apart textwise isn’t an excuse; it makes it worse.

When writing a chaotic or complicated scene, it helps to map everything out first. For clarity's sake, map out exactly who is where, doing what, and when. Then piece out what in all that’s going on you’ll show. In the end, roughly half of what you mapped out will actually be in the story, but because of it, there won’t be any errors.

If you know what order your attackers are coming in on, you won’t run the risk of two of them apparently being in the same place. Rooms won’t grow extra doors for people to escape out of. Nobody's wand will inexplicably be back in their hand a page after it was expelliarmused without having to get it back first.

The other method, which involves much less work, is to describe the event through the eyes of a particular character, who doesn’t understand it any better. Something like this:

Harry ran, dodging spells and hexes. The entire pitch was a swirl of confusion. He could no longer tell who was who in the pouring rain. A spell hit him in the small of the back and the battle faded from view…

Unfortunately, you can only get away with this if you’re very vague about what actually happens. Once you have one bit of fighting in detail, including the whos the whats and the wheres, the rest has to follow suit. If Ron Weasley is shown hurtling from one side to push Harry out of the way of something, readers won’t like it if your focus never returns to him for the rest of the scene, and they have to wait for the scene in the hospital wing to explain that he escaped by rolling under the Quidditch stands.

As always in writing, balance is key. Too much description can make a quick scene drag, too little can be so confusing as to be unreadable.

Good Luck