(no subject)

Script review for The New World (See previous post) fills me with hope.

Smith made into more of a hero was inevitable - hell they cast Mr Farrell, didn't they - but to be honest the romantic in me is glad about that. I'm glad he's a rascal and not a straightforward hero though.

The bit about the indians ♥ God I hope so. I want to see a more realistic portrayal of their concerns and of their inter-tribal relationships. Please please.

And the mention of the ending. I hardly dared hope. But Pocahontas married to John Rolfe and meeting John Smith again in England? Her more powerful than he could hope and still an ideal in his eyes? ♥ ♥ Yes, just yes. I was so so so afraid we were going to get a tidied up version and this makes me hope that we might just get a romanticised version of a fairly accurate account. and yeah, I go to the cinema for a story, slight romanticism is fine

thoughts about fanfiction

broken hearts are for assholes by _cee. This fic somehow made me think about the nature of fanfiction.

I've always sort of thought I liked fanfiction for a number of reasons - there's the immediate audience and their responses which force me to improve. I won't post my original fiction in a public domain, but something over which I have no rights anyway is fine. More than fine. It allows me access to other people who are better at writing than I am and allows me to grow through watching them write.

I really value the way some people can construct sentences. There are people on my flist like cupidsbow who always make me want to try new ways of writing, new perspectives or styles or whatever. These are people who make me think about writing, not just do it. abundantlyqueer, for example, has a style very different to mine simply in the way she puts the words on the page. And yet each time I read one of her fics I feel I'm more able to see the way she fits them together. chaosmanor is the same - she writes sentences, single sentences, that I would kill to have thought of. This is also true of _cee, like in the example above, and particularly in she.

So fanfiction can be a way of learning, of testing out thoughts about the way I write. I don't know that these are necessarily things that are visible to other people, but when I go back and read a fic I can see where I've done it. Business Transaction, for example, was an experiment in dialogue.

In addition to that, and the benefit of having an audience in advance, is the fact that in fanfiction it's as if you can just write a burst of something without having to fill in all the rest. There are a few certain associations which you can assume your readers already have, so a mention of New Zealand means something to them, a mention of photography identifies a character. This is an unbelievable luxury, especially when it comes to brief character-exploratory bits. And that brings me back to the fic at the top of this page - that is a piece of beautiful, atmospheric writing on its own. It doesn't feel like it ought to be part of something longer because it says all it needs to say.

So that's the other benefit of fanfiction. It frees us to write as much or as little as we like. So much more can be said in a 100 word drabble if it comes with emotion and knowledge behind it. _cee's fic is short. Too short to exist as a short story on its own, were it not for the fact that no more explanation is needed. And because of that there is no reason for it to be longer, or part of a chapter of something else.

So fanfiction is the freedom to write what we want, how we want, to explore ways of putting words together that original fiction doesn't allow us. It also gives us an audience who are willing to comment, often constructively, on the result.