Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I was checking out Roll Call for some unfortunates to put in Sickbay, and I
ended up at the Coffee Nebula
reading up on Seven’s favorite word (say it with me now), “irrelevant”. I have
my own page of Voyager Links, which fortunately
doesn’t require much upkeep since the show is off the air and new writers are rare.
Even old writers are getting scarce…

Anyway, further along the surfing path, I reached
Watt-Evans’
Laws of Fantasy, and was struck by #6, If a story can be written without
a fantasy element, then don’t bother with the fantasy element. I want to
rewrite that one a few different ways to apply to sci-fi and fanfic, but I’m
supposed to be rewriting Colony at the moment.

One last rule, from the same page: Debra Doyle’s Rule: If it has
horses and swords in it, it’s a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship in it, in
which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that’ll turn a story with a
rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.

Naomi Chana was blogging about multi-fandom writing not working. She sees similar failures in cross-overs, as well. One might take this, on one level, as the usual murmuring against multi, and, on one level, I did so when I commented that single-fandom authors failed as often (if not oftener) to live up to the spirit of the show as multi-types did.

There is something eternally suspicious about the multi-fandom writer - something that smacks of betrayal or at least jaded decadence. In larger fandoms, similar suspicions cling to those who leave one camp within the fandom for another, whether it be a change of pairing, the frequent switch to slash, or the infrequent switch to what Naomi Chana called compatibility. Or back again.

What she called good fanfic, fanfic with the referential dimension, compatible with the show, is what I call canon fic. To me, it’s just another fanfic genre. Don’t get me wrong - I certainly prefer it to all other fic as much as she does, but I don’t mistake it for the sine qua non of fanfic. I didn’t get into fanfic by reading canon. The first fanfic I ever read was Jane Austen fic, and of it all only one story sticks out in my mind as canon writing. Canon can be hard to find in Trek as well, perhaps because space opera isn’t all that easy to write. Romance is easier, or angst, or smut, depending on your leanings.

What got me into fanfic was reading fanon. The referent of canon writing is the show; fanon writing calls instead on the body of fanfic. In that way, fanon is more truly referential - it is a language that grows, even after the show is off the air. Take, for instance, the J/C fanon that has sprung up to bring an end to the C/7 broadcast relationship. J/C canon pales by comparison.

Those members of the C/7 list who were never in the J/C camp like to point out the baselessness of the whole J/C phenomenon. Those classic J/C episodes, they would say, were bad episodes and unconvincing. Those famous stray J/C moments - well, they never really happened. They were a mass-hallucination.

As a former J/C writer, my response is, why, yes they were, thank you very much. That is the nature of fanon. Seeing things that aren’t there is the greater part of fanfic. I started writing with a rather choppy background of watching the show, but a very strong grounding in fanon. My stories were a dialogue, not with Voyager, but with the J/C Story Index. Maybe they failed as good writing, maybe they failed to capture the spirit of Trek, but they had the referential dimension all right. They referred to fanfic. They were good fanon.

Naomi Chana remarked that multi-fandom writers, while writing good stories, usually failed to write good fanfic (of my canon variety). The other side of the coin is that single-fandom writers, while writing good fanfic (of my fanon variety), frequently fail to write good stories. I think most of us recall a time when a good fanfic excused a poor story; many fans never stop preferring good fanfic to good stories. Those of us with the bad luck to grow old in fandom lose patience with poor stories.

Maybe it’s true that multi-fandom writers prefer, subconsciously, a good story to a good fanfic. After all, how can they tell, hopping from one fandom to another, what a good fanfic is for any particular show? How can they establish the reference, without extensive reading in the fanon, or obsessive watching of the show? Yet if they carry their own universe with them and speak some language of angst only they can understand, that is also a fanfic genre.

Just not my genre. I prefer canon, though I haven’t forgotten fanon.

I’ve been meaning to filk this one for a long, long time. It was like shooting
fish in a barrel, really: I’ve Grown
Accustomed to the Phage. If you don’t recall the original tune, I keep a page
of original lyrics for my filks.

Pardon me while I go post it to ASC.

Thanks to Sara, all the sad, lonely plot bunnies of the world have a place to
hang out and multiply. Hop on over to
The Breeding
Ground and watch the fic fly!

Jade’s drabble Sands of Decision
and Picnic Prize-winning story A Moment of
Clarity are up.

Also, for your reading pleasure, a preliminary filk from my forthcoming filk
musical, The Sound of Borgness:

Filk:      Drone Seven
Original:  (How Do You Solve a Problem Like) Maria
Codes:     Borg Queen, drones, pre-Scorpion
Date:      August 26, 2002

   Two of Nine:
She rushes round
With such a sound -
She never takes the stair.

   Three of Nine:
She leaks when she assimilates
And all the new drones stare.

   Two of Nine:
And underneath her armor
She has mammaries to spare!

   Three of Nine:
Drone Seven doesn't fit in the Collective.

   Two of Nine:
She's early for her duties,

   Four of Nine:
But she does them like a drone.

   Two of Nine:
She's leaves us still regenerating
And does our work alone.

   Borg Queen:
It's time to put Our foot down -
All the evidence has shown

   Two and Three of Nine:
Drone Seven doesn't fit in the Collective.

   Four of Nine:
We could have ended like the other five;
But Seven saved our lives!

   Three of Nine:
How do you solve a problem like drone Seven?

   Borg Queen:
How do you reassimilate a drone?

   Four of Nine:
How do you find a role that fits drone Seven?

   Two of Nine:
A manifold scrubber!

   Three of Nine:
A sonambulist!

   Four of Nine:
A Queen!

   Borg Queen:
Many a thing she feels she ought to tell you,
Many a thing she tries to organize...

   Four of Nine:
But how can you make her stay
And do it proper Borg way?

   Borg Queen:
How do you cut her ego down to size?

   Four of Nine:
Oh, how do you solve a problem like drone Seven?

   Borg Queen:
What can you tell a drone who thinks she's wise?

   Four of Nine:
When I'm with her I'm unused
Out of contact and bemused,
Yet she makes me proud to think that I am Borg.

   Three of Nine:
Unpredictable as humans,
Independent like her parents.

   Four of Nine:
She's a good drone,

   Two of Nine:
She's a misfit.

   Four of Nine:
She is Borg.

   Three of Nine:
She'd out-pester any pest,
Drive a Horta from her nest,

   Two of Nine:
She could throw an old Hirogen
Off the trail.

   Four of Nine:
She's efficient,
She's precise,

   Three of Nine:
She's a nuisance.

   Four of Nine:
She's all right.

   Two of Nine:
She's a rebel!

   Four of Nine:
She's perfection!

   Borg Queen:
She's a girl.

   All:
How do you solve a problem like drone Seven?
How do you reassimilate a drone?
How do you find a role that fits drone Seven?
A manifold scrubber!
A sonambulist!
A Queen!

Many a thing she feels she ought to tell you,
Many a thing she tries to organize...
But how can you make her stay
And do it proper Borg way?
How do you cut her ego down to size?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like drone Seven?
What can you tell a drone who thinks she's wise?

Writing fanfic is like speaking a language. The vocabulary of that language
depends on the style of fanfic - for some, the language is the events of canon as
broadcast. For others, the language is the infectious ideas of fanon. Canon people
may denigrate a fanon story in which the characters are stunningly out of
character. Fanon people more often express a sentiment of boredom when reading
canon stories in which none of their own familiar chords are struck.

To make a random analogy, canon fanfic is like historical fiction, where the
challenge is to fit a story to the historical record. (An AU would be like alternate
history.) Fanon fanfic is more like
romance novels, in which the overall plot and emotions are rather standardized,
and the challenge is to do that popular turbolift theme in your own personal way.

Neither canon nor fanon is much like the mystery novel; that much
concentrated, mandatory plotting would be hard to reconcile with the
language of either fanon
or canon. Science fiction and fantasy depend upon writing a new language
(for the new world) and then convincing the reader that she speaks it. That’s
the opposite of fanfic, even for sci-fi shows.

I meant to blog about communication in fandom more generally, so
let me see if I can connect the dots. The language of fanfic is similar
to the language of general fannishness - a canon writer knows the nits as
well as any nitpicker would. A fanon writer knows the classic episodes for
her preferred fanon pairing, even if only second-hand. A complaint about the
show itself leads to a fanfix.

There is no question of civility in fanfic itself - you can snark to your heart’s
content, and as long as you phrase it as a story, there is no arguing with you
directly. Someone might write her own counter-story, but such exchanges
are rarely violent. There’s quite a lag in writing stories, and there’s a bigger
one in reading them - if you read them at all. What J/C fan would read our
C/7 fic to find out what we’re saying about J/C? There’s a dialogue going on
there, but it’s between the writer and the fanon, not the writer and the reader.

There’s no question of civility when talking about the show, either, because
such discussions are always a bloody (and I mean that literally, not Britishly)
religious war. Kill them all and let Roddenberry sort them out.
Just walk into
#jetc and start talking about C/7 and you’ll see what I mean. Or read the
TrekBBS on any topic. These are topics on which we agree to disagree
violently, repeatedly and irreconcilably.

Sometimes, we’re not writing fanfic and we’re not talking about the show.
Those are the meta and the diva times - talking about fandom itself, or
talking about our lovely selves. Meta and diva cause the most controversy
(as opposed to formalized name-calling).
Is someone else’s ideas about, say, the Muse a legitimate meta discussion or
a claim to divine standing?
Is an email about your important diva doings, when crossposted to a generous
smattering of lists, just helpful information or annoying mass-marketing? Is
meta interesting at all? Is snark cruel? Does merely having opinions turn you
into a diva?

At the meta-diva level, we’ve lost our common tongue of Trek or Vamp
or whatever it might be, and we’re thrown back on our native languages.
Where I come from, sarcasm is never a faux pas, but
self-promotion always is. If someone is clearly stupider than you are, you don’t
point that out. You never, ever, ever condescend. It’s fine to go slumming but
you can’t rub his face in it, and
you’re not going to get any sympathy from your friends after the breakup.

But I digress. The point is that there’s a grammar. Some of the rules
are national, some local, some class-based, some individual. It’s not a matter
of print coming across differently than voice would - the sentences themselves
mean different things in different languages.

The Basic English of fandom is always to say thank you for feedback and
never to voice a negative opinion. It’s a starveling tongue, but I doubt there’s
a bigger intersection between the various languages out there. As I get older,
I find that not much can be conveyed in Basic Fannish, and not much of what
can interests me. I’d rather talk to someone who speaks my language than
dance around someone who doesn’t.

Disclaimer for speakers of foreign languages: Note that
I never said canon was better than fanon, or that New Englanders were better
than midwesterners. Nothing I said means that canon is better than fanon or
that I am better than you, not even if you would
have meant exactly that if you had written the above.

I’ve been accused of writing “canon” and I don’t object to the label, partly
because I don’t believe canon and fanon are mutually exclusive. The way I see it,
writing canon means writing that has a significant relationship to the show as
broadcast - speaking a language that anyone who watched the show could
understand. Writing fanon is writing with an eye to the traditions of fanfic. How
deeply you delve into canon or fanon determines how “canon” or “fanon” the
resulting story is.

They’re not quite symmetric, because fanon is both easy to ignore, easy to
stumble into, and easy to create. Fanon spreads like a virus - you
pick it up somewhere, without quite remembering which fic it came from, and
incorporate it into your fic, spreading it to others. Canon is hard to ignore,
hard to get right, and impossible to create unless you’re TPTB.

Writing fanfic is always a dialogue with canon - sometimes it’s shouting
“you should have been this way,” and sometimes it’s whispering,
“you really were this way.” The quality of the fanfic is determined
by how convincing the argument is - people who prefer to shout down their
opponents like their fanfic over-the-top. Readers with a more
hermeneutic approach will prefer a convincing moment of characterization or
fanfix to an arbitrary chapter of familiar but unfounded fanon plot.

To give a specific example: a fanon story tells you that
Janeway finally saw the light and told Chakotay how she really felt about him.
A canon story tells you how Janeway saw the light. There’s no
good reason one story can’t do both, though there are bad reasons.
Fanon-leaning people tend to be angry at canon and refuse to deal with certain
events, or deal with them in a hasty, out-of-character way. Canon-leaning
people tend to shy away from any consequences, as if TPTB themselves
were leaning over their computers insisting that the characters be returned
unaltered for next week’s episode. Fluff worn on your sleeve or angst hidden
in your heart…

I really was going to write about communication in fandom, but it’s late so
that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Liz and leather-clad company were kind enough to recommend
Than Fade Away over at
Bright Shiny Objects.
Sad was I to see myself the only representative of all Trekdom - is no one writing,
or is no one reading?

I’m 400 posts behind on ASC, and getting behind on C/7 fic despite the
miniscule size of C/7 fandom, so the trouble isn’t that Trek is dead. Were I as
brave as Lori, to commit myself to the infinite backlog of VS7.5 episodes, I would
have plenty to read. Just reading Lori is a full-time occupation.

Writing Trek is a different matter. It would be an insult, in my mind, to
The Original Cheesies to write serious fanfic about them. I have been
permanently scarred by long-term exposure to the classic caricatures,
marching across the TV screen of my childhood in bright, primary colors.

I confess to being one of those crass souls whose feedback to Lori
opened with a declaration of just how much Picard/Troi squicked me - but
the deeper truth is that any combination of TNG characters
squicks me. Even as individuals, they were squicky - except for Data, Yar and
Spot. Though I watched it off and on, it was never a series that grew on me.

I have the greatest admiration for people who can write DS9 - not, perhaps,
enough to read what they write, but admiration nonetheless. The
characters were, at least, interesting - more human than the TNG crew, more
realistic than TOSsers. But the show itself was a morass of arcs and politics -
even if someone were still broadcasting it, I wouldn’t have the time to watch
it all and find the cracks into which to put my fic. My experiences with Buffy
have set me off the sort of writing in which canon is “more honoured in the
breach than in the observance.”

What is there to say about ENT, except that the franchise should have
taken a break before once-moring into the breach? I, at least, will observe
a decent period of mourning before I go chasing after another
ship called Enterprise.

Which leaves me with VOY, dear, sweet VOY. Dear, sweet, cancelled,
endgamed, over VOY, the only Trek series ever to be
about something (something besides ripping off Babylon 5,
anyway). In fanfic, there’s nothing like that something. It didn’t
matter how many bad time travel eps (and they were all bad)
TPTB tossed at us, nor how many EMH stories, nor how many times Seven
rediscovered her humanity, because the show itself was about a crew
trapped in the back end of the beyond with nobody but one another to rely on,
on a hopeless quest to travel an infinite distance home.

Go ahead, you can write a story about that right now, even without my
telling you who the Captain was, and whether she was in love with her first
mate or her helmsman or, Great Bird preserve us, an idiotic Irish
hologram.

So why aren’t you writing already? You say you need other fanfic to
inspire you, and the well has gone mysteriously dry? You say you need a
show to watch, but UPN barely deigns to recycle the well-worn
episodes of seventh season? I feel your pain, every Sunday at 11am if I’m
even awake yet, but have you
forgotten…Delta
Blues? The series has been preserved forever in the fuzzy-cam eye of Jim
Wright, and you, yes, you, can watch the reruns any time. You could go there
right now, have your own virtual third season.
Remember Seska? Remember Kes? Weren’t those the days? You
can relive them, and even rewrite them.

Don’t mind me - I’m just reminiscing about
the eternal VOY now.
If I had the time, I’d even write some metafic about it.

I distributed the couplets somewhat evenly through Colony, but I’m still
rather short on subplot scenes. I was thinking of dragging in the Borg - I have my
own bad guys who could, presumably, make a subplot of trouble,
but the Borg are so much more accessible. Tuvok plus Borg post-UMZ seems
like a promising combination.

Throwing the Borg at every minor lull in my writing is the sort of thing TPTB
would do. We’re supposed to be above all that, but I need to do something
about the
whole issue of dropping a moon into a sun. It takes too long, and my aliens have
to be pretty darn dense to fall for that one.

If not the Borg, maybe an ion storm… This is why I don’t write VOY
anymore - I used up all my good plot ideas.

As usual, I’m late linking the latest
zendom article, on lovin’ fluff.

Jungle Kitty said
something on-list about fanfic shortcuts that I just can’t get out of my mind.
She was kind enough to quote a whole article:
It’s
Like a Movie, But It’s Not, which otherwise you have to log into the NYTimes
page to read. In it, Neal Gabler claims that movies today skip all the work of
entertaining and expression, replacing it with cues that the audience knows -
so that you get the outline of a movie, rather than an actual movie.

So yes, sometimes you have the outline of a fanfic - formulas that
substitute for a story of a more traditional form. This is where I lost track of the
conversation, though. I’m still not sure what a formula is or how to know one
when I see one. Does shortcut mean that anything classifiable under the
Borg Plot Classification is a formulaic
story? Do you have to write a new plot to avoid formula, or is it enough to
write a certain way?

I gave as an example the
tried-and-true J/C formula of Janeway finally realizing after an unspecified
number of years that she can’t live without Chakotay any longer. I think
those who said that formulas no longer satisfy them would dislike
such a story because of the formula itself. My only criticism of the
Sudden Realization formula story is that the Sudden Realization itself is rarely
justified. If someone makes me believe that Janeway can’t live
without Chakotay any longer, then I consider it a good story, however
popular the plot.

On the other hand, you can fail to motivate an original plot - it’s not only
formulas that get sent out into the ether without sufficient verisimilitude. I’m
rewriting Colony because it’s the outline of a novel, rather than the novella
I wanted it to be. Yet some people liked it - sci-fi fans more than others, I
suspect, because sf is a genre where originality vs. formula has long been more
important than showing vs. telling. You can, in other words, tell
all you want as long as the story you’re telling is new - Foundation,
a novella-long set of dialogues, is a good example of just what you could
get away with once upon a time.

Well, that was a roundabout and oxymoronic way of saying I can’t blog
right now because I’m busy rewriting Colony.