thirty days of fanfic, day five

[jlh]

(list of questions can be found at day one)
one | two | three | four

5 –If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?

I don't know that I've ever really had that happen. What I have had happen is that I get curious about a secondary character, and then I write a story about them, later. So that's how you get Out of Character, because I wanted to write about what Chekov and Sulu were up to in the background of the Trek Hollywood AU, and I plan to write some Nyota and Carol from that universe as well. And Parvati's fic With One Breath is really a spinoff of Eight Ways from Sunday, looking at how the events of that fic affected her and, to a lesser extent, Lavender.

Part of what I've been doing lately is deciding when companion fics, rather than ensemble fics, are appropriate. As I worked on the Trek Harvard AU I became more curious about the "Cliffies" and at one point tried to figure out how to incorporate their stories into the main narrative, until I realized that they really deserved entirely their own story. So I plan to write the Nyota, Gaila, Janice and Christine at Radcliffe fic in the spring. Whereas the HP sequel I'm posting now. was always going to be a great big ensemble, with each character having their own arc and their own things to do and be and learn in the course of the narrative.

Comments

[slytherincess]

Part of what I've been doing lately is deciding when companion fics, rather than ensemble fics, are appropriate.

Would you consider a companion fic to be limited by length? For example, I just wrote a 70K word fic and there's a missing scene I'd like to write into a separate fic, which would be a shorter one-shot . . . would you consider, like, a missing scene fic to be a companion piece? I'm feeling like it would be because it's part of the original story (the mother ship!), rather than a sequel or a prequel. Perhaps it's just semantics, but I'm curious as to what you consider a companion piece to be, comparatively.

[jlh]

I've written missing scene fics and I think they're a little different because they're so much shorter. When I think of a companion fic I think of one that's as long as, or as involved as, the original fic. So the Radcliffe fic would be just as long as the Harvard one, and just as broad in scope. With One Breath isn't as long as EWFS because EWFS is about eight people and WOB is about just one, but it overlaps the same period of time and talks about very similar changes. Parvati and Lavender were affected by what went on in EWFS but the story doesn't really talk about them.