Leaping in head-first
May. 2nd, 2004 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowscastI've started a Spike/Xander fic. Yikes.
Whether it'll come to anything, who can say. I've started far more stories than I've ever finished, over the years. (Only one WIP actually up on the web, though - and the guilt just keeps on throbbing. One of these days I'll finish it. I swear.)
I've written a short first chapter: 1344 words. Hm, I wonder if posting word counts to my livejournal whenever I get some writing done would help motivate me? You never know... I need all the motivation I can get, and having people reading it as I go along isn't really an option. (I don't know any Buffy people well enough to inflict that on them. Plus, too much pressure.)
The premise of the story, such as it is, is this: AU season 7. Suppose the First Evil was a no-show. Suppose that without the influence of the First Evil, Spike went considerably less insane post-soul. Suppose that without the First Evil egging him on, Spike decided not to go back to Sunnydale at all; suppose that he just couldn't face Buffy with the weight and guilt of his soul upon him. Suppose he went back home to London, instead, and one September evening while drunk and maudlin he called Buffy and left a vague and weepy apology on her answering machine. Suppose Buffy, worried by the message (and having *69-ed to find out where it came from), sent Xander to London to find him.
All that's in the first chapter, so I don't think it counts as spoilers to the story.
Then... adventures ensue in London. And slash, most likely. All of that part's rather vauge in my mind right now. Either it'll coalesce eventually into some sort of reasonable plot, or the story beginning will be abandoned on my hard drive like so many others. It could go either way.
There's a lot that intimidates me about starting this story, and about writing in this fandom.
Actually, the things that intimidate me break into two main bits:
1) The fandom is so big! There are so many great writers already working with it! Can I contribute anything new? Will anyone notice me? Will anyone care?
and
2) Breaking the "write-what-you-know" rule.
Second things first: Spike's dialect. Damn. I've never written a character with a dialect significantly different from my own before. Never, in twenty-odd years of writing! (OK, when I say "twenty years" that counts the stories I wrote for my grade one teacher... but still, they were stories, and there were no dialects.) And I'm terrible at faking accents in real life. I just can't do it. I can't even fake a Scottish accent, despite sharing a home with my Scottish grandmother for the first 15 years of my life. How the hell am I going to write Spike? I can find online slang dictionaries to pepper his speech with colourful expressions, but how will I know if I'm using them right? How will I know when I'm using a word he absolutely wouldn't say?
And then I go and make it even harder on myself by setting the darn story in London instead of Sunnydale. OK, I did live in London for the summer of 1999, so I've got something more than nothing to work with... but still. It's a foreign place that I don't know a huge amount about. Whereas Sunnydale is a made-up place that I know about as much about as anyone else does. (Plus, Sunnydale is a lot more like my Canadian hometown than London is. Except for the Hellmouth stuff, of course.)
Whether it'll come to anything, who can say. I've started far more stories than I've ever finished, over the years. (Only one WIP actually up on the web, though - and the guilt just keeps on throbbing. One of these days I'll finish it. I swear.)
I've written a short first chapter: 1344 words. Hm, I wonder if posting word counts to my livejournal whenever I get some writing done would help motivate me? You never know... I need all the motivation I can get, and having people reading it as I go along isn't really an option. (I don't know any Buffy people well enough to inflict that on them. Plus, too much pressure.)
The premise of the story, such as it is, is this: AU season 7. Suppose the First Evil was a no-show. Suppose that without the influence of the First Evil, Spike went considerably less insane post-soul. Suppose that without the First Evil egging him on, Spike decided not to go back to Sunnydale at all; suppose that he just couldn't face Buffy with the weight and guilt of his soul upon him. Suppose he went back home to London, instead, and one September evening while drunk and maudlin he called Buffy and left a vague and weepy apology on her answering machine. Suppose Buffy, worried by the message (and having *69-ed to find out where it came from), sent Xander to London to find him.
All that's in the first chapter, so I don't think it counts as spoilers to the story.
Then... adventures ensue in London. And slash, most likely. All of that part's rather vauge in my mind right now. Either it'll coalesce eventually into some sort of reasonable plot, or the story beginning will be abandoned on my hard drive like so many others. It could go either way.
There's a lot that intimidates me about starting this story, and about writing in this fandom.
Actually, the things that intimidate me break into two main bits:
1) The fandom is so big! There are so many great writers already working with it! Can I contribute anything new? Will anyone notice me? Will anyone care?
and
2) Breaking the "write-what-you-know" rule.
Second things first: Spike's dialect. Damn. I've never written a character with a dialect significantly different from my own before. Never, in twenty-odd years of writing! (OK, when I say "twenty years" that counts the stories I wrote for my grade one teacher... but still, they were stories, and there were no dialects.) And I'm terrible at faking accents in real life. I just can't do it. I can't even fake a Scottish accent, despite sharing a home with my Scottish grandmother for the first 15 years of my life. How the hell am I going to write Spike? I can find online slang dictionaries to pepper his speech with colourful expressions, but how will I know if I'm using them right? How will I know when I'm using a word he absolutely wouldn't say?
And then I go and make it even harder on myself by setting the darn story in London instead of Sunnydale. OK, I did live in London for the summer of 1999, so I've got something more than nothing to work with... but still. It's a foreign place that I don't know a huge amount about. Whereas Sunnydale is a made-up place that I know about as much about as anyone else does. (Plus, Sunnydale is a lot more like my Canadian hometown than London is. Except for the Hellmouth stuff, of course.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 02:25 pm (UTC)I completely empathise. As I have just started writing my first story and I an having the exact same problem, having toowrite in a dialect that is completely alien to me (the entire cast of BtVS). May I suggest that you rent the following movies.
Snatch
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
High Heels and Low Lives
The will have some good, cockney dialect in them.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 08:04 pm (UTC)Man, when I watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels there were significant swathes of dialogue I couldn't parse at all!
Anyway, it's always fun to have a "research!" excuse to watch movies. Thanks for the tips!
And hey, thanks for replying at all. I'm new in this arena, so it's nice to have people talk to me. :)
I see from your userinfo you're Irish. The good news it it should be fairly easy to find an American to look over your text and tell you which bits don't sound American. But yeah, even so it's hard to write in the first place, isn't it? I want it to sound right in my head. (Oh, if you don't know any Americans, I'll do a bit for you if you'd like - Canadian English is nearly indistinguishable from American, and I'm aware of most of the differences.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-04 11:56 am (UTC)Well I would be happy to 'translate' anything, you can't make out, I have spent some time in Britain, plus us Irish are used to the British( thats not a political statement, by the way!). And just so you know, Brad Pitt's portrayl of the 'Oirish Traveller' in Snatch, is not typical!! I live it a fairly rural part of Ireland, ( I used to live in Dublin) so I am unlikely to come across any beta reading americans.
I may take you up on your offer, Thanks.
Will anyone care?
Date: 2004-05-06 11:09 am (UTC)As for the accent thing - I was born a cockney and could check your story out for linguistic slips if you like! (Just trying to get a sneak preview....)
Re: Will anyone care?
Date: 2004-05-06 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-06 06:10 pm (UTC)Oh dear *god* yes. The fandom may be big and multifaceted but the pool of good writers in any fandom is small to middling, so there's always a good opportunity to make a mark--and in sub-genres such as slash and S/X, even more so. (Slash is still quite a large genre in itself, but S/X, despite its occasional trendiness, can always use new blood.)
I struggle with "write what you know" all the time. The anxieties and imaginary limitations that concept produces can be overcome by (1) realizing that human emotions are shared by all of us, and (2) research. Even so, I don't do a lot of writing set in Victorian times because I know that without research I'd get stuff wrong, and I don't feel like doing the research.
The great thing about Buffy is--well, compared to all my previous fandoms, it was incredibly liberating, because it didn't require me to research the FBI, or police procedure, or military organizational protocols and structure. It was all an invention of Whedon and his merry band of crackwhores, with its own set of comprehensible rules. As long as you nail the voices and characterizations, you can do pretty much anything you want, even wildly AU stretches (as AUs are canonical, yay). When I worry about British English, like Spike's voice for instance, I remember that Spike himself is the construct of a bunch of American writers who are just winging it (JM himself being thoroughly American). I keep Brit word lists, slang and such, and his voice is one of the areas I'm most careful with in writing, but it's doable. I just need him to sound like *Spike* and not necessarily like a real British person, you know?
Good god. Apparently I have a lot to say tonight. And yet my fingers tire. And so I slink away again.