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Why bad fic is good
May. 11th, 2009 01:20 pmI was reading another screenwriter's blog (as I am wont to do), and found this post. The point of it isn't so much relevant to me, since he's talking about why you should take a writing job on a crappy show and not worry about having a crappy show on your resume, but the reason he recommends it is really interesting:
You can't learn from something that's done right.
It may seem counterintuitive, but I've found it to be true in fic writing. I can't count the number of times I've read a really awesome fic and said, "I wish I could write like that," whether in reference to the prose itself, or the storytelling, or the plot, or the literary device used, or whatever. But the problem is, it gives me a benchmark without any real way of teaching me how to reach that benchmark. What makes a good story work? Often, it's not something you can explain - it's just that everything clicks and things come together perfectly and it's not really something you can replicate. And I've found myself endlessly frustrated in trying to do things I've seen other authors execute flawlessly, when I really don't know how they did it, and thus, don't know how to do it on my own.
(This was also an issue I had early on with dialogue. I knew funny lines when I heard them, but I didn't know what made them funny, so the only way I knew how to write funny lines was to steal jokes from other shows and adapt them for whatever I was writing.)
On the other hand, you CAN learn from a fic that gets it wrong. You can look at their mistakes and figure out how you'd have fixed them. You can see where they went wrong and vow never to do that in your own writing. It's often much easier to learn what not to do than it is to learn how to recreate the best story you ever read. (It's also why concrit is helpful, because then someone is pointing out your own mistakes so you can learn from them.)
Maybe this is striking a chord because I just read another fic last night that didn't go the way I wanted it to, and much like with He Will Come For Me, thinking about how I'd have made it more interesting gave me a fic idea of my own (not that I'll ever write it, but that's a different issue).
You can't learn from something that's done right.
It may seem counterintuitive, but I've found it to be true in fic writing. I can't count the number of times I've read a really awesome fic and said, "I wish I could write like that," whether in reference to the prose itself, or the storytelling, or the plot, or the literary device used, or whatever. But the problem is, it gives me a benchmark without any real way of teaching me how to reach that benchmark. What makes a good story work? Often, it's not something you can explain - it's just that everything clicks and things come together perfectly and it's not really something you can replicate. And I've found myself endlessly frustrated in trying to do things I've seen other authors execute flawlessly, when I really don't know how they did it, and thus, don't know how to do it on my own.
(This was also an issue I had early on with dialogue. I knew funny lines when I heard them, but I didn't know what made them funny, so the only way I knew how to write funny lines was to steal jokes from other shows and adapt them for whatever I was writing.)
On the other hand, you CAN learn from a fic that gets it wrong. You can look at their mistakes and figure out how you'd have fixed them. You can see where they went wrong and vow never to do that in your own writing. It's often much easier to learn what not to do than it is to learn how to recreate the best story you ever read. (It's also why concrit is helpful, because then someone is pointing out your own mistakes so you can learn from them.)
Maybe this is striking a chord because I just read another fic last night that didn't go the way I wanted it to, and much like with He Will Come For Me, thinking about how I'd have made it more interesting gave me a fic idea of my own (not that I'll ever write it, but that's a different issue).
