This post is mostly about exposition
14/9/12 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchI know I've been kind of quiet, but I have been doing stuff! For one thing, I hand-wrote aralias a Gallifrey fic here, and I'm still taking prompts on that meme if anyone's interested.
And the new semester has been going well! The other people in my year in the PhD program are super nice, and everyone in general is very cool. There is a ridiculous amount of reading, but I am keeping up so far while working on the weekends, so I think I'll be fine (especially when my weekend job wraps up). I also made it to a fencing practice for the university club. Got over my normal 'agh new place, agh new people' anxiety and had a lot of fun teaching new people how to fence sabre. I'm still doing some settling in stuff (got lost on the bus system on the way back from fencing, and there's something weird going on with my bus pass that I need to sort out on Monday), but overall I think everything's good.
But the main reason I'm making a post today is because I am still thinking about that Teen Wolf renaissance faire AU, and I just can't write it. But I've identified why! The problem is exposition.
You get to skip a lot of exposition in fanfic, which is great as far as I'm concerned. You can get on with the plot without having to explain what a TARDIS is, or what Batman does, or why all these people keep talking about the Prime Directive. You get to assume a certain level of base knowledge, because otherwise people wouldn't be reading fanfic. And when people do read fanfic without knowledge of the source (I do this all the time), it's pretty much their responsibility to educate themselves with wikipedia, or fan wikis, or more fanfic, whatever.
On the other hand, in AUs you have to explain a lot more about what's going on. It's kind of like a fantasy story, where the reader can't really take anything for granted and you have to feed them the world in chunks. The usual strategy in sci-fi/fantasy is to give the viewpoint to the least informed character and work from there - even shows like Doctor Who do this with the companion, so that the viewer doesn't get left way behind. Unless you want to dump exposition into the narration (which you usually really don't), a naive viewpoint is the way to go.
(I feel like someone has talked about this before. Aralias, possibly? IDK, I'm not being original here, just complaining.)
Anyway, that's not the problem. I love writing characters that don't know what's going on.
The problem is that there are some things I just can't write exposition for. Or maybe the problem is more that writing for the naive character feels kind of fake? This is what I ran into on the Doctor Who fencing AU that I keep messing with - the early parts of the fic are hard, because I'm trying to explain fencing to the reader via the viewpoint character. That one I can probably push through if I ever sit down and just deal with it: I can remember life before fencing and how I encountered it, and I can draw on those experiences. But with the ren faire AU? I don't think I can ever actually write that fic.
I grew up on the circuit, and I still do at least one or two faires a year. And taking the naive viewpoint and trying to explain my community to the internet, even for the sake of an extremely silly shipfic, just feels weird. I've been trying to figure out why, since I don't have a problem drawing on my personal experience for other fics - for some reason ren faires are some kind of sticking point. I'd feel way more comfortable with the fic if I was writing from the insider's pov, but I think I'd have to work really hard to pull it off without confusing the reader. And a switching POV would be okay, this just feels like a story that needs one voice.
Luckily I am the only one who actually wants Derek/Stiles fic where Derek is a leatherworker and Stiles is an armored playtron, so I can just not write it. (Except I want it enough for EVERYONE. The Argents just bought into a faire that the Hales have been working for years! Derek got them kicked out of the last Argent show after some kind of incident with Kate Argent, so now everyone's worried and Derek's trying not to freak out while he keeps flirting with this ridiculous guy who clanks around in a hundred pounds of metal. Boyd is a jouster. It would be magic.)
(I'm still writing Derek-in-heat fic instead, in case you were hoping that my actual writing projects were less ridiculous.)
How do other people deal with this? Do you ever just want to skip explaining what's going on and make your readers sink or swim?
And the new semester has been going well! The other people in my year in the PhD program are super nice, and everyone in general is very cool. There is a ridiculous amount of reading, but I am keeping up so far while working on the weekends, so I think I'll be fine (especially when my weekend job wraps up). I also made it to a fencing practice for the university club. Got over my normal 'agh new place, agh new people' anxiety and had a lot of fun teaching new people how to fence sabre. I'm still doing some settling in stuff (got lost on the bus system on the way back from fencing, and there's something weird going on with my bus pass that I need to sort out on Monday), but overall I think everything's good.
But the main reason I'm making a post today is because I am still thinking about that Teen Wolf renaissance faire AU, and I just can't write it. But I've identified why! The problem is exposition.
You get to skip a lot of exposition in fanfic, which is great as far as I'm concerned. You can get on with the plot without having to explain what a TARDIS is, or what Batman does, or why all these people keep talking about the Prime Directive. You get to assume a certain level of base knowledge, because otherwise people wouldn't be reading fanfic. And when people do read fanfic without knowledge of the source (I do this all the time), it's pretty much their responsibility to educate themselves with wikipedia, or fan wikis, or more fanfic, whatever.
On the other hand, in AUs you have to explain a lot more about what's going on. It's kind of like a fantasy story, where the reader can't really take anything for granted and you have to feed them the world in chunks. The usual strategy in sci-fi/fantasy is to give the viewpoint to the least informed character and work from there - even shows like Doctor Who do this with the companion, so that the viewer doesn't get left way behind. Unless you want to dump exposition into the narration (which you usually really don't), a naive viewpoint is the way to go.
(I feel like someone has talked about this before. Aralias, possibly? IDK, I'm not being original here, just complaining.)
Anyway, that's not the problem. I love writing characters that don't know what's going on.
The problem is that there are some things I just can't write exposition for. Or maybe the problem is more that writing for the naive character feels kind of fake? This is what I ran into on the Doctor Who fencing AU that I keep messing with - the early parts of the fic are hard, because I'm trying to explain fencing to the reader via the viewpoint character. That one I can probably push through if I ever sit down and just deal with it: I can remember life before fencing and how I encountered it, and I can draw on those experiences. But with the ren faire AU? I don't think I can ever actually write that fic.
I grew up on the circuit, and I still do at least one or two faires a year. And taking the naive viewpoint and trying to explain my community to the internet, even for the sake of an extremely silly shipfic, just feels weird. I've been trying to figure out why, since I don't have a problem drawing on my personal experience for other fics - for some reason ren faires are some kind of sticking point. I'd feel way more comfortable with the fic if I was writing from the insider's pov, but I think I'd have to work really hard to pull it off without confusing the reader. And a switching POV would be okay, this just feels like a story that needs one voice.
Luckily I am the only one who actually wants Derek/Stiles fic where Derek is a leatherworker and Stiles is an armored playtron, so I can just not write it. (Except I want it enough for EVERYONE. The Argents just bought into a faire that the Hales have been working for years! Derek got them kicked out of the last Argent show after some kind of incident with Kate Argent, so now everyone's worried and Derek's trying not to freak out while he keeps flirting with this ridiculous guy who clanks around in a hundred pounds of metal. Boyd is a jouster. It would be magic.)
(I'm still writing Derek-in-heat fic instead, in case you were hoping that my actual writing projects were less ridiculous.)
How do other people deal with this? Do you ever just want to skip explaining what's going on and make your readers sink or swim?
