Fanfiction, Part IV: Where Do My (Original) Ideas Come From?

(Come see The Dark Room! We’re having a blast, and you will too! Only five shows left!)

Apparently, one of the things famous writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror are forever getting asked is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Even a mostly unpublished writer like me can see this is something of a ridiculous question, along the lines of, “Why do you love your children?” Interviewers might be better off asking more specific things like, “How do you feel about your daughter’s current report card?”, “Tell me one of your most positive memories of your son,” or “What are some influences you associate with this particular book?”

But I have to admit, this is one of the few times I’m glad that I’m not — and have barely any chance of becoming — a famous fantasy writer. Because although I don’t know where many of my plot-device ideas come from, or why the characters that pop into my head are themselves and not someone else, I do know one key aspect of my writing process bears an uncomfortable resemblance to fanfiction.

I should say it’s “uncomfortable” only because in a genre like fantasy in which originality is so highly valued, and in a social context like that of today in which getting obsessed with fictional characters to the point where you start making up new stories for them is seen as unhealthy, I’m a bit embarrassed to have to explain that a large part of my brainstorming involves imagining the casts of my favourite stories in a variety of unlikely scenarios. Writing-wise, however, hey, why not? It seems to work for me.

Usually, the way it happens is this: I find myself slipping into daydreams about a particular scene for a particular set of non-original characters. I know there’s something about that scene that I’d like to write about, but I’m not always sure what. Most often, it’s the set of emotional dynamics that surround it: I like the idea of best friends having to choose between each other and their ideals, or of a cards-close-to-chest person finally revealing her feelings to the people she loves. Other times, I glom onto a cool plot point I’ve thrown in so I can squash the characters into story shapes they don’t normally fit, or a line or two that just sounds so good when I have characters say it in my head that it’d be a shame to waste it.

There are patterns: you may have noticed that I love characters who are emotionally closeted and outwardly mean but secretly care about other characters very deeply. Characters like this — Snape, House, Holmes, the Phantom of the Opera — appeal to me as a reader and as a writer. (Similarly, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I also  love the wrench ghosts throw into things, and I especially love the moment when a character who was thought to be weak gets revealed to be strong, or when a character who was thought to be a stranger gets revealed to be someone another character loves but thought was lost.)

Anyway, when I find myself interested in a scenario that involves Holmes or House or whoever, I know it’s the old archetype that’s hooked me again, not that particular character and his particular problems. So I try to find a way to use my new variation on the theme in my own work, with a repressed character of my own. Usually, that’s no problem — there are plenty of them ready to run around in my head, although I often have trouble getting to know them properly until I’ve filled in the rest of their world and peopled it with the other characters they love and hate.

When I was first starting finishing novel-length manuscripts, at the age of about eleven or twelve, I was convinced that all ideas had to be one hundred percent original, springing out of what Shakespeare might call airy nothings, with absolutely no influences whatsoever. This is probably why my first completed manuscript a) reads like I threw in every random idea that came to me as I wrote it (because I did); b) took me the longest to write and was the shortest novel I’ve ever written (because I decided I had to wait for inspiration whenever I got stuck); and c) is a very un-self-conscious pastiche of C. S. Lewis.

It first occurred to me that it was okay to use my daydreams — some of which involved other people’s pre-existing characters — when I was working on my third completed manuscript around age fifteen. If I’d decided to take that story another way, it could easily have become the kind of Mary-Sue fanfic that gets held up as an example of all that’s wrong with the Internet; instead, I ended up with a hilariously poorly written 128, 000-word first draft that involved 29 main characters and a bunch of embarrassingly self-aggrandizing power fantasies. But the experience was valuable because it taught me how to identify the charged parts of the silly little scenes I’d imagine for myself while bored and how to restructure them without the silly stuff so they made a real story that still resonated with me. I’m actually still working on it — though the number of protagonists has dwindled very significantly, and the amount of plot has grown tenfold — and I’m pretty optimistic about the polished story it will eventually make.

Maybe it would make me a better writer if I could come up with these story seeds without the crutch of popular fiction — and sometimes it feels vaguely like I’m cheating on my own imagination when I work with my characters but daydream about other people’s. (Then again, maybe I’m just loath to treat my own characters as carelessly as you need to in order to have a fruitful playing-around-with-stories session.) But, for better or worse, that’s the way I roll.

Besides, it’s not like I’m pulling someone else’s ideas wholesale and reworking them. With the exception of Shakespeare, I’ve never taken another author’s work, characters, or story structure with the idea of remaking it into my own. It’s more like having a set of toys: some people work out their ideas with dolls or action figures — it just so happens that my set of playthings is a bunch of imaginary people that I borrowed from books or movies or TV. When I tell people which story or show influenced which manuscript or play, they usually go either, “… riiiiiiiight” or squint a bit and say, “Yeah… okay, I guess I can sort of see what you mean.”

Because even when I settle on a scenario, the character whose story I really want to tell is seldom one who’d appear in the show or book or movie that inspired me. I don’t want to know what this plot looks like to the protagonists who’ve been following the mystery or developments or war since day one — what if you came into this world ten years later from a different background? What if you ran into this group of people while that plot was going on without knowing these pertinent facts? And what if you were already going through personal crises X, Y, and Z of your own?  Once I have a plot that interests me, the character I choose to use is often one who comes into the whole thing near the very end — long after the scenes from my daydreams would have played themselves out.

Maybe most importantly, I use the fanfic-inspired skeletons more as clothestrees than as models: I throw all my unattached ideas at them and see which ones hang nicely. Hey, that scene I was imagining about the emotional revelation might fit in this world I thought of where beliefs can come true, which means it really belongs to these original characters! This image of a small stone winged horse and the dream I had where I was trying to help an old man find something in an apple orchard might fit together with that scene I thought of with the ghost!

So in the end, it’s a mistake for me to think of originality as something that depends entirely on the source of an idea. Original ideas can wind up playing out like a Mary Sue fic (*cough*WesleyCrusher*cough*), and ideas based off someone else’s characters can sprout into something completely different and exciting. It’s not where you get your ideas: it’s how you use them that counts.