#also. we have no idea how many fanfics have been rebranded into published works | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kaelidascope · 5 months

Note

Dude, I love this fanfic so much! I just wanted to ask where you got the idea from. Did you have any inspiration from anyone? Also, what's your favorite fanfic? And want do you recommend ?

AWE bless!! Thank you so much I'm glad you're enjoying it <33

So actually a good 80% of this is written from personal experience LOL I used to dance and was into drift building/racing in my late teens/early twenties! Most of the references or scenes in Midnight Menagerie are references to things I've seen or done in real life, OR stories friends have told me within the same field. (Nora is literally just a rebranding of this one mutual friend we had who just. Absolutely fucking unhinged) Like for example, the anticipated Hangover Chapter is just a retelling of an insane Summer weekend I had in 2017 ☠️ it's a personal delight being able to translate things into the narrative, even more so knowing people find my stupid, terrible decisions as amusing as I do in current times lol

My general rule of thumb is to write from experience. Things I understand either on a technical point or emotional connection. So, if you've read it in my work, it's probably something I've done LOL

Another reason I find drive in writing this type of narrative is that MM!Blake's type of dissociative PTSD is something I haven't seen much in media in general. I've seen people depict her in various ways (some of them good!), but none of them ever really apply directly to me, so I wanted to make something that I could relate to and how to properly navigate life, given the environmental circumstances. Plus some us need better examples on how to juggle mental illness as adults and also be in healthy long term relationships because damn I have zero reference LOL

For the fic recs, oh boy I have so many LOL time to be a pathetic fangirl on main but okay here's the ones that immediately jump to mind (also heads up most of these are mature or explicit rating);

Certified Kaeli Fresh Fics

Let You See My Wilder Side (If I Can See Your Bones)

We all know this one but it is, hands down, my favorite piece of literature of all time. Masterfully crafted and a timeless classic worth several rereads (and I have. Embarrassingly so)

Written by @/lucytara on tumblr || @/explosive_sky on twitter

honestly all her works are immaculate and beyond compare. Also a major fan of I Have A Bullet With Your Mouth On It (That was first RWBY fanfic I ever read LMAO a friend recommended it to me before I even watched the show) I aspire to write like her some day. It's what got me writing fanfiction in the first place. So, credit goes to Erin for inspiring me to post my manuscripts at all. Words cannot express my gratitude and appreciation. I have two book series in the process of being published now and I wouldn't have had the nerve to do it had it not been for this specific fic.

2. One Day At A Time

Also one of the earlier fics I read before getting into the show LOL I love all of @/Frenchsoda 's work, the full list is also worth checking out. I'm a fan of disgruntled Blake who doesn't understand her attraction to Yang but it's so god damn sweet ugh

3. Fucking In Love

Written by @/Set_WingedWarrior and @/Softlight

This one circulates a lot in my social circles. Everyone I know LOVES this one and after reading it earlier this year, now I see why. As someone who worked in the sex industry for a brief period of time, this one's not only accurate but also A DELIGHT to read. The premise is fun, captivating, and worth the wait. I actually discovered a chapter update earlier this year and sent the gc into hysterics because we thought the fic was dead LMAO props to these authors!! They're doing an amazing job and deserve praise

4. You're A Mountain, Full Of Glory

written by champion author @/lescousinsdangereux

I should just preface already that every book Blake reads in MM is a fanfiction that exists because I love Easter eggs. Everyone knows I had Blake reference this in chapter 3 LOL but it's equally as immaculate as Erin's work. I LOVED especially the dynamic between Weiss, Yang, and Ruby in this one. Baby, we're complicated fucking murdered me 😭 also that fuckass Christmas scene, that's my favorite Christmas song LMAO

5. The Home Inside Your Head

Written by the ever skilled @/writeriguess . I found this fic by accident by seeing fanart for it floating around on this site. Got curious, picked at it, and. Oh, my god. It's not very often my brain gets scratched in the right way, but boy this one does it. This author does something specifically unique I haven't seen many do before, and I applaud them for it. There's great detail on the scenes that matter, and the fucking organic build up between Blake and Yang is just. God. Chef's kiss. Truly. It feels so god damn natural and healthy and it's already crossing off several of my agendas already. Give this one a read and give the author some love. SENSUAL FACE TOUCHING? CHAPTER 13????? BOOOOOOOYYYYYYY I'm normal about it

6. You'd Be Paranoid Too (If Everyone Was Out To Get You)

Written by @/WabaJaba_ on twitter

Okay so this one's completely different than what I've previously listed but HOLY FUCKING SHIT IS IT A THRILLER. It doesn't nearly have the amount of love and attention it truly deserves. A friend of mine recommended it to me because it shook them so fucking hard they were in total brainrot hell for a MONTH. NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY LMAO God I was obsessed with this for weeks myself. It obviously lives up to it's rating, horror fics aren't for everyone. But if you're able to read it, good lord you should. It's chilling, captivating, and had me on the edge of my fucking seat the entire time. Both endings are good, I still can't decide which one I prefer but RAH I will make sure this is seen god dammit

and last but certainly not least

7. You And Me and This Temptation

written by talented author @/ProfessorSpork

Okay this one was an accidental find as well. A friend sent it to me because THEY found it by accident, I clicked on it for later, went looking for a completely different fic that I mistook for this one, started skimming and realized 'wait a minute LMAO I don't recognize this'. But the thing you have to understand is I hate reading. I'm not a reader, I'm picky and it needs to be worth sitting down for long periods of time. This is one of the rare instances where I was so captivated by it I kept reading more and more from the middle where I landed, and eventually just said ykw let me just start from the beginning cus LMAO context.

This one is, by far, one the healthiest and loveliest depictions of first times I have ever seen. This shit was so inspiring to me that it literally kickstarted an essay in someone's DMs why depictions like this are so important. I didn't have this experience irl, and why MM is written the way it is is because its meant to serve as a lighthouse for those who, like me, haven't. This fic however I feel like should be a required read for anyone getting into relationships for the first time because if it's not like how these two interact, LEAVE IT. This is the standard. This is amazingly written, it's the closest I've ever seen canon Yang and Blake be written to date. The fucking souvenir bit 😭 NJKFGNFJKGNGJ killed me, I was kicking my feet laughing for a good minute. This is the kind of standard everyone should look at and go 'yeah, I want what they have' BECAUSE IT'S CORRECT. LOUD CORRECT BUZZER NOISES

Honestly everything in my bookmarks is certified Kaeli Fresh but these 7 are my top faves. They're probably also really commonly known I'm sure but LMAO like I said I don't read much 😭 which is heavily ironic considering I write myself. Anyway this ended up way longer than I intended but LOL <3 <3 go give these incredible authors love!!

#midnightbeesfic #rwby #bumbleby #blake belladonna #yang xiao long #Boy this turned into a massive ramble #I'd directly tag the authors but I'm shy as fuck sorry LMAO #I hope Midnight Menagerie and my other works offer a fraction of respect to the works these authors have produced #Certified Kaeli Fresh works

56 notes · View notes

vintage1der · 6 years

Link

What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.” Devotees of fanfiction will sometimes tell you that it’s one of the oldest writing forms in the world. Seen with this generous eye, the art of writing stories using other people’s creations hails from long before our awareness of Twilight-fanfic-turned-BDSM romance Fifty Shades of Grey: perhaps Virgil, when he picked up where Homer left off with the story of Aeneas, or Shakespeare’s retelling of Arthur Brookes’s 1562 The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. What most of us would recognise as fanfiction began in the 1960s, when Star Trek fans started creating zines about Spock and Captain Kirk’s adventures. Thirty years later, the internet arrived, which made sharing stories set in other people’s worlds – be they Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or anything and everything in between – easier. Fanfiction has always been out there, if you knew where to look. Now, it’s almost impossible to miss.

In the last few years, fanfiction has enjoyed something of a rebrand. Big-name authors such as EL James, author of the Fifty Shades books, and Cassandra Clare, who has always been open about writing Harry Potter fanfiction before her bestselling Mortal Instruments series, have helped bring it into the mainstream. These days, it’s fairly common knowledge that some people just really like writing about Captain America and Bucky Barnes falling in love, or Doctor Who fighting demons with Buffy. The general image of fanfiction has brightened somewhat: less creepy, more sweetly nerdy.

But the divide between fanfiction and original writing holds strong. It’s assumed that if people write fanfiction, it’s because they can’t produce their own. At best, it functions as training wheels, preparing a writer to commit to a real book. When they don’t – as in the famous case of Fifty Shades, which one plagiarism checker found had an 89% similarity rate with James’s original Twilight fanfiction – they are ridiculed. A real author, the logic goes, having moved on to writing their own books, doesn’t look back.

“Here’s the thing,” Naomi Novik explains over the phone from New York. She is the bestselling author of the Temeraire books, a fantasy series that adds dragons to the Napoleonic Wars, and Spinning Silver, which riffs on Rumpelstiltskin. “I don’t actually draw any line between my fanfiction work and my professional work – except that I only write the fanfiction stuff for love.”

In between writing her novels – or indeed during, as she admits that fanfiction is one of her favourite procrastination techniques – Novik is an active member of the fanfiction community. She is a co-founder of the Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the most popular hosting websites, and a prolific writer in the universes of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Merlin and many more.

And she’s not the only professional at work. Rainbow Rowell, the bestselling author of Eleanor and Park and other novels, once told the Bookseller that between two novels, she wrote a 30,000-word Harry Potter fanfiction. “It’s Harry and Draco as a couple who have been married for many years, and they’re raising Harry’s kids,” she said. “It’s them dealing with attachment parenting and step-parents and all these middle-aged issues.”

The divide between a fanfiction writer and an original fiction writer can look very arbitrary when looking at authors such as Michael Chabon, who once described his own novel Moonglow as “a Gravity’s Rainbow fanfic”. Or Madeline Miller, whose Orange-prize winning The Song of Achilles detailed the romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and whose latest novel Circe picks up on the witch who seduces Odysseus in the Odyssey. Miller said she was initially worried when one ex-boyfriend described her work as “Homeric fanfiction” but has since embraced her love of adapting and playing with Greek mythology. The tag could also be applied to classics such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, reworkings of Shakespeare by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Edward St Aubyn in the Hogarth series, and a spate of parodies: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Android Karenina.

Others may find it odd that published authors would bother writing fanfiction alongside or between their professional work. But it’s all too simple to draw lines between two forms of writing that, in their separate ways, can be both productive and joyful. Neil Gaiman once wrote that the most important question an author can ask is: “What if?” Fanfiction takes this to the next level. What if King Arthur was gay? What if Voldemort won? What if Ned Stark escaped?

“I believe that all art, if it’s any good, is in dialogue with other art,” Novik says. “Fanfiction feels to me like a more intimate conversation. It’s a conversation where you need the reader to really have a lot of detail at their fingertips.”

For writers still wobbling on training wheels, fanfiction offers benefits: the immediate gratification of sharing writing without navigating publishers; passionate readers who are already interested in the characters, and a collegial stream of feedback from fellow writers.

“There was an audience of people who wanted to read my writing,” says young adult author Sarah Rees Brennan, who wrote Harry Potter fanfiction in her teens and twenties before she published her own novels, the latest of which, In Other Lands, was a Hugo award finalist. “Here were all these people online who wanted stories about familiar characters. Audiences were pre-invested and waiting.”

For writers, whether already published or on the path to being published, this instantaneous readership functions as a writer’s workshop: Novik calls it a “community of your peers”. Spending hours thrashing out the details of Draco Malfoy’s inner life can’t help but function as a crash course in character motivation. And the limits and constraints of working within a pre-existing world, with its own characters and settings, is a unique challenge.

“Fanfiction is a great incubator for writers,” Novik says. “The more constraints you have on you at the beginning, the better. It’s why people do writing exercises, or play scales. That kind of constraint forces you to practice certain skills, and then at a certain point you have the control to bring out the whole toolbox.”

Once some writers get those tools, they never look back. Rees Brennan no longer writes fanfiction. “I had a friend say it’s like the difference between babysitting kids and having children of your own,” she says. “With a world you built yourself, and characters you built, there’s this sense of deep, overwhelming love.”

But Rees Brennan is still a fan of collaborative writing and shared universes, as in the short stories she writes with Cassandra Clare about characters from Clare’s Mortal Instruments universe. “It’s amazing to gather around a kitchen table and yell at each other excitedly about what’s going to happen to mutually beloved characters,” she says. “I want that for every creative person – a chance to find their imaginative family, wherever it may be.”

Novik scorns the idea that published authors should turn their back on fanfiction. She recalls being on a panel where one member said he couldn’t understand why someone would waste their time writing it over an original work: “I said, ‘Have you ever played an instrument?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I play piano’. I said, ‘So, do you compose all your own music?’”

“When I was first published, I deliberately went to my editors and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been writing fanfiction for 10 years. I love it.’ It was non-negotiable for me. As soon as you do that, by the way, it turns out that like half of the publishing industry has read or been involved in fanfiction,” she laughs. “Shockingly! It’s amazing how all these women who like storytelling have some connection to the community.”

For Novik and many other writers, fanfiction is a fundamental a way of expressing oneself, of teasing out new ideas and finding a joyous way to engage with writing again after the hard slog of editing a novel. The journey to become a published writer isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral, as we grow older and continue to explore the characters and tropes we love. There’s so many stories waiting to be told – perhaps one or two of them could involve getting Captain America laid. God knows he needs it.

#creative writing #books #culture #fiction #fanfiction #The Guardian

4 notes · View notes