I never took a formal, in-school creative writing course. In fact, my only brush with creative writing was my freshman year of high school where the student teacher who had already realized she hated teaching tried desperately to figure out how to fill the last quarter of the year. I was told to write a ten page (hand-written) short story in five weeks.
I turned in ten page a week for five weeks.
No one is surprised.
Yet, miracle of miracles, my writing has improved since that first tragic attempt at playing with words. Some of it comes from practice, good beta readers, and rewriting books umpteen billion times. Some of it comes from cons and online courses (Mary Robinette Kowal has a great one on Writing Short Stories that will eventually sink into my skull). Most of my improvement has come from fandom.
Fandoms are dangerous things at times. Amorphous, occasionally hidden, ready to riot and march to war. Fandoms spring up around everything from music groups to cookware, from movies to dwarf planets (stay strong, Pluto Fam). And within the fandoms everything – EVERYTHING – is up for discussion.
From what kind of ice cream Pluto would eat if it were a person to what the color of the socks on our favorite Second Lead mean in episode four of a Korean drama (they’re very distinctive socks, okay?).
My first real fandom – the one where I learned to analyze the height of lampshades and decode costumes – was The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.
Strange, right? It was a web drama based on Pride and Prejudice and Lizzie was a master’s student interning at Pemberley Digital. I knew the story forwards and backwards. I knew the characters. I’d actually listened to this dissected by college literature teachers.
And there I was every week waiting to pick up tiny details. Was today Darcy Day? Would we finally get to see the infamous and elusive Fitzwilliam? Why was the camera tilted wide? Was Charlotte coming back? What did the flowers on Jane’s shirt actually mean?
It was exhilarating!
Fandom discussion was an intellectual debate without any threat of failure. The worst that could happen was a fandom war and I’m very good at using a block button.
The rest came quickly: in-depth costume analysis of Mad Men, the dissection of The 100 and Kingdom, history checks for a Chinese drama set in the Three Kingdoms period. I walked away with more information about set design and history of the world than I ever had in school.
I learned about color signaling, foreshadowing, and how to fail your fans by not using anything you set up (makes the sign to ward off the evil of GOT S8).
On the literary side I watched people dissect every page and phrase in a book for ship wars. I saw people defend pet theories based on three sentences in the fifth chapter of book two in a series of nine. I learned what impact a single word could have because of the framing of a scene.
And I took it all back to my writing.
Sitting to write a new book I fought for an ending line because I knew – I KNEW – one of my clever readers was going to see that line and the next chapter’s heading and put it together. It was a sly wink to a devoted reader who had emailed me after Book 1 that they hoped the series was going in a certain direction (and they were right).
I started adding in more details. Tiny things like the colors someone wore, the embroidery on the hem of a dress, and the location of their rank… because it will matter to someone. Because I know the readers who will re-read my book a dozen times and tell all their friends about it will be looking for those clues.
Sometimes I write a line and think, “This ones for the ship wars.”
I’ve already told the reader how this ship is going to go. But I have to give the shippers hope. They need something to cling to so they stay here long enough for those characters to find Happily Ever After where they belong.
Besides, someone needs to write the fanfic and it can’t always be me!
It’s not a coincidence that most of the best authors writing today have talked about writing fanfic. The delightfully absurd streets of fandom, where every word choice is analyzed over for years, is one of the best training grounds for a writer. So wade in! Find yourself a fandom! Get excited about a piece of art and find your people. Have a strong opinion about a midpoint twist! Read that essay-length critique of clothing and what that orange bird on someone’s shirt means for the plot!
Try your hand at fanfic if you haven’t yet.
Dabble with a meta-analysis of a character’s sudden change of temperament.
Theorize with some friends over what the first episode of a limited-run show means for the ending (because the set up is so important and… that’s another blog post).
Go have fun with other people’s art so you can come back and enjoy making your own.