To my surprise, some of the writing was actually pretty great. There were more than a few silly sex scenes, and character actions or clothing choices I didn’t agree with, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers, right?
Unless . . . unless the beggar writes her own sex story.
People write fanfiction for different reasons. Some want to fix everything they think is wrong with a show. I wanted only to adjust two minor inconveniences: the fact that Buffy refused to give Spike a chance, and the fact that it aired on a PG-rated network. I also wanted to adjust what I thought was wrong with erotic Buffy fanfiction at the time: too much of it was generic, as if it could be pasted into any dime-store romance novel. Not enough of it employed the multidimensionality of the show’s characters, the witty repartee, and the way the show’s writers deftly blended drama with comedy. Thus, strictly for my own enjoyment and satisfaction, I set out to write a sizzling sex scene featuring the characters I knew and loved on the show, acting and talking as much like themselves as possible.
Taking a cue from the tie-in novels that always opened with a good hook of a first line, I settled on this:
Buffy Summers was being baked alive.
She isn’t actually being baked alive, of course; she’s trying to sleep during a miserable heat wave while having a vivid sex dream about Spike—the inverse of his dream about her. Because it’s a dream, she can let go of her inhibitions, indulge in her darkest fantasies. But then she wakes up, and Actual Spike appears in her room, wondering why she’s yelping his name and shuddering from the aftershocks of an orgasm.
I could have ended it there, as a short, steamy one-shot, but the sudden irrepressible Spike voice that had materialized in my brain was extremely curious as to what would happen next, and so was I.
The three months I spent exploring the possibilities were maybe the most fun I’d had with my own imagination. I filled two notebooks with notes, I discussed it with my partner over coffee and pancakes, and wrote tirelessly, day and night. It became a multichaptered erotic romantic comedy I called “In Heat.”
Curious about how an immortal male would react to his mortal lover’s period, I added a scene where, to Buffy’s horror and revulsion, Spike yanks out her tampon, drops it in a mug of human blood (which she’d presented to him to throw him off the scent), and says, “One man’s tampon, another man’s teabag,” before voraciously eating her out. (That specific line was dreamed up over tea at IHOP—and my partner and I laughed and laughed. We’re not easily grossed out.)
As a bisexual woman in a deeply affectionate relationship with another woman, I think I offered a unique perspective. I could describe a sense of desire and longing from both male and female points of view. To me, Spike was a lot like a lesbian. The Buffy/Spike relationship was arguably a queer one—their roles were so often reversed, Spike so open with his emotions and Buffy so guarded. She was just as physically strong as he was, if not stronger. Perhaps that’s what most attracted me to their dynamic. I constantly drew from my own relationship in the fic I wrote—many of Spike’s quotes (often during sex) came directly from my partner; I just adjusted them to be in his voice, not hers.
At last, after several (thousand) revisions, my work was done. I had achieved my goal: the ultimate how-they-get-it-on fic. I could retire! But of course I wouldn’t. Once I posted “In Heat,” there was no turning back. I was part of a community now. People loved my work and wanted more, and I couldn’t help but keep thinking of more to write. I made a website and received glowing reviews and approval from my now-colleagues. Someone even gave me an award! One day, I signed in to a Yahoo! group called “One Good Day” (referring to Spike’s comment that he’d get Buffy one day) and everyone squee’d at my arrival. I was famous! A red-carpeted welcome mat was rolled out for me, with long-stemmed roses landing all around it. It was a far better reception than I ever got as a musician. How could I not want to spend all my time there?
Not only were they a complimentary bunch, but most were talented writers as well. I was thrilled to have found myself in the company of so many like-minded individuals. We became fast friends, gave each other writing advice, offered to be “betas,” or test audiences/editors for one another’s works in progress, bounced ideas around, and generally had a great time. All because we shared a burning desire to read and write smut about two fictional characters.
Fic U: Authoring via Spuffy Fanfiction 101
SYLLABUS:
1)Write Hot Smut Without Breaking Character
A)If You Wouldn’t Hear It in the Show, It Shouldn’t Be on the Page. Don’t use florid descriptions or pretentious phrases, unless that’s what the characters do. Don’t do what I once did early on and end a sexy tension-filled chapter with a cheesy line like, “And then, fire met ice.” (Groan.)
B)What Makes Smut Good? The feeling that you’re there, in it, WITH them, or better yet, that you’re one of them. Approach the scene from the point of view of one or both of the characters, not as an impartial narrator. Bring in immediacy, emotion, thought, touch, sight, and sound. Make it rhythmic and lyrical, but avoid (A).
C)Smut MacGuffins: Easy AND Fun. Direct routes include: dreams, spells, curses, chains and/or kidnapping, mystical doodads, pheromone demons. Easy AND fun. Harder and less fun routes include: Buffy dies and comes back to life and hates herself and feels dead inside, so why not sleep with Spike? (Just kidding—that’s what happened on the show!)
D)Use UST. There is nothing hotter than Unresolved Sexual Tension, so use it. Keep it going. Push it as far as it can possibly go before you can’t stand it anymore and have to get them naked. (I once wrote thirty-one chapters of Spuffy UST. It was by far my most popular fic.)
E)Fuck Outside the Box. Buffy and Spike are two very strong, acrobatic people. They’re superheroes! They probably wouldn’t just lie there and take it slow and romantic—at least not at first. (This was confirmed when they made a house fall down in the show.) So what would they do? Think of something outrageous that hasn’t been done before, then prove it could happen.
2) Write Snappy In-Character Dialogue
A)Hear Voices. Watch an episode to refresh the character voices and the cadence of their speech patterns in your mind. If you can hear them talking, you can write their dialogue. Just make sure what they say doesn’t stray too far from their personalities or beliefs.
B)Avoid Catchphrases. If Spike is using the phrase “bloody hell” in every sentence, he should stop. If Buffy is saying “soooo not ___” or “___ much?” more than once per fic, it’s time to think of something else for her to say. I made this mistake a couple of times in my earlier fic. I learned not to as I improved.
C)Would You Like Sex with That Dialogue? If you don’t whisper hot nothings during sex, or can’t imagine people conversing between all the grunts and moans, don’t bother with this. I’m an auditory person—I need to hear my characters fucking as well as see them. Of course, they’re not gonna say, “Did you buy the groceries today?” because that’s not sexy (unless you really like grocery shopping). They’ll say something breathless, heated—and depending on how they feel, ardent or conflicted or hateful—in a rhythm that echoes the act itself.
Being a part of this community was not only a great social experience, it was like a crash course in learning to write. And over the years, my classroom grew. We all moved from that relatively small Yahoo! group to FanFiction.Net and LiveJournal and created our own websites, all of which invited thousands more into the fray. And while the BtVS fandom wasn’t the largest, it boasted members who were professional authors, screenwriters, and playwrights, as well as editors, literary agents, and college professors. And everyone, professional or not, was extremely vocal and opinionated. Soon enough, what started out as a drive to fulfil my own desires had evolved into something more serious.
Writing sex and dialogue came relatively easily to me, although I did get better at it through practice. Plot, on the other hand, was another matter. If my stories ever had a plot, they would b
e built around whatever sexual scenario had popped into my head that week. One of my betas coined a phrase for this type of fic: PDP—porn-driven plot. Another one of my betas, a librarian in Florida, continually challenged me to write a fic with a “real” plot. Why not? I thought. And what better way to educate yourself than to try your damnedest and test it out on a built-in audience of thousands?
A year or so earlier, one of my fanfiction heroes, Saber Shadowkitten, had approached me with an offer I couldn’t refuse: her one-shot “Humping Like Bunnies” was begging for a part two called “A Bunny in the Oven.” She didn’t have the time to write it, but she wondered if I did.
Saber’s “Humping Like Bunnies” hit all my fic buttons: a lot of antagonistic UST; vampire and slayer united against a common enemy; a spell gone awry (one that turns Spike and Buffy into bunnies unable to resist each other); “waking up” DURING the sex act, horrified/shocked/disgusted, but OMG it feels oh-so-good, can’t stop now; and an ending that alludes to a blossoming relationship. That was so my jam.
Pregnancy fics, on the other hand, were not my jam. They were the opposite of my jam, as I had no interest in ever seeing myself or Buffy in that condition. Saber didn’t have to explain what the sequel would be about; it was evident from the title. I took it on as a challenge and was proud of the short and sweet outcome. Readers begged for more, but I wasn’t interested in continuing it until my beta set me on a plotting mission. I knew that story had growth potential, wink wink. Not to mention, it gave literal meaning to the fic term “plot bunny.”
For the sake of this story—which I wasn’t getting paid for, just writing as an exercise—I pored over several books about plot and pregnancy and spent hundreds of hours online researching every aspect and timelining each event. While the finished product, “Heart Don’t Lie,” was far from perfect, it was an invaluable learning experience.
Fic U: Authoring via Spuffy Fanfiction 201
SYLLABUS:
1)Write a Plot That Doesn’t Suck
A)Keep the Pace—or, Don’t Let Smut (or Shmoopy Love Stuff) Grind Your Plot to a Halt. For “In Heat,” I wrote fourteen chapters that were fast and furious, then went back and added a couple of interludes that, I realized much later, derailed the momentum of the story (which was really about the blossoming of their relationship). In “Heart Don’t Lie,” my solution was to have every sex scene advance either the plot or the direction of their relationship. As long as sex does something other than make you wait for the next development, it’s good. In one scene that occurs in the thick of the action, they break the bathroom mirror and uncover a hidden tablet that’s the key to taking down the Big Bad.
B)Create Intriguing Original Characters. While the story’s villain, Lilith, wasn’t a creation all my own, I did have to give her a personality; the same was true for her henchman. It’s difficult for me to write character voices when I can’t hear them in my head—so I assigned either accents or actors to them. The more life and depth and sense of humor I gave new characters, the more comfortable I became with creating them.
2)Utilize Audience Feedback
A)It’s Not as Great as They Say It Is. Fanfiction affords you a vast audience you wouldn’t normally have. Use it, and learn from it. If you give people what they’re looking for, they’ll give you praise, some of it hyperbolic. You’re allowed to bask in the love for a while and let it bolster your confidence, but don’t get complacent. Be aware that it’s all subjective and that audiences are fickle. But praise is helpful in that you begin to see what works and what you shouldn’t stop doing.
B)It’s Not as Bad as They Say It Is, Either. Every creative person needs a thick skin. Not everyone will love your work and you’re bound to hear about it sooner or later. But it’s also important to stay objective and not take it personally, to learn the difference between constructive and useless criticism and to separate the two.
C)Follow Your Gut. Pick and choose what you’re going to listen to and learn from. Change it only if you really agree. Don’t write only for the masses; don’t do anything just for praise. I always regretted changing something simply because a beta told me to and I wanted her to like me. In the end, it was my fic, and I needed to believe in it 100 percent.
3)Avoid Clichés
A). . . To a Point. Avoiding clichés was always my biggest concern; it still is. But initially, I was so anti-cliché that in a story about a heat wave, I refused to write a sex scene using ice, even though it would totally make sense. I later learned that people actually want those kinds of clichéd scenes. (When writing my fic “Older,” I asked for suggestions. Most of them were clichés.) As long as you write them without being lazy, they can still be sexy. Some clichés are unavoidable. Sometimes you don’t know they exist, and sometimes, because things progress so quickly on the internet, they become clichés before you know it.
B)The Cliché You Read May Be Your Own. Sometimes, your own writing becomes a cliché. To wit: every now and then, someone writes a one-shot that is a parody of fanfic clichés. Each time, I’ve seen something of my own making in these. I say, “What? I wrote a cliché? But I try so hard to avoid them!” and they’ll point out that they became clichés after I wrote them. Sometimes it’s the dirty talk—Spike saying “perfect fit” became one—but sometimes it’s really odd, like, “‘Yep,’ she said, popping the p.” (That somehow ended up all over some Harry Potter fics!)
After Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended, followed by its spinoff, Angel, I still missed the characters and wished I could change the course of the series somehow. Spike and Buffy’s relationship in canon had taken a depressing turn. I’d lost my inspiration. Around then, a new type of fic was gaining popularity in the Spuffy community. It was called “fantasy” or “all-human” AU.
At first it seemed ridiculous—why read something that wasn’t about vampire Spike and slayer Buffy? Wasn’t that what made them so great? Were these so-called fic writers just trying to get Buffy fans to read their unpublished manuscripts by finding and replacing the character names? I held out until I read a fic where someone recast them as high school students trying to make their exes jealous, and they still miraculously sounded and acted like themselves. That was all it took. I was hooked, and immediately started writing my own AU.
I wanted “Crash and Burn” to reference and parallel the show as much as possible so it couldn’t be mistaken for some generic work. Buffy had a doomed first love with Angel—not because he was a vampire, but because he was her stepbrother. Buffy was a little more shallow, closer to her personality before she was chosen as a Slayer. She was who she’d be, I thought, without that element present in her life. Spike was a wayward rocker nursing a broken heart who literally crashes into Buffy (in lieu of her town’s sign). Naturally, they fall for each other. He even writes a song for her (which I wrote and recorded and posted with the fic).
Eight years later, I still get emails that say it’s the only AU some readers have ever cared for, because it’s so much like the show. (And recently someone asked me if they could play that song for their first dance at their wedding. /brag)
The popularity of my fic gave me the confidence to write something all my own. That manuscript landed me an agent. I can now officially call myself a Writer. After more than ten years learning (and teaching) at Fic U, I’ll take that diploma now.
The Look of Fic: 1999
The homepage of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fansite The Slayer’s Fanfic ArchiveE
Mediancat’s fanfiction on The Slayer’s Fanfic ArchiveF
Megafandoms: Harry Potter and Twilight
Lesson One: Size Matters
Harry Potter. Its author, J. K. Rowling, the first billionaire from books. A movie franchise that kept several generations of British actors employed for the better part of a decade. An entire imaginative world for the generation of children that grew up reading and writing in it. FanFiction.Net alone hosts over 500,000 Harry Potter stories, and there are many more on other archives, some still active, som
e gone and never coming back. In addition to the large multifandom archives like FanFiction.Net, Fanlore lists thirty general Harry Potter fanfic websites (including some sites with more varied purposes, such as the influential MuggleNet, which include substantial fanfiction sections) and at least three times that many smaller archives devoted to particular relationships, themes, or characters. The influence of these fansites and the networks, systems, and cultures they help put in place has been enormous—and it isn’t likely to fade any time soon.
Twilight. Like Harry Potter, marketed as a children’s book series—in the Young Adult (YA) category Harry Potter helped establish. It came home from elementary school via my daughter’s book-order form, and I didn’t think twice about it. Like Harry Potter, Twilight is a global book and movie franchise that inspired hundreds of thousands of fics and also like Harry Potter, it gathered a fanbase big and passionate enough to transform mass culture and the industries that help produce it in unprecedented ways. But on the question of what kind of transformations—the two mass franchises part ways.
Lesson Two: Sex Matters
Harry Potter was in great part responsible for the explosion of YA as a book marketing category. Twilight also helped establish a highly lucrative publishing category (after more firmly entrenching YA literature and paranormal romance in particular as lucrative markets)—but books in the publishing category Twilight helped launch were not going to come home in my daughter’s grade-school backpack. These were adult books. Really, really adult. Unlike any other fanfiction fandom, and certainly unlike any children’s franchise, Twilight not only inspired an underground erotic romance revolution but took it mainstream. But long before Fifty Shades of Grey and other forays into the world of commercial publishing, Twilight fanfiction had become the virtual site for an enormous and sometimes astonishingly frank conversation about sex, stories, and how to go about integrating the two in writing. Such conversations had been going on for a long time in fanfiction circles, as we’ve seen in the Star Trek, X-Files, and Buffy fandoms, but when it comes to conversations about sex (as opposed to the actual act, where your mileage may vary), size, as it turns out, does matter.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 17
