How to Mine Fanfic for Ideas
Dec. 8th, 2024 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithI got to talking about when fans love an entry that you didn't expect to be super popular, and how to identify with reasonable accuracy which things probably will be popular. And I oopsed an article again, so here it is.
Figuring out what readers love is just a matter of observing patterns and frequencies.
One of the earliest examples I noticed was with Valdemar fanfic, which runs heavily to stories about Companions Choosing their Heralds. Over and over and over again, that one motif with myriad variations of the same basic scene. So if you want the best chance of getting lots of hits on Valdemar fanfic, you write that or at least include it in some of your work.
To load that into an original canon, you have to break it down a bit more. Why do people love this bit in particular? It's a confluence of things. Most Heralds are Chosen young, as tweens or teens, so there's a coming-of-age part. Companions are sort of guardian spirits in the form of horses, and horses are also popular. Then there's the Chosen One motif, but a way healthier version than usual: the Companions pick out the most moral humans they can find, and there are a bunch of them instead of just one. It creates a sense of teamwork while saving the world. So you can take those motifs and mix and match them with others, seeking to hold onto the mood and the appeal, without duplicating it too closely.
Every fandom has its favorites. It has things that people go to that fandom for. Sometimes they're things concretely appearing in the canon. Other times they're things that are hinted, suggested, or just done in a way that lots of fans interpret them the same.
People can grab onto little things and build whole edifices on them. Like in Sherlock, the quote "I consider myself married to my work," in the context of a show that pays way less attention than average to sex/romance, encouraged lots of asexual/aromantic fanfic. That's cool because there isn't a lot of ace/aro fanfic, as it's not well supported by most media.
Nowadays, it's easier to do this than it used to be. Mining the internet is a lot faster than doing it with books in a library or an armload of paper fanzines. Look at the archive sites. Which ones are bigger, which fandoms attract more attention? And then what do those have in common, where you can identify clusters of things that people like? Because popularity is not just about having Hollywood behind it, since tons of movies go down without a bubble. Look at individual fandoms, and within those, which motifs are most popular in each one? There's always something, usually a good handful of things, that repeat.
Use the tools that the sites provide for finding fanfics you will like. Most have some kind of counter(s) and something like tags or folders. Just read the numbers. Which stories and fanwriters get the most hits? Which fandoms and tags are the biggest? And what do they have in common?
The tags are often the most useful because so many of those literally are the names of tropes or motifs. Those are the loose parts of literature that authors assemble into stories. So over time you build up this list of things that are super popular. When you want to create a new canon or storyline, a promising approach is to start with one or more of these really popular things.
Interestingly, a lot of these aren't quite in the mainstream. They're a half-step to the side. They're places where a canon almost went but didn't. Okay, there are a lot of canon Choosing stories in Valdemar. But some other canons, like Star Trek, frequently go right up to a great idea but then stop short. Said great idea is then available to anyone else who wants it, without copying it, because canon didn't use it as such. The Trill episodes are popular for fanfic because, for instance, a symbiont who changes hosts is expected to drop previous relationships. What if they didn't? How would people cope with changing bodies and the impact on their relationships? Those are stories that interest fans, but canon barely touches on it. So you can aim for things that are popular are common ... or watch for things that are underserved but still fit what will really appeal when it is offered.
So you'll have some unique features, often things that get spread across fandoms as AU. What color would your dragon be, or your Jewels? What shape would your daemon take? People write that stuff persistently because it's a form of characterization that lets you sort individuals, distinguish them, so those kinds of things tend to be popular.
Then you'll have some things that span fandoms, genres, literature as a whole. Hurt/comfort is popular in general, but it's most popular when used skillfully as J.R.R. Tolkien did: apply increasing hardships, but separate them with scenes of comfort. This lets you crank the tension way higher without exhausting either your characters or your audience. It's not all that hard to spot, or even to write, and yet there are tons of books or movies where they crank the tension up to 11 and leave it there. Which gets boring.
Almost every fandom runs heavily to fixits. Look at what people alter and why. You can learn not only what they don't like very much, what annoys or outrages them, but what they would like better because that is what they write in fanfic. So one of the most popular fixits is when the hero and the villain actually resolve their differences somehow and make up. This is the "enemies to friends / lovers" motif and it's enormously popular across many fandoms and genres. So why not just do it right the first time? Set up the conflict, but show how characters fix it instead of trying to kill each other.
One of my main goals as a writer is to do things well enough that my fans don't feel compelled to run along behind me and fix what I fucked up. And it works. I've had people write bits and pieces of side stories; I've had at least a couple write book-length entries in my settings. But they're additions, not corrections. I find that awesome.
I often say that I write fanfic "derive in, extrapolate out." This is one of my "derive in" tools. That means take a piece of canon and examine its structure. Not just the surface, but how it's actually built and why it works; what the characters are like and how they got that way. Look for pieces that are in canon but not explained.
Frex, Tony Stark is a blacksmith in Iron Man. But there's no explanation of how a spoiled rich brat learned one of the skills you absolutely cannot learn from a book alone. He has the muscles and the muscle memory to build a mechasuit in a cave with a box of scraps. The background has to be there, and it's interesting because it doesn't fit the rest of his character, but it's never mentioned. That's where I got "What Little Boys Are Made Of." Derive in is spotting "Tony is a blacksmith" in canon, then asking what kinds of things would have to happen for that to be true. Extrapolate out is telling a story about how that could happen. It's a headcanon story, which is another really popular category, and when it works well, there's a consistent comment that people leave: "New headcanon: accepted!"
Once you have identified a bunch of popular fanfic motifs, and you want to start using them either or fanfic or for original work, then it helps to think about the structure. Scott McCloud has a great explanation of the Six Layers. Most fanfic is written at the surface layer, and that's fine for casual entertainment. But the really good stuff, the most popular stuff, tends to go a lot deeper -- it examines the infrastructure of canon and then builds something new on that, something that feels stable rather than tacked on. The same is true of original work. A lot of it is really surface work. Hollywood likes to cover that with sex appeal and explosions. But you can still tell the difference between a movie with good worldbuilding vs. "let's blow shit up."
Thinking about infrastructure, working from the core out, will produce more solid storytelling than working at the surface. Though admittedly, layers 1: Idea/Purpose and 2: Form are interchangeable, so you can do either first and then the other. Take one or more popular motifs and use that as your Idea. Put it in whatever Form you want to make, and go from there.
Of course, there are differences in taste across subgenres or genres. Horror fans like blood; gentle fiction fans do not. You can have fun trying to define the "isness" of a genre or subgenre based on what its fans like or won't tolerate. For example, here's an analysis of whether a movie franchise fits the Cozy Mystery category. Even after you have studied reader tastes in general and fanfic in particular, sometimes they'll still surprise you by ignoring something with popular motifs or pouncing all over something unexpected. It's all information. It's all an opportunity to learn more about what readers enjoy -- and for that matter, what you as a writer enjoy telling stories about. We've all got our own favorite motifs that we like to talk about, and that's part of what creates your style as a writer.
Tallying the most popular motifs is straightforward. Figuring out exactly why a given motif is so attractive can be trickier. Producing an engrossing rendition in fanfic and/or original work is what takes the real skill.
Write whatever inspires you. You can never predict everything perfectly. But you can learn to stack the deck a bit in your favor.
Further Reading
"How to Build a Novel from Themes and Symbols" is another set of instructions for creating fiction from loose parts.
"Wednesday TV Series (The Addams Family) Overview" has a guide to this series of posts, some of which analyze the canon for fanfic applications, using background knowledge of how fanfic works and what audiences tend to like.
"Meta: "Why We Need Thing" Part 1: Overview" has a guide to this series of posts, which examine the value of a character who has multiple rare or unique traits. This is useful if you like writing for a niche audience.
Figuring out what readers love is just a matter of observing patterns and frequencies.
One of the earliest examples I noticed was with Valdemar fanfic, which runs heavily to stories about Companions Choosing their Heralds. Over and over and over again, that one motif with myriad variations of the same basic scene. So if you want the best chance of getting lots of hits on Valdemar fanfic, you write that or at least include it in some of your work.
To load that into an original canon, you have to break it down a bit more. Why do people love this bit in particular? It's a confluence of things. Most Heralds are Chosen young, as tweens or teens, so there's a coming-of-age part. Companions are sort of guardian spirits in the form of horses, and horses are also popular. Then there's the Chosen One motif, but a way healthier version than usual: the Companions pick out the most moral humans they can find, and there are a bunch of them instead of just one. It creates a sense of teamwork while saving the world. So you can take those motifs and mix and match them with others, seeking to hold onto the mood and the appeal, without duplicating it too closely.
Every fandom has its favorites. It has things that people go to that fandom for. Sometimes they're things concretely appearing in the canon. Other times they're things that are hinted, suggested, or just done in a way that lots of fans interpret them the same.
People can grab onto little things and build whole edifices on them. Like in Sherlock, the quote "I consider myself married to my work," in the context of a show that pays way less attention than average to sex/romance, encouraged lots of asexual/aromantic fanfic. That's cool because there isn't a lot of ace/aro fanfic, as it's not well supported by most media.
Nowadays, it's easier to do this than it used to be. Mining the internet is a lot faster than doing it with books in a library or an armload of paper fanzines. Look at the archive sites. Which ones are bigger, which fandoms attract more attention? And then what do those have in common, where you can identify clusters of things that people like? Because popularity is not just about having Hollywood behind it, since tons of movies go down without a bubble. Look at individual fandoms, and within those, which motifs are most popular in each one? There's always something, usually a good handful of things, that repeat.
Use the tools that the sites provide for finding fanfics you will like. Most have some kind of counter(s) and something like tags or folders. Just read the numbers. Which stories and fanwriters get the most hits? Which fandoms and tags are the biggest? And what do they have in common?
The tags are often the most useful because so many of those literally are the names of tropes or motifs. Those are the loose parts of literature that authors assemble into stories. So over time you build up this list of things that are super popular. When you want to create a new canon or storyline, a promising approach is to start with one or more of these really popular things.
Interestingly, a lot of these aren't quite in the mainstream. They're a half-step to the side. They're places where a canon almost went but didn't. Okay, there are a lot of canon Choosing stories in Valdemar. But some other canons, like Star Trek, frequently go right up to a great idea but then stop short. Said great idea is then available to anyone else who wants it, without copying it, because canon didn't use it as such. The Trill episodes are popular for fanfic because, for instance, a symbiont who changes hosts is expected to drop previous relationships. What if they didn't? How would people cope with changing bodies and the impact on their relationships? Those are stories that interest fans, but canon barely touches on it. So you can aim for things that are popular are common ... or watch for things that are underserved but still fit what will really appeal when it is offered.
So you'll have some unique features, often things that get spread across fandoms as AU. What color would your dragon be, or your Jewels? What shape would your daemon take? People write that stuff persistently because it's a form of characterization that lets you sort individuals, distinguish them, so those kinds of things tend to be popular.
Then you'll have some things that span fandoms, genres, literature as a whole. Hurt/comfort is popular in general, but it's most popular when used skillfully as J.R.R. Tolkien did: apply increasing hardships, but separate them with scenes of comfort. This lets you crank the tension way higher without exhausting either your characters or your audience. It's not all that hard to spot, or even to write, and yet there are tons of books or movies where they crank the tension up to 11 and leave it there. Which gets boring.
Almost every fandom runs heavily to fixits. Look at what people alter and why. You can learn not only what they don't like very much, what annoys or outrages them, but what they would like better because that is what they write in fanfic. So one of the most popular fixits is when the hero and the villain actually resolve their differences somehow and make up. This is the "enemies to friends / lovers" motif and it's enormously popular across many fandoms and genres. So why not just do it right the first time? Set up the conflict, but show how characters fix it instead of trying to kill each other.
One of my main goals as a writer is to do things well enough that my fans don't feel compelled to run along behind me and fix what I fucked up. And it works. I've had people write bits and pieces of side stories; I've had at least a couple write book-length entries in my settings. But they're additions, not corrections. I find that awesome.
I often say that I write fanfic "derive in, extrapolate out." This is one of my "derive in" tools. That means take a piece of canon and examine its structure. Not just the surface, but how it's actually built and why it works; what the characters are like and how they got that way. Look for pieces that are in canon but not explained.
Frex, Tony Stark is a blacksmith in Iron Man. But there's no explanation of how a spoiled rich brat learned one of the skills you absolutely cannot learn from a book alone. He has the muscles and the muscle memory to build a mechasuit in a cave with a box of scraps. The background has to be there, and it's interesting because it doesn't fit the rest of his character, but it's never mentioned. That's where I got "What Little Boys Are Made Of." Derive in is spotting "Tony is a blacksmith" in canon, then asking what kinds of things would have to happen for that to be true. Extrapolate out is telling a story about how that could happen. It's a headcanon story, which is another really popular category, and when it works well, there's a consistent comment that people leave: "New headcanon: accepted!"
Once you have identified a bunch of popular fanfic motifs, and you want to start using them either or fanfic or for original work, then it helps to think about the structure. Scott McCloud has a great explanation of the Six Layers. Most fanfic is written at the surface layer, and that's fine for casual entertainment. But the really good stuff, the most popular stuff, tends to go a lot deeper -- it examines the infrastructure of canon and then builds something new on that, something that feels stable rather than tacked on. The same is true of original work. A lot of it is really surface work. Hollywood likes to cover that with sex appeal and explosions. But you can still tell the difference between a movie with good worldbuilding vs. "let's blow shit up."
Thinking about infrastructure, working from the core out, will produce more solid storytelling than working at the surface. Though admittedly, layers 1: Idea/Purpose and 2: Form are interchangeable, so you can do either first and then the other. Take one or more popular motifs and use that as your Idea. Put it in whatever Form you want to make, and go from there.
Of course, there are differences in taste across subgenres or genres. Horror fans like blood; gentle fiction fans do not. You can have fun trying to define the "isness" of a genre or subgenre based on what its fans like or won't tolerate. For example, here's an analysis of whether a movie franchise fits the Cozy Mystery category. Even after you have studied reader tastes in general and fanfic in particular, sometimes they'll still surprise you by ignoring something with popular motifs or pouncing all over something unexpected. It's all information. It's all an opportunity to learn more about what readers enjoy -- and for that matter, what you as a writer enjoy telling stories about. We've all got our own favorite motifs that we like to talk about, and that's part of what creates your style as a writer.
Tallying the most popular motifs is straightforward. Figuring out exactly why a given motif is so attractive can be trickier. Producing an engrossing rendition in fanfic and/or original work is what takes the real skill.
Write whatever inspires you. You can never predict everything perfectly. But you can learn to stack the deck a bit in your favor.
Further Reading
"How to Build a Novel from Themes and Symbols" is another set of instructions for creating fiction from loose parts.
"Wednesday TV Series (The Addams Family) Overview" has a guide to this series of posts, some of which analyze the canon for fanfic applications, using background knowledge of how fanfic works and what audiences tend to like.
"Meta: "Why We Need Thing" Part 1: Overview" has a guide to this series of posts, which examine the value of a character who has multiple rare or unique traits. This is useful if you like writing for a niche audience.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-14 12:26 am (UTC)Could also be that a lot of people are lonely and want to be chosen by someone/something.
>>People can grab onto little things and build whole edifices on them.<<
I observe that superhero (and some magic) settings often produce fanfics that explore the science behind powers, or apply science/logic to the use of powers.
>>Which stories and fanwriters get the most hits? <<
Some sites allow you to look at people's favorites or saved works. If you find someone who has similar taste in stories, that is another option to find good stuff.
>>The Trill episodes are popular for fanfic because, for instance, a symbiont who changes hosts is expected to drop previous relationships. What if they didn't? How would people cope with changing bodies and the impact on their relationships?<<
I read a good fanfic once that had a culture that was designed to incorporate that sort of shifting between identities and relationships. Alas, it was a discussion of a dying culture used to give background context to a more current in-universe problem. (Although...if those pronoun sets had actually been developed it might be very useful for humans who have radical shifts in persona or self-perception. Think bipolar disorder.)
>> What color would your dragon be,...<<
I wish they had more stories about the watch-whers. And I was never entirely clear if other humans ever returned to the Lost Colony...
>>What shape would your daemon take? <<
Daemonfic that incorporate daemon-equivalents for aliens can be pretty interesting. (Also, that is canon to the source material, where humans and witched have daemons, but the armored bears craft their armor and the mulefa can perceive and interact with Dust directly.)
>>Then you'll have some things that span fandoms, genres, literature as a whole.
Though you probably want to control for stuff that is so common it skews the results. Like multiple Generic Romance Plots.
>>Almost every fandom runs heavily to fixits. <<
I observe that you have canon universes that serve as fixits for Real Life.
>>A lot of it is really surface work. Hollywood likes to cover that with sex appeal and explosions.<<
...because that works on a lot of people. If someone likes it, fine, but the trend to focus on that stuff exclusively can be annoying for people who tend to latch on to patterns and details. Just like an extrovert-focused society bugs introverts.
...I remember noting the incongruity of a setting that had no real explanation for dulcimers and royalty in the same geographic area (I suspect the author wanted a mashup of Western romance mixed with marry-into-royalty motif.)
(no subject)
Date: 2024-12-27 05:33 am (UTC)It's pretty fascinating to me because I opened this expecting a different sort of post from the title.
I was thinking about finding interesting details in things you read, taking them home and blooming them into something personal. A turn of phrase you like, a headcanon you want to do something with, a crossover you hadn't thought about before.
About finding little gems here and there and finding ways to weave them into your own stuff.
Instead it's more about... breaking down what's popular and why it's popular? Trying to figure out where to start when you don't have an idea but want to write anyway? It feels like there's overlap with a company doing market research. It's definitely not what I would have thought about in terms of "finding ideas in other people's work"!
I guess as a person who can't stop coming up with more ideas than I could possibly fully develop in a lifetime, it's a bit of an outside perspective for me. I have more trouble with synthesizing my ideas and creating a complete whole with them, than with finding new ones. So when I think of finding "new ideas", I'm thinking of finding new details to include. Things to add into and flesh out a skeleton I'm already gluing together.
I do want to push back slightly on the part about fixits?
>> One of my main goals as a writer is to do things well enough that my fans don't feel compelled to run along behind me and fix what I fucked up. And it works. I've had people write bits and pieces of side stories; I've had at least a couple write book-length entries in my settings. But they're additions, not corrections. I find that awesome.
I know this is you talking about personal writing goals? but.
I think this is a limiting framework of what a fixit is? A story doesn't have to "fuck up" to have a fixit. Sometimes fixits just come from original and fanwriters having different goals and priorities. When I do a "more people live" AU of say, FMA... it's not because I think the deaths in FMA were a mistake. They were super important to the story being as good as it was! They contributed to the narrative, the moral, the realized craft of the story!
I just, personally, want those character(s) to live in my AUs. I want to see what I can do with them if they're still around.
So I don't think having lots of fixit stories is automatically a "failure" and not having them a "success" (though yes, personal goals are personal).
>> So why not just do it right the first time?
It might already be right! The fixit is just finding a different "right", or even a "wrong" that's more comfortable/fun for the fic.
*hops back off the soapbox*