Fic Questions Meme

[jedibuttercup]

Taken from calliopes_pen, because I've been stressed and fretful and having a hard time writing lately, here’s a fanfic focused meme to get my creative juices stirred up again.

Choose a fic and 1 (or more) question(s) from the list below:

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?
2: What scene did you first put down?
3: What’s your favorite line of narration?
4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?
5: What part was hardest to write?
6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?
7: Where did the title come from?
8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of it?
9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?
10: Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?
11: What do you like best about this fic?
12: What do you like least about this fic?
13: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?
14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?
15: What did you learn from writing this fic?

My fanfic can be found either through my DW indexes (Main Index; and B:tVS-Focused) or at the AO3.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

Back Again, Harry? 12 and 13 11 and 12

[jedibuttercup]

The thing I like best? The worldbuilding, definitely. It's an interesting challenge, trying to spin it in a completely new direction without ever coloring outside plausibly canonical lines, at all; the whole "pick one change, see what happens from there" type AU.

The thing I like least? Well, it's not precisely part of the story; but it's a tie between the necessity for canon review (I'd forgotten how much I struggled with the later books) and that particularly prejudiced, snooty kind of reviewer that's convinced I'm doing it wrong and not above lecturing me what I should do/should have done instead. Or even, in a particularly irritating variation, why exactly I lost them as a reader and am going to lose future readers as well! *sigh* Megafandoms; this is why I don't play in more of them.

[beatrice_otter]

That's what I love about AUs, too--I have very little patience for what the SW fandom does WAY TOO OFTEN which is have a character go back in time and go, "Oh, i must keep things the same!" Or, "I want to change x but everything else must be the same!" No. First of all, YOU KNOW WHAT'S COMING, WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT EVERYTHING BUT X TO STAY THE SAME? EVERYTHING THAT COMES NEXT IS EITHER TERRIBLE OR CAUSED BY TERRIBLE THINGS. Change everything! And see what happens, what logically follows.

Ah, the prejudiced and snooty reviewer. I just had one of those going through my first and second fanfic ever, the SG-1 fic duology where Sam got pregnant as a result of that first season ep "The Broca Divide." They left a review on like half the chapters! ... and like half the reviews were along the lines of "wow, I'm surprised what a good job you did with this," emphasis on the "surprise" and "backhanded" part of "backhanded compliment." Aaargh.

[kerrykhat]

The Soul Job, 4 and 9?

[jedibuttercup]

It took me a couple days to find the time to re-skim the fic to answer your questions, sorry; that was what, the second Big Bang fic I ever wrote? :)

My favorite line(s) of dialogue? Hard to pick just one, so here's a few of them, by character:

Eliot: "We're brothers, not bookends!"
Hardison: "Apparently, shit went down while we were gone that did not make the papers."
Lindsey: "Forgive me if I don't put all my eggs in that basket full of if."
Nate: (regarding Lindsey's soul) "Then let us help you steal it back, so you can captain it as you see fit."
Parker: "Didn't you know? He's like Samson. His hair's the source of his strength! If you cut it off, we'll have to find a new hitter."

And as for different versions ... no, actually? I'm the type of longfic writer who has to begin at the beginning and write straight through to the end, no skipping around or writing alternate scenes. I usually have a plot skeleton laid out that I'm writing to, but the way I visualize as a I write, I kind of have to see it all building in my head to know exactly what the characters should do next.

(The only time I ever backtrack and write a different version is when I'm doing a multiple-POV story and I just can't make the next scene happen from the selected POV. So I either have to move the scene, or change characters, and in either case I usually delete-with-prejudice the parts that weren't working.)