An Old Flame*

Are you the same person that you were ten years ago? I mean, obviously in a lot of ways you are (name, memories, NI number and so on). In some other less obvious ways you... maybe... aren't. Those pink corduroy flares that you thought were a good idea? That evaporated milk habit? That - ew, squick! - that boyfriend?**

If you're wondering why I'm asking, it's because I'm editing my first novel. I wrote it nearly ten years ago, and it's an odd experience coming back to it. I hadn't even read it for years, and so in some ways it was rather exciting. There are lots of adverbs (sadly) but also some rather fun scenes, and some plot twists I genuinely hadn't remembered. It needs work but I think it could be quite good, if I do the right things to it. And the right things aren't the opaque, totally mysterious impossibilities that they are for my most recent magnum opus, thank God, they are actual definite changes that I can do. This is all good. 

But - as I say - it's odd. It's odd because my writing voice has changed, and I'm trying to work out how much I should go with my old one and how much I've got better. It's odd because the sort of book I write now isn't the sort of book I wrote then, but that doesn't mean I don't want to write that sort of book. It's odd because I recognise myself and I recognise the differences, the way I've developed as a writer and as a person.

It's oddest of all, I think, because it's a love story.*** It was my first love story. 

People talk about how first novels are autobiographical (and then often go on to say that they're rubbish because they're autobiographical). That's not true, obviously, because loads of people write novels without ever writing anything recognisably autobiographical. But in a way it is true: your first novel is the one you've waited your whole life to write. It's the one, I think, where the purest expression of yourself comes out. You're less guarded, less ambitious, less driven by career moves or vanity. Not to mention that every time you write a book, you narrow down the possibilities for your next one - so the first, the first... It's not the best. But sometimes it's the most yours. 

And so... my love story. It's making me feel the way I did ten years ago. I was in love with my character then, and I'm still in love with him. I have to be, or I couldn't write the book. But now... I don't know. It makes me feel... off-balance. Haunted. Maybe slightly unfaithful. Like a perfect lover from the past has walked in and expects me to love him as much as ever. And I do.  

We'll see. But right now, I'm enjoying it. To be fair, I'm only four chapters in. But I can't help thinking, maybe I've cracked it. Maybe that's the trick of happy editing: leave the book for a decade.   

* I love this metaphor. Especially as the character in question is called Ash. 

** This is a joke. I didn't have a boyfriend ten years ago. And not having a boyfriend is never a bad choice.

*** Slashy?! Of course it's slashy. 

NaNoWriMo, Dialogue, Falling In Love...

So. Well, sorry I haven't updated this for a while - as you've probably gathered, I'm doing NaNoWriMo, and I got behind at the weekend due to a monumental hangover, and am only just now back on target. Although, as I'm writing this blog rather than my novel, and haven't finished my quota for today, this positive state of affairs might not last...

Anyway. The novel is going as well as can be expected, in the sense that I haven't yet run out of plot (I'm fairly sure I will at some point, but I'm refusing to think about that right now). And I haven't reread any of it, which probably helps with my morale. No doubt I will finish it, thinking it's wonderful, and then go back and be horrified by what absolute tripe it is. Maybe that's the point of NaNoWriMo, though. It might be shit, but at least I'll have 50,000 words of it...

But it has been making me think. Which I suppose is a good thing. (Well, I hope so. You never know with thinking, it's a dangerous business.)

My novel, by the way, is called The School of Glass, and, as I've mentioned before, it's slash fiction. (Not fanfiction, but original slash - for more thoughts on slash versus fanfic, see my previous blog...) Which means it's basically a love story. With other elements, obviously, but the emotional thing is much more foregrounded than in any of my other novels. (Except possibly bits of Tyme's End, I guess. And The Broken Road. And Come The Revolution... hmmm. Looks like I write a lot about emotions, now that I think about it. And have a tendency to make sweeping generalisations about my own work which are just wrong. Oh well.)

Anyway, at the moment my protagonists hate each other. And I'm really enjoying writing them into a situation where they can be nastier and nastier, while trying to keep my options open for later, when the reader will have to start rooting for them to get together. It's intriguing. Right now I'm working up to some actual physical damage... and not in a good way. (Or rather, it isn't good for the characters. I'm hoping there will be a certain... frisson... for the reader.)* And the long downhill slope - from first dislike to visceral detestation - is quite easy, really. Hatred, once it's mutual, is surprisingly logical. And satisfying to write.

But it does make me think about what happens on the other side, when they have to start fancying each other. It raises all sorts of questions about why and how you (well, I, I suppose) fall in love with people. Not to mention the knotty problem of how that's expressed in words...

In a way it's really the same old issue of writing about emotion. You can approach it with the classic tactic of avoiding the label, and going instead for the physical and mental experience of what that state is like. In the way that, as a rule of thumb, you can't say, 'I felt angry', you have to say, 'I felt sick. How could he have done this to me?'. Or, rather than 'I felt happy', you might say 'the fresh air went to my head like champagne'. (Those examples are purely to explain the principle. Please don't judge me...) To make emotion immediate, it has to come to the reader in a vivid, non-abstract image. So, when you're in love with someone, you look at them and your stomach flips over, your heart races, your - well. You get the idea. Probably best not to go into too much detail... :)

And that works, up to a point. But, even in life, the symptoms aren't everything. There is something else, clearly. But I'm damned if I can say what it is.

Or rather - and more to the point - if I can write it. This is partly to do with the fact that we will never, let's face it, care about a character as much as we care about ourselves. Obviously. So romance in books is already at a major disadvantage, in much the same way that watching your friends snog has very little of the same effect as actually snogging someone yourself. Romance has to be better, much better, than it is in the real world. Someone in a book says, 'I love you,' and it just doesn't... well, it doesn't make your heart beat faster, or make you shiver or catch your breath. People have said things to me that have gone to my head like a drug, that I've actually felt in my chest like a shot of adrenalin... things which have turned me on like a light switch... and yet if I typed them here they'd make you wince. At best. (Don't worry, I'm not going to.) A character saying, 'You know I love you. I absolutely love you,' just doesn't cut it. Even though in real life it sometimes, actually, does.

So you have to try to create the intensity of it all, when you're hampered by a) the fact that you have to use words and b) the fact that it's fiction. It's well nigh impossible. Or at least it looks it, from this end of the book. Maybe by the time I actually get to the soppy section it'll seem much easier. (Then again... should I draw any conclusions from my use of the word "soppy" to refer to anything associated with romance?)

I should point out, at this point, that while I have identified these problems I have absolutely no words of wisdom to offer as an answer. I'm just letting you in on my preoccupations.

So there we go. My characters will blunder on for the moment, hating each other, and sooner or later they will have to start the long slow U-turn that will lead them to True Love. Or something. It'll be an interesting journey - for me, at least... From profound enmity to romantic passion... or, as a friend of mine said in a (fairly) similar context, from "fuck off" to "fuck me".

Then again... maybe that's a perfect beginning for a relationship.


*OK, this sounds kinkier than it was meant to. But I still can't bring myself to delete it.

Fanfiction, slash, and the Female Gaze

I'm taking a pause in the middle of Mazecheat edits, which are slow, boring work (mainly adding in technical/plot points so that the end actually works - which is complicated, requires close reading and is highly unrewarding). And it's lunchtime and there's nothing on BBC iPlayer I feel like watching, so...

...so I thought I would write this.

I've been meaning to write about fanfiction/slash fiction for a while - ever since, in fact, I read one of the first ever online reviews of The Traitor Game, which said: "the one thing I'm curious about is whether B R Collins cut her writing teeth online, as there are elements in it which are closer to fanfiction than to professional fiction - and this is in no way a criticism!" Later she added that it was "something to do with the quality of the emotions. Like I said - definitely NOT a crit!"

Ri-ight, I thought.

I didn't get it at all. I knew nothing about fanfic at that point - and when I looked at some it still didn't make sense. Fanfic, I thought, is when a writer takes SOMEONE ELSE'S CHARACTERS and SOMEONE ELSE'S WORLD and writes their own story about them and it. (Those caps aren't emotional, by the way, they're supposed to imply a kind of slightly bemused emphasis. Imagine me talking to myself in a very slow and confused sort of way.) So if you're writing with your OWN characters and your OWN world... er... well - fic possibly, but where does the fan bit come in? (Unless you're your own fan, of course, which I suppose, in my case, possibly... but that's presumably not quite what she was driving at. She'd never met me, after all.)

It bugged me. Because deep down - and the more I read fanfic, the stronger it was - I had a conviction that she was on to something. And that felt... weird. As if I'd revealed more of myself than I meant to.

And I kept reading. I read lots and lots of fanfiction, most of it slash fiction. And slowly, slowly it started to dawn on me. She wasn't really talking about fanfiction in general. No, she was talking about slash. Slash is - and I'm mainly talking about M/M slash, just so you know - a form, or let's say a subspecies, or maybe a kind of daughter-species, of fanfiction. But here's the crucial thing: 'original' slash can (and does) exist, when 'original' fanfic (presumably) doesn't.

For anyone who isn't familiar with slash, let me give you the basic rundown. Slash fiction is (generally, see above) fanfiction which involves a non-canonical pairing of two (generally) male characters. It is (generally*) written by women for women. And most of them (generally**) are straight or bi. I.e., they find their male characters sexually attractive.

(For more details, plus endless, endlessly enticing links - this time I got distracted through here and here to, er, here - go to TVTropes. Actually The Traitor Game has its own TVTropes entry, where the troper has obligingly joined in on this debate...)

So what's the difference between slash fiction and gay fiction? Surely gay men (for example) writing about gay men will have the same basic approach? And they don't get labelled slash, do they? (And whether or not you think "slashy" is pejorative, it's certainly more marginalising and easily dismissible than "gay".) I'm happy to acknowledge slash as a genre, but I'm not prepared to define it simply by the gender of the author (M/M fiction by woman = slash, by man = gay). No. So what is it about? The believability of the Ms as Ms? The transparency (or otherwise) of the convention that these are, actually, Fs, rewritten and encoded in order to explore something about them in the real world?

Anthony McGowan (great YA writer and altogether Good Thing) once said to me that he was astonished at how male he thought the characters in The Traitor Game were. And it was one of the nicest compliments I've ever had. (My mother, on the other hand, told me they were far too female. I like to think that Tony knows more about male experience than my mother... but you never know.) I really wanted TTG to be authentic; I didn't want the characters to be some female fantasy of adolescent boys. (There's a place for that... but possibly only in my head.) And I do think, truly, that I succeeded. "Gay", then, rather than "slash"?

And yet... it is a bit slashy. I mean... What was it the review said? "Something in the quality of the emotion"? Well. There's a lot of sexual attraction. There's a lot of boys looking at each other. There's a fair amount of sublimated eroticism which focuses on eyes and hands and voice, rather than - well, breasts or arses or cocks or... Maybe there really is something in the quality of the gaze, not just its object, which can imply or subvert the gender of the gazer. Maybe there's something female in how you look, not just who you're looking at. Maybe the implied gender of the gazer is more important, in the end, than the gender of the gazee.

But no. I don't like that conclusion, and I don't trust it, either. My gut tells me that fancying someone is fancying someone. Sexual attraction is sexual attraction. Men don't automatically fall for big tits, any more than women fall for a lovely personality. The Female Gaze, as Our Friend TVTropes says, 'may overlap with Homosexual Male Gaze'. Think we're back where we started.

And yet... and yet...

I am playing around at the moment with a slash novel. Yes, deliberately slashy, deliberately self-indulgent - not one for the publishers, more to remind myself of the onanistic pleasure of writing, to drive away the I-must-make-a-living-demons that prey on creativity. I started it yesterday. It's from a male character's POV, and on the first page I reread the sentence: "Behind him there was a young man - his own age, but taller, with a clear, cold look in his eyes, as though the mountain air had got between his irises and the outside world."

Bingo, I thought. That is so slashy.

And I don't even know why.



*OK, I'm going to stop doing this now. You get the idea.
** No, I'm sorry, I can't.

One of the nicer things this week...

Good reviews are nice. They really are. It's lovely to have someone be nice about your books, especially when it's someone brilliant (coughMalPeetcough) in a national newspaper... You can quote them on the cover and everything. It's great. I've been lucky with reviews, on the whole, and I'll always be grateful.

But a few days ago I came across something on the Internet that gave me more pure, lasting, disinterested pleasure than a review ever has.

Fanfiction.

The Traitor Game has not one but at least two people writing fanfic. Possibly even more. I can't express how delighted I was - am - to have found that out. It feels like such a privilege. Is that crazy? I had to restrain myself, with difficulty, from commenting. (I was only going to thank them and say I thought it was really cool, but all the same I decided not to, because I don't want them to feel I'm looking over their shoulders, or that I imagine I have some kind of right over what they write. The same goes for positive Internet reviews, as it happens. Every so often I can't resist, but in general I feel that the author should keep in the background, so that people can say what they want without it getting personal.) But I was just... so pleased.

Fanfic is a weird thing. I've never written it; I only really heard of it after I wrote The Traitor Game, because someone wondered whether I'd been influenced by slash...* Fanfic is subversive, in a way; there are stories about authors and producers getting antsy about other people writing about "their" characters. But as long as no one's making money out of it, I don't understand the problem. And yes, I used those quotation marks advisedly. Michael and Francis aren't really "my" characters: any more than - oh, I dunno, let's say Takeo and Shigeru, or Fitz and the Fool, or (and I've read a really good piece of slash about these two) Sparrowhawk and Jasper aren't "mine". I'm a reader: those characters live in my head, independently of their authors. And they go on living. That's what reading is. I've never written fanfic, but I recognise that experience - you read a book, you love the characters, and you rewrite them again and again, you get to know them, you live their lives... That's normal, isn't it? And it's a huge compliment to the author. I'm amazed and thrilled that people care enough about Michael and Francis, that they want them to go on living, that they want them to have a happy ending.

So thank you, whoever you are. I'd give you my blessing if it didn't sound patronising. Hope people go to read your stuff here. And here.

And yes, I always thought Michael and Francis would get together eventually too.

*This is an interesting question, and one which I fully intend to muse on at more length. But not now.