write about love

turns out i'm still not done with 4x11. you know, you give these things time to sit, you chat to your friends, you solidify your opinions. this is a post about alice, but it is also about q and alice. if you like q/alice as a ship this is not the post for you.

( this is also a post with spoilers. )

magicians thoughts and theorising... was going to stick this on pillowfort but lol that site's kind of dead isn't it? i am doing my best to make dreamwidth my home. please look forward to more content even if it is just more of this bullshit!

( help me im losing my mind in here )

saw this post on tumblr, read it over a couple of times, read through a lot of the notes, and have been having some thoughts. this may make me sound like a grinch but bear with me: i don't disagree with what OP is saying. there is a difference between fanfic and traditionally published fiction! (i am not going to talk about self-publishing in this post, because that's a whole different kettle of fish which frankly i know absolutely nothing about.) fanfic is a culture of gratuity - this was once leveled to my face as a criticism of fanfic and i was like, actually, you're damn right, and i'm going to take that as a compliment. we write fanfic to indulge, to transform media in ways that cater to us or to people like us. (that's a topic for another essay.) this is an unequivocally good thing. i don't know where i'd be without fanfic, and i'm sure a lot of others feel the same. i've felt welcomed in the community, i've written things to get them off my chest, i've read things that have helped me with feelings i didn't even know i had. i don't think the OP of that post is trying to say that any of this is invalid, or that we should therefore gatekeep original fiction... i honestly think they're pointing out a difference between the cultures, and that making the jump from one to the other is more hard work and requires a shift of mentality that may be unexpected to many fic writers.

you know why i know this? because i'm doing it as we speak.

a few years ago i decided my writing had got pretty good, and i was ready to be published. i've been writing original fiction my whole life, longer than i've been doing fanfic, and i've always wanted to publish a novel. so i had a concept, i set about refining and writing it, and... i couldn't finish it. i got low about my writing skills; i was frustrated with both the story and the writing itself. stepping back, i noticed two things: 1) writing primarily character-driven fanfiction had left me with zero plotting skills (this is not the case for everyone but it was really, really badly the case for me), and 2) i was using fanfiction tropes and tone in my writing, consciously or otherwise. because i am a reader of both books and fic, i recognised the original story i was writing as fanfiction. this is why there's an "original work" fandom tag on ao3, or why fictionpress exists - because you can write original work that exists fully within a fannish framework. i've done it a whole bunch, as have many others. (just that none of mine has ever seen the light of day.) and there is plenty of excellent stuff out there that fits this profile! but it is not traditionally published original fiction. it's fannish original fiction.

since that revelation, i've worked a lot harder at my writing, and at honing my original fiction voice. i write a lot less fanfiction, and i've noticed that the fanfiction i do write has become more literary. again, not a good thing, not a bad thing, just a thing that's happening as i shift out of the 24/7 fannish mindset for my writing. in 2015, i was at a pretty low point in my life; it was also a year in which i wrote a frankly obscene volume of fanfic. it wasn't necessarily "well written," but it was fun, and i got a lot of good feedback for it. the flipside to this is that i started writing pretty much entirely for the feedback. again, i have to keep emphasising this: neither objectively good nor bad; though it was personally quite damaging i couldn't speak for anyone else, and i think that there's nothing wrong with tailoring your work to an audience. at that time in my life as a writer, i was entirely focused on creating works as part of the fanfiction culture. it was 2016 when i decided i was ready to be published. i was not ready. just because i had been successful with fanfiction, that did not mean i had anywhere near the right skillset for traditional publishing.

it's a long journey to getting published. and you can't just "start with a novel" as i planned to do - it's pretty much impossible given how the publishing system is structured. (i am not here to say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.) currently i'm sending out short stories left right and centre, waiting for one of them to hit the target and be accepted into an anthology. i have one story in an indie anthology of limited release, and one that came incredibly close to being included in a book for actual circulation. (i was basically told, "we love your story but because of word count restrictions we just can't fit it in alongside all these other stories we love just a little bit more.") this has been over the last year and a bit. traditional publishing takes time and dedication. it takes practise. in 2017, after scrapping my first try, i wrote and completed an entire original novel of 94k words! but it had the same problem: it was fannish in origin and execution. it would be much better suited to ao3 than a physical book. (still thinking about putting it up there one day, tbh.) this is not to say these words were wasted. quite the opposite in fact. the few people with whom i shared the novel - also fannish people - enjoyed it. and i learnt a lot of lessons about plotting and pacing and storytelling. it's put me in a much better place for the novel i'm working on now, which exists outside the context of fandom and uses language more appropriate to the books i love than the fics i indulge in. but it's still going to take me a long time to write this novel, and to get my name out there by throwing short stories at tiny dart boards. it's been like working on my writing from scratch. and you know what? it's been fantastic, but i'm never going to stop writing fanfiction. there is room for both in my life, and, i suspect, in everyone else's too.

there's been some rumbling on the internet recently along the lines of "we shouldn't need to monetise our hobbies." this is really, really crucial. lots of people say that fanfiction is a genre, but i have come to disagree. fanfiction is a culture. and given its origins as something gratuitous, founded on labours of love and communal idea-building and sharing, imo it's fundamentally incompatible with capitalism. we have our own etiquette, code of honour, conventions - even, as that post mentions, particular phrases and sentence structures. fanfiction is asymptotic to the mainstream: however close it gets, it always belongs to its specific culture. you can file off the serial numbers but something like 50 shades (an extreme example, but still) will still read as fanfiction. that's because we are familiar with the vocabulary of our culture and we can pick it up even when it has ostensibly hopped to the mainstream and reached a different audience. (tho i'll bet a lot of the middle aged women who were suddenly flagged as a demographic that read erotica were like, already getting their kicks for free on ao3.)

i'm not trying to be traditionally published because i think fanfic is evil and/or traditional publishing is superior. i'm not doing it because i think my fanfiction is perfect and deserves to be read by a wider audience. i'm not even doing it because i feel a compulsion to monetise my hobbies/talents. i'm doing it because i love books and i love writing, and i want to share that with a wider community that i am currently not a part of, not the same way i'm part of fanfiction communities. but what i have done is examined my motivations at length, i have thought long and hard about what compels my desire to be traditionally published, and i have doubted myself. i have come to these conclusions after a lot of thought and hard work. and i'm going to do both! none of this makes fanfiction any less valid as an art form and outlet. it's just. really, really different. and i don't think there's anything wrong with, if you're thinking of moving from fic to traditional publishing, knowing exactly what that's going to entail. trust me when i speak from experience - it's something i wish i'd known.

1. primary: what you value
2. secondary: how you strive for your values
3. tertiary: where you can go if you're under pressure
4. antithesis: the opposite of what defines you

to elaborate; this maintains jkr's assessment that where you're sorted is based on what you value. your primary house is where you'd end up with the hat on your head. this by no means precludes you from having traits from your primary house that apply to other aspects of your personality, nor does it mean you can't value things outside your primary house. (e.g. lots of primary slytherins, who value ambition and cunning, will also happen to have those traits fitting the other descriptors - the key is they work to emulate these traits because they value them.) it's about the best fit. what fits best is going to give the most complete description, allowing for nuance outside the framework.

the way i usually type a character is "top down." i start by thinking which hogwarts house i'd sort them into, based on the values system, and then pick a secondary based on their actions in canon. once you've got the secondary, it can often be hard to separate the tertiary and antithesis, especially if you're working with a minor character or fresh new OC. i try to pick the tertiary first, but sometimes the antithesis is more immediately evident. you might even find an antithesis before you work out the secondary and tertiary. there is of course no wrong way to do this, since it's something i made up for kicks and am posting on the internet (lol), but i would suggest that starting from the primary is the best approach.

if you like mbti, it may help to think of this as a pared down version of that system. each house placement here is a function. your primary and tertiary are extroverted functions - i.e. they explain how you interact with the world around you - and secondary and antithesis are introverted functions - i.e. they explain how you internalise and create a sense of self. a character will always exhibit more primary and tertiary traits than secondary, but getting know them and the inner workings of their mind will very clearly reveal their secondary and antithesis.

it's best to learn by example. let's break down how i sort harry potter himself:

1. G: harry values courage in the face of adversity, daring, and being outspoken. he has more sympathy for people he dislikes who are brave than those he likes who become cowardly.
2. S: the way harry works towards his goals - i.e., the communication of his values & ideals to people around him - is through a whole lot of moxy, ambition & cunning.
3. H: under pressure, harry turns to his friends. he is capable of working hard if the situation calls for it, but it's not the kind of thing he'd turn to without external pressure.
4. R: harry is defined by his lack of interest in the acquisition of knowledge and creative thinking - in other words, he is more content to do things by the book/in ways he's done them before than to look for new ways on his own.

one of the common pitfalls of personality typing systems is they almost seem to pass judgement on the person being typed. i want to impress that none of these things are value judgements, except the primary house as a judgement of what someone values. saying that harry has no interest in learning is not to say he should - just that it's an aspect of his personality that he doesn't have that interest.

harry's character is pretty solid for us, since he's the protagonist. let's take draco as an example of how we can fit a more secondary character to this system:

1. S: perhaps because of how he was brought up, draco values people who are ambitious, traditional, and isolationist. it's clear from his actions, especially in hbp, that he emulates cunning thinking in his approach to taking on a task.
2. H: draco achieves his goals by exploiting his extensive support network. it's not just from environmental factors - he seems to naturally rely on others and enjoy having loyalties, going both ways.
3. R: again using hbp as my evidence, it seems like draco turns to obscure knowledge and fairly creative thinking in high-pressure situations.
4. G: to me, draco's gryffindor antithesis is more evident than his tertiary ravenclaw. he is constantly shown to disregard brazen acts of courage. he freezes in situations that require him to act against the norm and seldom shows bravery himself.

i hope from this you can get an idea of the rudiments of this system! feel free to ask for other character typings (i have a fair few of them kicking about for hp), or to come disagree with me in the comments. if you want to use the system to type characters yourself, please link back to this explanation - not just because my secondary slytherin wants credit, but because my primary ravenclaw thinks it's a good idea to have a concise point of reference so you won't have to explain everything a second time :)