Current fanfiction project: Cold Smithing

Available Beta Positions: Cold Smithing

Idea Backlog:

Legally In Love - A cliché White Rose romance surrounded by Schnee politics. It's outlined and I love the premise but it could use some reworking. I limited myself with chapters again when I shouldn't have.

Red Reaper - A medieval alternate universe about a notorious assassin and a princess. I enjoy cliché storylines. It is outlined, but I have a few other ideas I could go with instead with the same setting that I'm considering.

Rotkäppchen & Schneewittchen - A title I like, but am not sure where I want to go with. Might use it for one of the Red Reaper alternatives, might use it for an entirely separate medieval AU, might even use it for high fantasy. It could end up being an anthology of White Rose shorts, or it could end up a collection of fairy tale-themed smut. One of those was a joke.

Civil Duty - Nothing more than an idea I haven't given much thought to. Some character, probably an original character (or Jaune, the best OC), lives as a civilian and mucks up Roman & Neo's plans in Vale without the aid of aura. I'm hesitant on this one if only because OCs have polarized reception in the community, especially when they're the leads. The other problems are that it would require immensely detailed planning on my part, outlining an interesting narrative outside of the RWBY storyline that keeps to Vale, possibly intertwines with the RWBY canon, and making a convoluted, yet enjoyable, battle of wits between Torchwick and someone who isn't a Mary Sue. The challenge to write it may not be worth the payoff.

Writing as Experiences

June 9, 2016

Storytelling is an interesting art, in that it has many different mediums. Writing, videos, games, sculptures, drawings and paintings, speeches, acting, and everyday conversation. No matter what, when you tell a story you’re trying to inform another on an idea, and relating it through the single fundamental way we all interact with the world: experience.

When you tell someone about the dangers of an apex predator, you do so with stories depicting how deadly one can be. It puts whoever is on the receiving end of the story in the shoes of the characters, getting insight to their world. When someone tells a good scary story, you feel terrified for the duration. When you see a painting of a parent holding a newborn child, smile on their face, it is telling a story of joy that you understand, and then relate as “having a child is a wonderful thing.” It’s trying to transmit an experience.

So, a writer’s goal is to deliver an experience to the reader that will leave an impact. Maybe it’s a fluffy story full of happy moments and good feels, or a book of social commentary and fear. Perhaps it’s an empowering action adventure, or a hopeful romance. If a writer is trying to tell a story, the hope is that the reader becomes absorbed in it, and thus shares the experiences of the characters, or of the world. Even better is when the reader stops treating the characters as fictional, and begins questioning their motivations, or their actions. “Why is he going in there?” “No, she can’t die!” “Just take them across the mountain!”

Fictional characters don’t exist beyond their printed words. At the end of the day, no matter how much fan art is made, how many songs are sung about them, or how many fan fictions are written about them, fictional characters are bound to their medium. And when the medium ends, the characters end too. Creating the illusion of a real person, a real entity, something which isn’t fictional, is the game writers play. They may have reasons and actions in the writer’s mind, a motivation which drives them, but unless those are written, they’re unknown to readers. A reader can never completely understand the characters writers create, because their understanding is bound purely to the written word.

Getting back to the point, writers are trying to create experiences they imagine, or have had themselves, that others can then partake in. They do so through these non-existent paper people which readers then become engrossed in. There’s just one problem with transmitting experiences to others, and it’s the most fun part.

Everyone’s interpretation of the world is different, because their past experiences and knowledge shape what they understand of the world. If you’re told that the colour red is called blue, and blue red, without ever being corrected, then in your mind the colour red is what everyone else believes is blue. What’s wrong to you is right to someone else. In a different, more realistic and commonplace example, there is a God, versus there is no God, or there are many gods.

How this impacts literature, specifically a reader’s experience, is that words have varying meanings to different people, and no two people truly understand the same word identically. We tend to understand them close enough, but when you add up tens of thousands of words, typically woven with the writer’s own ideology, experiences, and interpretations of the words, there’s bound to be some major differences between how two readers understand the same book. If you want an example of this, consider the various interpretations of the Bible. It’s a single text, and yet there’s competing sects of religions based on the different interpretations. Those groups all believe their interpretation is the correct one, yet all the different interpretations exist.

Something very interesting to me, personally, is how and when these different interpretations happen. Since writing Cold Smithing, I’ve been privy to the way people interact with the story through reviews, and private messaging following those reviews. There’s clear times where the reader base becomes divided, typically around points of emotional conflict, and the reason for this is because of how each reader understands the characters involved. Even more interesting is that since Cold Smithing is fan fiction, a reader’s understanding of the character doesn’t just come from past experiences with similar archetypes and the story itself, but also the canonical work, and other fan fiction. Consider Ruby, a character who is either very mature or incredibly naive, based on who you ask.

So my job as a writer is made harder, because I have to also deal with these pre-existing interpretations of the characters. I have to try and convince a reader to believe in the version of the character I’ve put into my story, while also attempting to use their preconceived notions to my advantage, building off of them to generate deeper, more rich characters. Why throw out all that information a reader has on the character? They’ve already become real in the reader’s head, the illusion exists without me doing any work. Instead of fighting it, I have to try and incorporate it.

What this means though, is that every character has to be every understanding everyone has of them, all while not seeming like any of the others to any one understanding, within the limitations of what a reader is willing to accept as still within their understanding. This is, of course, ludicrous and impossible, mostly because many are polar opposites. Instead, I’ve chosen a group of understandings that are similar enough, and made sure to keep the characters from being too radically part of a single ideology, while also trying to keep them within the boundaries of canon, that the largest number of readers can at the very least accept them. Keeping to canon means that I’m keeping to the stem which most interpretations grow from, but keeping to canon also means I can’t go to the radical ideas that forego canon, such as a cannibalistic Ruby, or a tortured Yang. I can make some stuff up, filling in the blanks the canon leaves, but I can’t do so in a way that explores the characters emotionally in directions the show doesn’t go.

Now, I could write a story about a part of the canon which doesn’t exist yet, such as a character’s past, and use their future as a goal to make the characters reach emotionally, but Cold Smithing has a very specific slice of the timeline, that being a second year at Beacon, had the Vytal festival not been interfered with and some upper year students taking the prize. This means I'm stuck with all of the previous canon of the first two volumes, and have to try and work with any new information thrown at me in later volumes about their past to create as realistic an experience as possible for this alternate timeline.

The end goal of Cold Smithing is to deliver an enjoyable experience of ordinary life as a huntress, as well as the ordinary life of a teenager from various backgrounds, that is understood somewhat similarly by all of its readers. The readers may understand the conflicts differently, and come to different conclusions about what’s right or wrong, but so long as they all reach the end and go “I understand what Weiss went through,” I’ve done my job.

This is why I always appreciate feedback from my readers, and why I then try to continue conversations in private with them. I want to know everything about each person’s experiences, because that’s the only way I’ll know whether or not I’m still on track with my goal. When a reader has an experience which goes beyond what I’m expecting in a negative way, negative referring to misunderstandings, it means I’ve made a mistake at some point, a lack of clarity or an inconsistency, which has caused the reader to go awry. Other times, it’s because Cold Smithing isn’t finished yet, and what will bring that reader back on course is something in the future that I then have to make note of and be sure to pay extra attention to in order to keep their experience from derailing further.

This is how I view writing.