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Anime Weekend Atlanta - Day Two - Fan Fiction
Writers
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If you walked into an Anime Weekend Atlanta panel room on Saturday
and heard some people talking about "misting," they weren't chatting about
the rainy weather that started the convention. They were fan fiction writers
discussing one of the odder writing techniques found on the Internet. The
panel included (left to right) Jamie Bateman, Kevin Callahan, Keener Barnes,
Robert Hayne and Gary Kleppe. |
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| The "misting" talk was actually "MSTing," as in Mystery Science Theater
3000, the cult TV show that satirizes old movies. That idea has slipped
into fan fiction, where one author will copy another's (presumably bad)
story and make parenthetical jokes about it. The panel didn't seem too
enthusiastic about the idea. "If I didn't like the fic the first time around,
I won't read it again," said Bateman. |
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The panel produced some comments on bad fan fiction, something that
spreads widely on the Net where there are no editors. "How can you limit
bad fan fiction? You can't, it's the Internet," Callahan said. T.J. Hamilton,
the panel moderator, noted that there's a lot more arguing and insulting
online among authors than in real life (but that's true for a lot of online
life, of course). |
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| More serious was the talk about how to keep developing ideas and avoid
the dreaded writers' block. "The best way to break a writers' block is
through a large sledgehammer," Hayne joked. He added that "I don't want
to break the block, I want to go around it." Hayne said that getting hung
up on a story without making progress often is the result of laying out
an entire plot in advance, and his solution is to find another path for
the story. "I don't plot. I'm a humor writer and I write what goes with
the best jokes," he said. |
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