Authorial Intent (Part 1)

I'm not at all ashamed to admit that I used to read and write fanfiction; I still get pangs from time to time but try and convince myself that if I'm writing I should put my efforts towards original stories (and end up writing nothing at all). Hell, I've even got a couple of fics that I can read today without cringing at their consummate awfulness (and some that are so terrible I can't bring myself to read em, but eh). An interesting aspect of fanfiction (perhaps due to the fact that many fic authors are female) is that it is very concerned with pairing off characters, and often in ways that the original creator did not intend.

As a former "shipper" (the name given to people who are particularly fond of a certain pairing, for example Ginny x Draco in Harry Potter) I'm acutely aware of this whenever I try and write a platonic friendship between a boy and a girl. What would be perfectly normal actions in real life can translate to simmering sexual tension in the eyes of a shipper.

I should take this time to point out that many shippers are quite, quite mad, choosing to see love and/or lust in the most mundane of things, deliberately misunderstanding the dynamic between some characters, declaring a typical resentment to be grounds for love/hate (which in itself is quite mad behaviour) and outright fabricating connections when there aren't any (see the above Draco x Ginny example; have they ever even said a word to each other, canonically?). Accounting for them is like trying to predict English weather, but I try nonetheless.

I also feel that to make a good story you need to put a lot of yourself into it, and that the best stories are ones that share a little something of a person's worldview. I think it was a Tim Rogers quote that said that said how you have to be vain to be a novelist, because you have to believe what you want to tell people is something that they should hear. At the same time however, I feel that this shouldn't get in the way of the story, instead complimenting it subtly. Of course, leaving things too open allows for misinterpretation, with people deriving entirely the wrong point from the message you were trying to convey.

Re-reading His Dark Materials I was surprised at quite heavy-handed Pullman was, which is rather saying something when you're talking about a book where God dies. It's a hard decision to make and an even harder balance to strike - the strength of the characters and writing meant that it didn't seem the wrong choice in HDM, but I very much doubt that I'd be able to do the same thing. Reading my own original work, my characters always seem to be very blatant copies of me, and the tone of the novel seems very deliberately trying to get a point across, but maybe it just seems that way to me as the creator.

This post was originally made back in like August and I've long since lost the train of thought, but it's an interesting topic I'd like to come back to. Let's call this Part 1!