Doorstoppers and Fanfic

A few weeks back I was putzing around, watching Bob's Burgers with the TV Tropes website open as I watched the episode. I do this often, enjoying how writers use (and misuse) tropes in their work. I have strong opinions on tropes that I'll share another time. That's not what this post is about. It's about a specific trope that I came across on the website as the adventures of the Belcher family played in the background. I found myself reading the page dedicated to Doorstoppers and there went the rest of my night as I fell down this deep rabbit hole. 

According to TV Tropes, a "Doorstopper" is a book that is literally heavy enough to stop a door. A proper doorstopper is no less than 500 pages, that's about 150,000 words with a normal sized typeface though most use a smaller font to fit more words on paper likely pushing that to number closer to 250,000 words. That's the number that TV Tropes uses as the minimum to define a doorstopper. That works for me, so we'll use that number. 

3.8 million words of doorstopping goodness.

I perused the entries. the Literature one hit all the classics you know and love. Dumas, Trollope, Michener, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolkein, Follet and modern writers like Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Stephen King and, of course, George RR Martin. I've obviously read my share of doorstoppers. I mean A Song of Ice and Fire is hugely important to me. I've read It and The Dark Tower series. I made it about 2/3 of the way through Winter's Heart in The Wheel of Time before I made a bold decision to start the series all over and read from the beginning. (It's been 20 years since I read The Eye of the World.) But a knew a lot of the entries in the Literature section. It was another section that caught me off guard. 

I opened the tab for Fan Works and, boy, was I quickly overwhelmed. Not only by the number of entries but by some of the word counts. Great googly moogly. The tab is split into smaller tabs labeled Over 2 million words, Over 1 million words, Over 500k words and Over 250k words. I was flabbergasted by the numbers. Someone wrote 16 million words of fan fiction dedicated to the Nickelodeon show The Loud House. To put that into perspective, that's FOUR Wheel of Times. Not four books but four of the ENTIRE SERIES. There's a lot-and I mean A LOT-of My Little Pony. I did a little research. I found someone that wrote 2 million words of MASH fanfic and someone else that 1.3 million words of Dallas fanfic. (These were strictly found on Fanfiction.net. I didn't even attempt to check AAO3.)

On Fanfiction.net there are over 600 words of 800,000 words or more. That's a lot of passion for an IP. I mean 800,000 words is about 2,700 double spaced writing pages (Times New Roman, 12 point font). That's incredible. That's a lot of time and energy. That's a lot of love and devotion. the level of commitment it takes to write this much is titanic, no matter the topic. And it seems to me to be a waste. 

I have an antagonistic relationship with fan fiction. I've never been a fan of it. Technically, you are stealing the blood, sweat and tears of another author. I know that's a little melodramatic but it's kind of true. That's the way I feel about my work. I know that there are plenty of writers, especially genre writers, that got their start writing fanfic and there are others that wholly endorse fanfic of their own work. I'm not so innocent, I suppose. My earliest attempts at writing were little more than Lord of the Rings/Dragonlance fanfic with the serial numbers barely filed off. But even then, it was my own world, my own characters and ultimately my own story. It turns out I was just using the same tropes from those properties. I wasn't using Middle Earth as a setting and despite the likeness I didn't have a character named Tanis Half-Elven. If you are going to spend the amount of energy it takes to write 16 million words of fanfic, why not on something original? Or, at the very least, something that could be called an homage or pastiche of the thing you love. It seems to me to be a better use of energy. I've written about shared DNA before and find that to be far more digestible a concept than fan fiction.

But who am I? Maybe I'm just being a Grumpy Gus. I try not to be a goalie in life. As long as you aren't hurting anyone, why should I stand in your way? (There's an argument to be made that you are hurting the original author with fanfic, but I'm not here to make it.) I'm all for writing in any form, especially if you derive happiness from it. 

Peculiarity

 The other day I was thinking about my father. He died a little over a year ago and I still have plenty of thoughts about him, though they come in dribs and drabs at the weirdest times. I haven't publicly written about his death and I'm not sure why. I've written about my father before and God knows I'm not afraid of sharing in this space, but lately I haven't had much to say period, let alone about my father's passing. And I don't have to anything to say about it right now. This is more about a memory that I have of him. A very peculiar memory. 

The last few years he spent the summers at our house and at night my son and I would sit with him while he watched television. It was nice and I relished that time. Not that it was just me and my dad but that it was all three of us. It gave my son a chance to get to know him and spend some time with him. We'd sit around and shoot the shit, remembering the past and talking about a wide array of topics, as we were wont to do. 

But it was during these times that some of my father's peculiarities showed. He watched a peculiar variety of shows. We'd spend plenty of time watching American Pickers or a wide variety of those car repair/rebuilding shows. But as I've said before, my father is a paradox and on top of those shows, my father loved genre television. Cowboy shows were a staple as was scifi. He was a regular viewer of this guy called Svengoolie, where I watched FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and the ever classic ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN with him. I also remember watching the Americanized version of the 1954 GODZILLA movie featuring Raymond Burr. And it's Raymond Burr that got me thinking about one of my father's strangest peculiarities. 

My father also like procedurals like SHERLOCK (BBC version), LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT and, in particular, the old PERRY MASON starring Raymond Burr. The first time I sat down and watched it with him (to be fair, I was on my laptop writing or putzing around on Twitter) my father did something I found bizarre. As the show came to it's climactic end when they trial was about to be decided, he turned the station. I was taken aback. I looked up at him and thought he was just messing with me, but he didn't acknowledge my befuddlement and, being who I am, I said nothing to him in return. This became the habit. We'd watch 55 minutes of PERRY MASON and my dad would switch channels for the last five minutes. We never watched the resolution of a case. 

Now I know that Perry Mason almost always won and I always wondered if that was part of my father's reasoning. But I found it so frustrating. And the lack of explanation just made it worse. I never pressed or pushed. Maybe I didn't want an explanation. Maybe the wondering was more interesting to me. Maybe he already knew the ending. Maybe he was more interested in the investigation and didn't really care about the ending. Maybe my dad was just peculiar. 

It's weird quirks that I remember about my dad. And maybe being peculiar is what makes us memorable. 

Eureka Euphoria

I didn't want to get out of bed Friday morning. I stayed up too late and was tired. But, as I do everyday, I got up, got ready for work and trudged out the door to my truck. Then something happened that was entirely unexpected, a spark lit in my brain and I had a moment. 

I've been struggling writing for the last several months. I have one project that I've completely outlined. I've told myself the story but I can't decide which POV style to use and it's completely frozen the process. I've also been wrestling with another story idea for months. It wasn't so much an idea as a notion. It wasn't quite coalescing into something the way that I would have liked. It was elusive, just at the edges of my subconscious, and it was frustrating. I just really struggled to write. I tried forcing the idea out and it resisted. It wasn't ready yet. That was until yesterday morning, in my truck as I drove to school. The notion just clicked together like so many Legos and became a idea then an honest to goodness writing project. 

Don't get me wrong. It's still early in development. It could just shrivel up and die on the vine like so many other projects. But the bones are there, it just needs to be put together. And I think I'm up to the task. As I'm conceptualizing the idea, putting it together in my brain, something else happened. A brand new idea came strolling in through the mists of my mind. It was jolting. 

The second idea is completely different than the first and it came in fully formed. Shockingly so. It wasn't a notion or a concept, it was a fully formed idea. Sold. Tangible. And I couldn't believe it. Endorphins were released. I was overjoyed. I rushed to work to get the ideas on paper before they retreated back into the aforementioned mists of my mind. After a few bumps, I managed to get to my desk and get the ideas into my notebook. I was euphoric. 

What I think I look like getting out of my truck.

I was excited about writing again. The last few months have been a grind. I wrote, working on some things that will never see the light of day, but this felt different. All the gloom and hesitation I'd been feeling is gone. And it showed. 

My students must've noticed something. They were working on a writing assignment and were diligent and focused. For a few of the classes the only thing you could hear with the tapping of computer keys. It was exciting. Even my most challenging class (one of the most challenging I've had in the 18 years that I've been teaching) were acting different. They lined up at my desk and were asking about their grades, trying to figure out what they could do to improve. I had several constructive conversations with some of the most demanding students about what was going on in class with them and felt like I made a little bit of a connection with them. And then they went to work. No shouting across the room. No TikTok dances in the back of the room. No theatrics and antics. Just work. At the end of class they were eager to show me how much work they had done. I was beside myself. I was smiling.

I wondered, did my students sense my mood? Was I giving off vibes of some sort? Whatever it was, I was glad for it. 

Writing is a funny thing. When I got up on Friday morning, I had no idea that I was going to have a breakthrough like that. And the icing on the cake was what happened in school. Now comes the difficult part, writing the stuff. It's also the most fun.