I love to listen to the sad, sad songs

[gwyn]

I want to write a death story in the Fast and the Furious fandom. This doesn't seem like a dramatic statement to make, really -- it's not that different than saying "I want to write a PWP" or "I want to write a novel-length WIP." But apparently it is; you mention a death story idea to people and they start groaning or sighing heavily, with sad-face emoticons or waving of hands in a physical show of denial. It's the ultimate form of the sad story, so it usually merits a few extra notches of anguish from other fans, but really, any sad story will generally garner a reaction of disappointment from most of the people in your fandom. Your friends are hurt, they're disappointed, and you know they won't read your story; worst of all, you may have trouble rounding up a beta/editor when your request is met with a spontaneous burst of tears.

I used to think that fans might be more open to the sad and the tragic than the mundane world -- most people I know outside of fandom won't go to a movie that doesn't have a generic, prefabricated storyline and guaranteed happy ending, so they're pretty much limited to stupid action movies and cut-and-paste romantic "comedies". They won't even watch classics like Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, because, you know, unhappy ending... And when I first got into media fandom in The Professionals, so many of the truly great stories were at best unhappy stories; in my opinion, the best things I read in the fandom were almost always death stories. Not that there were many of them, but anyone who read the classic circuit story Endgame knows what I'm talking about. When I wrote my own Pros death story, for a zine that my local fan group the Media Cannibals were putting out together, I couldn't find many takers for the required "at least two people have to edit your story" requirement we placed on ourselves (because we are all writing bitches from hell). I thought it was the best thing I wrote in the fandom, but most people wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, which was a surprise to me because I'd genuinely believed that people were more open to main character death stories than that. My first experience writing in Pros fandom was a novel that involved the death of one partner's wife, and since it wasn't one of the main characters, that kind of death was okay -- but that okayness led me to have a skewed understanding of how open people are to death stories. (Not that I didn't hear how much it made people cry, or subsequently how my stories are always "bittersweet" at best, which sits well with me because I love the bittersweet, oh yeah.)

That was the lesson, though -- anyone else, hell, even Cowley (or replace the secondary or tertiary characters of choice in your fandom) death is okay, but not for one of the main pairing folks. Naive as it sounds, this was an eye-opener to me. I'd seen people who could be lured by the promise of a good story into reading things they hated: non-con, BDSM, comedy, shopping for curtains... you name it, you could almost always squeeze a read out of most fans if the reward was pitched to them as great enough. But not death -- never death. I found this peculiar because I truly love sad stories.

Not every great sad story is a death story, either. But if the premise deals significantly with grief, loss, illness, or something similar, it often gets lumped into that big category of Sad Story along with death, and then people tend to avoid it. Folks scrutinize titles or rec lists with the zeal of a newly converted vegan, looking for the dangerous ingredient that will give away its true Sad nature and thus be crossed off the list. Escapism is the word of the day for most people reading any lit, but especially for fanfic.

And that's where I get stymied, because I find it totally escapist to be pulled into a well-written story and shown another world, regardless of whether it's sad or happy. But I've rarely met anyone in my life who finds escape in writing (even if it's superior) that captures a different world than my own and sucks me into that world, when that world is full of tragedy. I'm hard-pressed to pick a favorite novel, but among the top three choices would have to be Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, which a friend dismissed once as "a story about a guy burned to a crisp" and therefore impossible to consider as escapism -- despite the incredibly powerful love stories at its core, the intrigue of WWII, and the African desert exploration. It has sad stuff, ergo, it's not escapism. Yet every time I reread it, I'm so lost in his gorgeous, precise prose, the incredible characters he presents, the richness of this sealed-in-time world, that I find it terrifically escapist.

As fans, I think, we invest a lot of feeling in our characters (they are, after all, nearly real to us), and so tragedy becomes something to avoid because it's just too much feeling of a sort that is painful or hopeless. And I realize few people find it spiritually satisfying to feel pain for characters they love -- there's definitely a subset of folks like me who do find tragedy to be a rich and powerful reading experience, but I know we're in the minority. I get the appeal of the happy ending, because I love them, too; yet I find myself drawn to the intensity of emotion that tragedy gives me in a way that no generically happy or even flat-emotion well-written story will give me. And I've frequently found that the people who tend toward the darker, more tragedic stuff often are truly great writers -- in fandom, my love for really sad stuff has led me to some of the best writers in many fandoms not my own, most of whom share my love of tragedy. When I've brought up these names to some friends, they tell me that they may have read one or two lighter things by them, but that they "can't read her stuff because it's too dark [or sad, or has death]." What a loss for them! I think.

I can't help connecting that interest in exploring the tragedic with good writing, as well, because it seems like the stuff I admire most is prose that really delves into the deepest of human emotions -- and that will often mean feelings such as grief, loss, longing, regret. It's much easier to run out of things to say about happiness; grief can go on for longer, it seems. And happiness or contentment have a kind of plateau effect. Without conflict, there's no real storytelling, even though conflict can be as small as the details of daily life, or as large as a life-or-death struggle. What happens with the basic fanfic story of getting the characters together, having sex, and then giving them a happy ending or keeping the story going in shopping for curtains land is that we often hit a level where there isn't even the most minute type of conflict going on -- it's just generic. It's really only the good writers who get how to keep the emotion alive; but quality doesn't necessarily carry weight in fandom, because most people only want to see the characters on a page and aren't necessarily interested in plumbing the dark depths of human emotions with them, regardless of the writing style.

Which I get, in a way, but I also don't get, because I can't imagine wanting to spend time reading if I'm not going to be pulled into something intense and emotionally precarious. The truth is, I don't understand the desire for fanfic lite, or lit lite -- I know it's far more universally appealing, but it's just not something I'm that drawn to, so I'll probably never really understand it. I remember few stories I've read in fandom, I almost never reread, but the ones I do come back to are almost always deeply affecting, beautifully written, and intensely tragedic or haunting. Risky, experimental, devastating, dark... those stick with me. It can leave me feeling wrung out, incredibly sad, hopeless, melancholy, whatever... but it will almost always leave an indelible impression on me, as well.

And selfishly, it's where I know I'm in my element. The best stuff I've written in each of the fandoms I've done fanfic in has always been the sad stuff -- a death story in The Professionals, two grief-centric, regret-centric stories in X-Files, an illness/winter of our lives story in Magnificent 7, and two really hopeless, dark pieces in Buffy. I know that that's when I write best -- when I can explore those intense, really tragic aspects of human nature -- and that I will come up with something stronger and better written than any other time. It's not that I like that sadness in real life; I've had more than enough of personal tragedy in the past decade, thanks; yet I still long for that intensity in fiction. Same thing for vids -- my strongest vids are almost always the ones people tell me made them cry or react like they'd been punched in the gut. That's what I want, because that's the feeling I like to receive most when I read or view.

What I love in death stories most is when one character is forced to try to live without the other partner -- there's so much there to understand, to develop in how they cope, what their loss feels like, that I can't imagine missing out on that. Especially making the strong silent one suffer the loss -- what an emotional wing-ding that is! I love the flashbacks to their relationship, I love the nuances of their recovery (or not), I love seeing how they grapple with a future devoid of the One True Love of their life. While I have no desire to experience it in real life, in fanfic I can wallow and escape to their pain and still come out unscarred.

Of course, I know that's what a lot of people have issues with -- they don't leave the story unscarred. They can't separate their love for the characters from the loss of their characters, and it's harder to see it as escape. Though since most fans won't read them, I'm also thinking they don't know what else they're missing in terms of Gigantic Emotions and unforgettable stories. It's a big ocean in between the two countries -- fans who hate death stories think you're a masochistic freak for liking them; fans who love them think the ones who don't are pussies. Never the twain shall meet, I fear. There's so much misery and suffering in the world right now, why add to it by tormenting yourself with the pain and suffering of characters you love as if they were a part of your real life? That's nearly impossible to explain, I fear, especially since I've rarely seen anyone explain feelings about art to someone who doesn't share those feelings, and have the other person come away with understanding or interest. Each person brings a unique personal standard or belief to art, so you can't hope to bridge the gap, even if the people on the other side are your friends. All the academic musings and justifications in the world don't change how people react to these things on a personal level.

So I will write my story and know that even fewer of my friends in the fandom will read it, and I'll be sad about that, but I know going in it's going to happen. In my first writer's group out of college, I brought a short story to the group and no one wanted to read it, because they'd got used to me bringing these depressing, sad, painful, or really disturbing stories all the time and they thought the title meant yet another one. It was the first "nice" story I'd really written, but I had a tough time convincing them. Every time I'd submit a story to a magazine, I'd get a lovely note from an editor telling me how much they liked it, but that it was too dark for their readership. The only story I ever actually got paid for (rather than trib copies) was, of course, "nice." And the lit-fic novel I keep feinting at writing is based on my great-uncle's murder while he was a border guard in 1928 on the Southern California border; I'm sure that has a great chance of being sold, even if I wrote the best novel ever. There's just so much drama there, so much emotion to mine, but the audience that wants such drama is actually pretty small in any population.

Yet, oddly, most of the great literature and the great films are based around tragedy, especially death. I think one of the most important elements that made Lord of the Rings so successful was that they never shied away from the huge emotional resonance of character death -- the filmmakers never gave in to that modern need to keep all heroes alive and make all bad guys dead at the end. These days, if you kill off a major character, you can expect your audience to drop by half, if not more. And in fandom, I think, that may be an even larger number. In a small fandom like F&F, that's a significant loss of readership; in Pros, maybe not as much back in the heyday when Endgame came out (and dammit, I wish I had made a copy of that when I could have).

While I get the tendency to want nothing bad to happen to characters I love, I also want rich, deep emotional shadings, so I'm much more inclined to that dark stuff. I never loved Chris and Vin as deeply as when I wrote Cold Enough to Snow, and even though no one dies in it, people still classify it as death or tragedy, just because of an illness. To me, that gave me a platform for showing just how deep human emotions run, or how intensely people can love, and I think that fandom would be a poorer place without those types of stories to spice up the otherwise often bland fare we are usually offered. Without things like death stories, or illness, or loss of some kind, there would be a sameness that wouldn't be unlike what we're frequently force-fed on the shows we're following. Too much of any type of story would be bad, so the tragedic gives us something besides the same old 1-2-3 type story. We may be a small group, but I know we're out there. With our big box of Kleenex, but we're out there.

Comments

[paris7am.livejournal.com]

Thank god for people who can think clearly and translate their thoughts into writing so well! Death stories. My own feelings for them change from day to day. I think that most of the death fic I've read has been a surprise, with no warning, and perhaps that's the way I like it to happen - a stunning avalanche of emotion. Catharsis. If I read warnings, and I'm unfamiliar with an author, I will usually shy away from them toward something safer, but if I love an authors work I'll read it all. I anticipate *loving* this new story.

Can you direct me to Cold Enough to Snow? I thought I'd devoured all of your writing, but I haven't seen it before.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

It's at my web site, http://www.drizzle.com/~gwyneth. Scroll down to the Mag 7 section, under Buffy. It's on a lot of links/recs pages, too -- for some reason it's the one Mag 7 story that got "out there" in the genral fandom. And all of mine are at the blackraptor slash archive, as well.