A position statement: Y’all need to read The Luminous Dead. It’s like how The Martian would be if The Martian were queer, furious at capitalism, and 75% corpsier. In the meantime, please welcome its author, Caitlin Starling, to chat about her fanfic influences and rec us some fics!
How did you get into reading fanfic? Do you remember the first fandoms you read/wrote in?
Sailor Moon! I was (oh god) about eight years old, bumbling around various fansites. I ended up finding one that I think was just called Sailor Jupiter, and it had fanfic about an original sailor scout (of course), Sailor Sun. The story was divided up by pages you clicked between, and it had midi files of appropriate music! playing in the background, and sprite edits, and I was in love and wanted to make my own. I ended up writing a maybe 1000 word/many chapters-long fic (I was eight, I didn’t understand pacing) about Makoto and Nephrite, who I shipped for some reason, complete with .jpgs I stole from various sites, printed it out, and proudly gave it to my mother, my father, my therapist…
How has fanfic (reading or writing it, or just being in fandom!) influenced your professional work? Are there elements of your book that were informed by your background in fic?
In my solo writing life, I actually moved away from fanfic after my Sailor Moon phase and focused on original short fiction, and then NaNoWriMo, but I was also spending a lot of my spare time on forum and IM roleplaying, and much of that was fanfic-y in nature. I learned a lot about writing to please an audience that way, and tried out a lot of voices, storylines, etc. I also finely honed my shipping skills.
But I didn’t write fanfic, because I was scared! I was afraid that a) nobody would care, and b) if people did read it, they’d hate it, because how could I write good fanfiction that captured what people loved about the base property? I read a lot of fanfiction, and had a lot of admiration for it, but I wasn’t brave enough to jump into the sandbox. It didn’t help that I’ve always ended up loving niche properties and extremely niche characters or ships.
It took until college when I played Dragon Age: Origins that I was bit hard enough by the fanfic bug that I didn’t care about the fear anymore. I spent about a year and a half writing many hundreds of thousands of words of fic. I jumped back into roleplaying, which I’d fallen out of due to classes. All of that work ended up paying off in the quality of my prose and my ability to actually analyze what I was trying to do, if I was doing it, and if not, where I wanted to improve.
I didn’t end up with a big readership, but I did end up with a passionate readership, and I learned that I didn’t want to change what I wrote in service of a bigger audience. And I think it paid off, because when I moved on to Dishonored fandom (where I learned everything I know about atmosphere!), a surprising number of readers followed me even though they hadn’t played the game in question, and many of those readers have gone on to buy The Luminous Dead!
Which, speaking of The Luminous Dead, you can thank shipping (and especially shippy RP) for why it’s a two-character book focused on a very twisty relationship. The Luminous Dead also had its entire second half completely changed in edits for publication, and I don’t think I could have managed that without all my experience in writing AU fic.
And relatedly, what made you step away from fic?
Time. I started The Luminous Dead to see if I could still write original fiction, and then that ballooned into a career that leaves me with very little time or brainspace to get as invested in media as I’d need to in order to write good fic.
What have you found to be different about writing fanfic vs pro fiction?
The need for worldbuilding and a slower introduction to characters. I had a leg up on those skills, I think, because I was used to writing minor characters that I needed to contextualize for readers who hadn’t even noticed them in the original source, and because I wrote AUs extensively, but I still haven’t developed a talent for sweeping worldbuilding of my own, and I’m still learning how to manage a large cast. In a lot of ways, The Luminous Dead was a great way to transition back to original work, because I had a limited cast and a world largely determined by the needs of the plot, so it kept me from getting too overwhelmed.
If you were/are a shippy person, what makes you ship a set of characters? (In my case, I tend to ship them if they are inextricably bonded yet intensely furious with each other, so you can imagine how The Luminous Dead has affected me.) Or if not, what elements in canon make you interested in fic of the thing?
“Inextricably bonded yet intensely furious with each other” sums it right up! Beyond that, I also tend to ship characters who have some kind of thematic link. I ship Callista Curnow and Daud in Dishonored, despite them never meeting in game, because they both are steeped in death and loss, but from very different angles. Similarly, I ship Ser Cauthrien and Nathaniel Howe from Dragon Age (again, despite them never meeting in game) because they both struggle with redefining themselves in the wake of learning that the people they trusted most in the world were actually monsters.
(And if you’ve read fic of either pairing, then yes, you’ve almost certainly read my work.)
Are there fics or authors that influenced you or that you often go back to?
Not so much go back to, but Mithrigil in the Tokyo Babylon fandom blew my mind with the quality of her work, as did Alanna, author of The Conscience of the King, a FF7 fic that is Rufus/Reeve that probably started me down the rarepair shipping path. They really raised the bar on what I thought people could do with fanfic. I also read both before I was writing fic of my own, which is probably why they stand out so much.
What do you love best about fanfic as a medium? And are there things about the fic world that you wish(ed) would change/improve?
Fic is great for allowing deep dives into character relationships, because so much of the world and character background is already known that you can really focus in on the meaty bits. It’s also a great place to write short things to test different techniques out. But for me, the best part was that it made practicing writing into extremely fun, social play. I didn’t even notice I was writing millions of words until they were already written, which I don’t think I could have ever done in just original work.
There are things I don’t miss about being in fandom/fic writing circles, but I think a lot of them arise directly out of fandom itself, of being engaged creatively with a property controlled by something external, and the fact that the majority of people drawn to any one thing will be drawn by similar reasons. That plus general human nature. So I don’t think they could (or maybe even should) change, if that makes sense.
Tell me some of your favorite tropes! And/or: Are there any tropes you really hate except for That One Fic that wore it best?
Favorite tropes! Definitely a fan of character-exploration-through-bdsm-ish-things, as well as bodyguard/boss situations, AUs that completely remix the original source material while still being recognizable, curtainfic, interstitial scenes, extremely intimate shaving scenes, hurt/comfort…
Could you share some fic recs for fandom newbies?
Nothing specific, since I have odd/particular tastes in fandoms and ships, but if you enjoyed Dishonored, I would definitely recommend looking up Lady Smaragdina and Pathopharmacology on AO3. And generally, just try out those weird rarepair fics you sometimes see. There’s a lot of really fascinating stuff that happens in that corner of fandom that often gets missed– a lot of great writers trying out weird things, touching different areas of the source material than usually get looked at.
Caitlin Starling is the author of The Luminous Dead, and served as narrative designer for the art installation A. Human. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia. Find more of her work at www.caitlinstarling.com and follow her at @see_starling on Twitter.