Building a World

Back when the new Millennium was still in the single digits (Good Grief, that makes me sound old!), I was in the peak of my Harry Potter and Celtic Mythology phase.

Don't judge. Rowling hadn't outed herself as a TERF at that point, and I was still refining my writing craft through fanfiction, largely Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, with occasional forays into Star Wars and X-Men and anything else I liked enough to get creative about.

I'd quickly discovered that I was rather good at AU fanfiction, taking the broad strokes of a franchise and expanding it in a different direction. One of those fanfics was a full re-write of the Harry Potter series, with some very significant changes. When, several years later, I published my first book and started thinking of what to write next, revamping the 400,000+ word monstrosity that took almost 9 years to write into Original Fiction was a natural starting point.

Tellingly, this was the first time I tried to turn fanfiction into something original. I had no clue what I was in for...

As I quickly found out, "scrubbing off the trademarks", a common phrase to describe the process of turning fanfiction into original fiction, is a lot harder than just changing the names and locations.

At least, it is if you want your original story to be any good. Looking at you, Fifty Shades Trilogy...

First and most importantly, you have to identify the bits that are inseparable from trademarked content. Despite certain claims on the internet, Boarding School fiction and Magical Academy fiction were around long before Rowling came up with Hogwarts. Parallel Societies are staples of every Urban Fantasy out there.

Rowling's world building may be a mile wide and an inch deep, but for all her faults, she has an engaging writing style.

The next thing to do is make your own world building and character building to fill in the gaps that removing trademarked content left.

What is the basic societal set-up? How does the magic system work and why? Who has magic and who doesn't, and what does having or not having it matter? Is being magical necessarily better than being non-magical, and what are the attitudes towards either state?

Needless to say, it helps if your Alternate Universe fanfiction has worked most of this out in advance. The more AU your fanfiction, the less work it is to turn it Original.

That's the other stumbling block that I'm currently wrestling with. While I was mostly just using the seven books as a guide while writing that mega-fic, removing the books left me with a lot of blank space to fill.

I have the broad outlines of the story I want to tell, but Book 1 of my trilogy covers a span of years, and it can't all be brushed over with time flying by when you're in a routine.

The main character may be the cousin of the Prophesied Hero, but she's a pretty lousy cousin if she misses all of the chaos that goes on around him, in favour of her own pursuits.

At the same time, the story needs to get from point A to point B by the end of book 1, and adequately set up for Book 2. I have the outlines for both, and at least 5000 words of books 1 and 2, but there's still a lot that needs to be fleshed out or in some cases, written at all. There are plot points that I need to map out significantly before I decide which one makes for the more fulfilling storyline. There are characters that need to be developed more in order to tell their parts of the story.

There's also a part of me that needs to rediscover why I fell in love with this story enough to write it in the first place.

Our tastes change over time, and that's as true of what we write as it is of our media consumption choices.

When I started writing this story, I was, in many ways, a more hopeful person. I hadn't had my heart broken by people I trusted. I hadn't experienced the helpless fury of being an Essential Worker during COVID-19 while listening to people whine about how bored they were and how lockdowns were so unfair and oppressive.

Try explaining for the millionth time that day why someone can't go for an excursion to their favourite cafe for lunch, before you complain at me, Chuckles...

In some ways, those experiences make for a deeper and richer story. In others, they make it harder to relate to a heroine who still deeply, genuinely believes in happy endings and overcoming anything by working together. Writing the moments where that innocence is harshly and irreversibly stripped from her is difficult, and there's a part of me that wants to linger in her ignorance, to return to when I believed in the goodness of the world and the strength of democracy, however flawed it might sometimes be.

Until I can reconcile this conflict in myself, it's going to be hard to resolve it in my characters.

But, I've identified the problem, and that's always the first step. With the current flood of former fanfiction getting book deals, perhaps it's time to make another attempt at this one...