George Hasn't Discovered My Greatness: OC Discussion and Index/OC Story of the Month Thread

Attention: The Original Character Index has changed locations:
it can now be found here at: [link=http://boards.theforce.net/Message.aspx?topic=25562370&brd=10304&start=25562395]The New Essential Guide to Original Characters[/link]



Viva La OC Revolucíon!!!

 

Its a great idea, and I have a lovely Collaborative OC that has been about ignored to death because of personality conflict. She got a little glimpse of "sun" today because of a brilliant fic for the Qui-Gon Jinn challenge thread, but frankly I note that she(the OC) still has at least one very important, absent, first time reader, because that person has even bragged that their influence is keeping people from reading the series. Sad.

Just an interesting fact of personalities on the board.

So is this really going to be a way of getting all thoes wonderful OC's out there and are even established personalities on the board going to be willing to let past bad feelings end to have new people and new ideas nurtured?

Or is it just going to sound good in the heading?

 

Excellent Topic, LONG LIVE OC's!

 

I think we can trust the good people running this thread to make it an equal-opportunity OC thing...

 

I'm not too sure what you mean Nolie, but we do want EVERYONE to feel comfortable to express any ideas they have about OC driven fics here.

If it's a personal issue you have with someone on the boards, maybe its best to keep it to PMs, or IM.

 

I also have no idea to what you are referring, Noelie, but I will vouch for the quirky awesomeness of the OC writers I've interacted with on these boards. I have a whole lot of love for my compatriots in the OC Revolution.

 

O.k. the current topic of having a Monthly Featured OC Story is what I'll focus on right now (that doesn't mean you can't talk about something else altogether).

Some ideas from Layren , Jennifer_Lynn, Rebel Grrrl, and the always insightful, lovable, and down-right genius correllian_ale (hey, even my OCs have big egos) have been the following :

- Keep it in the OC Story Database, that way it stays in line with what other characterization threads are doing...maintaining indexes and challenges...andd the like.

- Who gets to decide what story to feature?
Well, the most prevelant so far is let voting decide, at least for the first one, then let the author of the chosen fic decide the next month's fic. Of course there woould be paramaters to adhere to, to prevent people from making turning it into alove fest for their friend's fics.

- A month of discussion about the current fic - like oprahs book club.

- Request the author to allow concrit?

- should only completed fics be allowed to participate so drive-byes don't get their fic pimped, and just leave it hanging?

- I suggested that the first couple of months, until things caught on to use only fics with EXTREMELY low readership, but that's jsut a suggestion.

Those are some of the ideas running so far, any others out there?

 

Hey! Great idea for a thread!

Monthly Featured OC Story is what I'll focus on right now

Monthly featured stories?hmmm that sounds like fun

Should only completed fics be allowed to participate so drive-byes don't get their fic pimped, and just leave it hanging?

Well if I my express an opinion?I see where you?re coming from but I don?t think it?s very fare b/c some fics are ling and can take a long time to complete therefore there are many fics out there that are WIPs but are a the same time great OC fics.

- I suggested that the first couple of months, until things caught on to use only fics with EXTREMELY low readership, but that's jsut a suggestion.

Hmm?. What do you consider EXTREMEKY low readership?

 

I think that it should alternate between the option of it being completed or uncompleted. The advantage to completed is that it's a closed case, but on the other hand, encouraging ongoing projects can be helpful in the context of seeing where it progresses.

 

Perhaps WIPs can simply be required to be 'current', as in last updated at least two weeks or perhaps even as long as a month ago? This would weed out the 'dead' stories and present those actively being developed.

 

That sounds like a practical idea. Also, there could be a requirement that there be at least one update during the period in which they are featured.

 

Well, if we are talking requirements to be a featured story, what happens if they don't update? The story would have already been listed for the month before we'd know that requirement was unfulfilled.

 

Maybe that person gets penalized in some way?

 

whatever is decided, I'm just glad there's a place to discuss all this. To throw in my two cents about the eligibilty of a fic for being SOTM, I would just say the story should be completed or the author shows the intention to finish. I don't think the author should be penalized for not updating; afterall, they didn't give the awards to themselves.

-Krystal

 

I agree. If it's heading towards conclusion, that's probably an acceptable level.

 

Request the author to allow concrit?

Just for what it's worth, I learned through the concrit thread policy list that not everyone is clear on what "concrit" is. It's short for "constructive criticism," and largely came from the world of beta editing. When removed from the one-on-one world of betaing and introduced to a group, concrit (and its cousin, positive feedback) become workshopping. Here and there you can still find FanFic threads with "workshop" in their titles, although to my knowledge none of them follow the traditional workshop format. In fact, the only threads I found that are workshops in the accepted sense are [link=http://boards.theforce.net/message.asp?topic=6767593&replies=178]T.A.C.T.I.C.S[/link] and "[link=http://boards.theforce.net/Fan_Fiction_Writers_Resource/b10304/12825746/?66]Serious About Writing[/link]." (And if you know much about "Serious About Writing," I'd love it if you'd contact me, since its host is gone and I have no one to do a writeup about it for the concrit policy thread.) The purpose of these threads is for authors to post sections of first- or second-draft works and ask, "Is this any good? Does this work?" Workshopping is especially effective if the author includes specific questions along with the story material: "Was that Han/Leia goodbye scene over the top in terms of emotion? Should I scale it back to something closer to, 'I love you,' 'I know?' What about Vader? Does his dialogue seem stilted? I somehow can't seem to capture the effect of JEJ's delivery in print," etc.

Regrettably, "concrit" seems to have gotten the reputation of being basically a negative review posted to a finished story. Negative comments can be lots of things, but they aren't necessarily constructive criticism. Posting "you shouldn't have done that" comments in response to a finished story is probably the use of criticism least helpful to an author, and may not help any but the most tough-skinned and inexperienced writers. For example: "I know how hard you worked on this story and that you don't intend to revise it, but next time, consider starting a new paragraph whenever a new character starts speaking," is about the best you can expect from that format. Authors with some experience are not going to be helped by criticism so general that it can be applied to whatever story they write "next time." (The only exception might be for writers new to TFN, who may not be familiar with writing conventions on the boards. I.e., "Next time, consider posting a few pages at a time instead of 30-page chapters all at once.") If concrit of a finished story gets much more specific than that, you run into the infamous "borderline flame" that is no good to anyone: "I really think that goodbye scene between Han and Leia went overboard in terms of emotion. They're hardened soldiers who have seen tons of friends die. They're not going to be clinging to each other and sobbing like neurotic college freshmen leaving mom at the airport for the first time." Assuming the story is absolutely done and posted, what help can this response be to the author? How can they use that criticism "next time" they write the same scene in the same story?

So while I'd love to see workshopping allowed (and concrit is definitely a part of that), I'd be leery of providing concrit on finished stories in a non-reciprocal format, where one author a month is put in the hot seat, while others can sit back and nitpick without ever having to risk putting their own stories out for review.

Now, if the idea is not "constructive criticism" (intended to improve the story) but just plain "criticism" (in the NY Times book review sense, not the "This thing sucks!" sense), then a brave author might be willing to allow people in a thread to do that. In that situation, the comments aren't directed to the author at all, but to other readers. The goal is to evaluate the story according to its strengths and weaknesses. For example: "I absolutely loved the author's portrayal of Luke. Writer X's natural sensitivity shines t

 

Do "hybrid" stories that star, say, Vader, the Emperor, and 52 people you've never heard of in your life have any place in this thread?

I was just about to ask that! If your central characters are OCs, but everyone else who shows up is canon, could you be featured?

 

Hey, this sounds like a pretty fun idea!

 

An OC-centric is generally regarded as a fic that stars OCs and has a plot line driven my the original character. Say you had a fic with an OC Jedi being hunted by Vader, your fic should really be concentrating on that character, with Vader as much a tool to the story as a character.

If your fics co-star an OC and say Jacen Solo, it would depend on on who the story focuses more on. If its about Jacen and he has a friend named Derak, it's really a story about Jacen. The more you concentrate on the OC character, the more it's considered an OC-centric fic.

There's a fine line, which really would depend on the mind-set of the reader.

 

I personally have no problem with hybrid fics in this thread. I have enjoyed a very many Oc/canon hybrid and that's what originally got me to writing OC's in the first place. I think as long as the author has updated within X amount of months, it should be eligible to be the story of the month regardless whether or not it's completed, but that's just my two cents. That way we can weed out all the stories that have been abandoned, but still make it fair to the other WIP stories.

 

Hybrids can be a lot of fun. Just look at Layren's stuff with Qui-gon and Kyran. You're never quite sure who the star is!

 

I was just thinking about that kind of thing . . . I don't want to get us mired in a hopeless tangle from the beginning, but I did want to request some special consideration for canon/OC romance stories, since even though they may be 50/50 canon/OC, there is really a third entity involved: the relationship between the two characters, which is really the author's creation.

There *used* to be a whole separate OC Romance thread, but it wasn't wildly successful, and last I checked it was locked, dusty, and dry. Rather than splitting off into sub-genres again, which tends to harm useful discussion of story types that have smaller followings anyway, perhaps canon/OC romances that are on the borderline of hybrid-acceptability could get a nudge into the OC circle. That is the mental category people tend to place them in anyway, which is why so many readers avoid them.

 

On hybrid fics...

I disagree that a hybrid fic staring a canon character is truly OC Centric. Honestly, one of the principle problems OC readers often face is the lack of a character to "bring them in". Having Vader or Palpatine or Anakin as a central character is not the same as having a cast dominated by OCs. I'm not saying that a canon character can't walk through the story every so often, but the real focus needs to be on the OCs and the OC story line. For good example of OC-centric stories, I'm always drawn to think about Yodimus' Planet Hopping or The_Face's detective stories.

 

For me it's "Who is the story actually about"...At the risk of sounding like a brown noser, for great examples of OC-centric fics that utilize canon characters I'd be amiss if I didn't mention one I read in particular.

For those of you who have read oqi's Triple Burn!, you know the plot on the surface was about a "demon child" that had come to warn the galaxy of a great oncoming danger, and choose a pair of OC Jedi to instill her message into. It took place prior to AOTC, so it became obvious to the reader (eventually) that Anakin was the oncoming threat.

Anakin played a "role" in the fic, and even though he was part of the central issue - it wasn't about Anakin. He was a delvelopmental tool for the author, a way to intergrate the original characters into the GFFA, and move the story along. At best any canon characters were in the story were featured in scenes only, and did not direct the traffic. It was OCs like Badour, Mai, Elitrea, among others that were centralized in the fic.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with canon or EU characters in a fic, I write plenty of them myself - but in my humble opinion, if the clam is that its an OC-driven fic, and the story tend to center on Vader, Luke or Thrawn with a bulk of OCs thrown in with no room to develop, I can't call it an OC fic.

Just my two cents, with a wooden nickel trown in for good luck.

 

I don't get it. Right now, there's like four threads on the first page of the Fan Fiction Writer Resource alone devoted to OCs. And I haven't noticed any huge difference in the readership numbers of OC fics compared to CC fics. In what sense are OC stories not getting a fair shake?

Maybe it's just me being an ignorant newbie, but I don't see all this OC persecution everybody seems to be on about. Is it a left-over mentality from the formative time of fan fiction?