bex77

I forgot to report on one of the interesting parts of the trip to NH yesterday.

I had an expository writing teacher as my navigator. I asked him if he ever wrote his own material. He said he had written plays (drama) and poems and prose short stories, even had a few published. He asked if I ever wrote. I said I'd written some stories, but most of them are too erotic or too "Mary Sue" to show anyone. He didn't know what "Mary Sue" meant. I told him it was a fan fiction term, mostly frowned upon, where the writer inserts herself into the story or creates a character very similar to herself. Wikipedia defines it thusly: "Mary Sue, sometimes shortened simply to Sue, is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and clichéd mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors."

He said he'd never read any fan fiction, and wondered if there was much of it and what it was like. *cough* I told him about the literally millions of stories out there...all the amazing TV fandoms like Star Trek, Doctor Who, Buffy/Angel and so many more, and how it's got it's own lexicon like Mary Sue, Shipping, Slash, Drabble. I also talked about the varying opinions about fan fic and its writers, whether the authors they jump off from are flattered or hate it for stealing their characters etc. and how shows like Doctor Who were kept alive for years and have returned due to the fans. I said I'd bet if he asked his Harvard students, many of them have read and/or written fan fic.

What's a drabble, he says? It's a 100-word story. Usually a moment that the writer wants to explore between two characters, a conversation, a brief theory about what something else meant, anything really. He wrote the word down in his little black book.

Today, he sent me a drabble he'd written! He said he'd been out on the internet, reading drabbles, and thanked me for letting him know about this cool world.

Heh. Snagged another one!