Fics

This week I heard high praise for three pony stories that were well-written, but left me unsatisfied because they were just sadfics. I use the words sadfic, happyfic, darkfic, grimfic, etc., for stories that just want to make the reader sad, happy, etc., and so they describe one event that is sad, happy, etc., and then stop. Then readers fill the comments with "DAWWWW!"s. "Cupcakes" is a grimfic. (Okay, I haven't actually read "Cupcakes". Maybe it is a masterpiece of dark humor. But that's not what I've heard.)

It seems most just-fics are sadfics. "From the Mouths of  TheFillies" is a sadfic. (I deliberately picked a story by somebody who isn't following me, so please don't PM him to tell him about this post.) Derpy has cancer. Dinky doesn't understand. Derpy dies. The end.

Being a fic doesn't mean something is bad, I guess. I haven't read or watched Old Yeller in a long, long time, but my recollection is that it 's just a sadfic. But a lot of people liked it. Pull on the heartstrings hard enough and something becomes a (children's) classic.

But your sadfic about Twilight crying on the graves of her friends won't be, unless you add something else:

Tension

Something may be lost and something may be gained. The reader is in suspense.

Decision

Someone must make a choice between two outcomes. A classic decision story is "The Lady or the Tiger?".

(Must it always be two things? In fiction, the choices presented are always between exactly two options (although a clever protagonist may respond with a third). Is this good writing, because more options is less dramatic; or is it just lazy?)

Tension and decision almost require each other. We usually call a resolution of tension without a protagonist's decision a deus ex machina, and call it bad. And a decision without important consequences is seldom interesting.

The decision doesn't have to be between the two outcomes that oppose to make the tension. In The Deer Hunter, in the Russian roulette scenes, the tension is between living and dying; but the decision is whether to play, or not to play.

In On the Beach, there is tension with no decision: Will everyone in the world die from nuclear fallout, or has someone in Seattle found a way to survive? The characters seek the answer to the question but have no control over it. But the main focus of the novel is not that tension, but how people respond (see below) to knowing they are all going to die soon.

Maybe Citizen Kane has tension without decision. Everybody wants to know who Rosebud was. The viewers eventually find out. But that's just a frame; you don't keep watching the film to find out who Rosebud was.

The only contemporary exceptions I can think of which have nothing but either tension or decision are weird existentialist fiction. The characters in Waiting for Godot must choose whether to keep waiting; one of the points of the play seems to be that their choice has no consequences. It is a decision without tension. "The Trial" by Kafka is a story about the fact that the protagonist never gets the chance to make a decision; it is tension without decision.

You might think horror and action movies have tension without decision, but they don't, as far as I know. Faceless cannon-fodder can be killed off at random, but their deaths don't resolve tension--they help create tension by showing that the characters we care about are at risk. Characters we care about almost always get to make a decision before being killed. And if some don't, well, that's just to make us more nervous about other characters who do.

Stephen King called horror a conservative, Republican kind of fiction. Characters get killed as punishment for some social infraction, like a woman choosing to have sex outside wedlock, or a man being kind of a jerk, or trying to learn secrets man was not meant to know. In Saw and its sequels, people have to choose between being maimed for life and dying. (I haven't seen them, but I've been told the people were chosen because they didn't value their lives, making it a punishment and making Saw another conservative horror story.) The people killed off in And Then There Were None were all themselves killers.

Even in action stories where you know the hero will succeed, he or she must make some decision near the end in order to succeed. Luke must trust the Force; Indy must both believe in the power of the Ark, and give up on ever seeing what's inside it. There are action movies where the heroes don't make any such decision. They are bad.

This strikes me as very peculiar. If fiction is supposed to be realistic, shouldn't it have plenty of stories where the outcomes  are not in the heroes' own hands? The rarity of such fiction must be a clue to why we read fiction.

Drama

Drama is tension with a dramatic structure: The story builds up to an emotional climax where some issue that the reader's been worried about almost since the start of the story must be decided. I said "decided", not "resolved", because although tension in real life is usually resolved by outside forces, tension in a modern story must be resolved by a decision, as noted above.

Tension in Greek drama didn't always need to be resolved by a decision. The Greeks believed in gods who were not benevolent; the question of fate was therefore very important to them. Could the gods condemn them to a horrible fate even if they lived virtuous lives? Oedipus Rex is a 2500-year-old existentialist drama in which the resolution is that the prophecy was, inevitably, fulfilled. Like "The Trial", it's a story about the fact that Oedipus could not make any meaningful decisions; his fate was pre-ordained. Today, and especially in America, we believe that we control our fates, and so our stories operate only within the small set of possible worlds in which this is true. There's a reason existentialism didn't originate in America.

Tension and decision without drama is possible.  Exhibit A: "My Little Dashie." The narrator decides that he wants Dash to be happy, even if it means (I think) that his life with her, the only valuable thing he ever had in his life, will never have happened. If it just happened without his assent, it would be a sadfic. If we'd known he'd have to make that choice, it would be a drama. But the story leading up to the decision doesn't dramatize (literally) the decision; it lays the groundwork so that we understand the consequences of the decision.

Response

Take a sadfic, then show how a character deals with the tragedy. Better yet, just infodump the entire sadfic in the first paragraph of the story, and go from there.

"Somewhere only we know" is a response fic. Rainbow doesn't have any choices; there is no hope and hence no tension. Rainbow responds to her horrible situation with a beautiful dream, and in the circumstances, it's kind of heroic. Rainbow is escapist, but this fic isn't escapism. On the Beach is another response fic.

"Pinkie's Last Party" sometimes gets accused of being just a sadfic: Pinkie dies. Be sad. But it's got more than that, especially in those last few paragraphs, where Pinkie feels sorry for Death and offers her a cupcake. That's a small but grand response to death that is perfectly Pinkie. That, not Pinkie dying, is what brings the tears, and they aren't tears of sadness.

Theme exploration

This is my favorite. Literature, it seems to me at this moment, could almost be defined as what you get when you take a story--something that would pass on fimfiction for a complete and proper story, with character and plot, and could get featured and published on EQD--and take that as a starting point for something bigger. The original story is like a lattice, and themes are like vines which the writer plants around it. As they grow he weaves them into the lattice. In the end, you can still see the shape of the lattice, but the vines may outweigh it.

In "Flowers for Algernon", Charlie is a mentally-retarded man who becomes a test subject for a treatment, then becomes a genius, but the effect is temporary, and he becomes stupid again. That's a sadfic, but the writer didn't stop there. He used it as the framework to build a much richer story on. The story built on it is about what his friends really think of him, why they value him, what friendship means, and the relative value of happiness, intelligence, and truth.

What's a theme? Maybe it just means "an idea". "Pinkie's last party" hints that you should live your life like it was a party: "I know that the worst way to ruin a party is to drag it out, trying to preserve a feeling that was always meant to be fleeting." Is that a theme? I think so.

Bonus points for more universal themes. I guess every theme has to be universal to be a theme at all--if a story kept returning to the point that the poorest countries have the best stamps, you wouldn't call that a theme, you'd call it OCD. But some themes are more universal than others. In The Natural, Robert Redford plays the world's greatest baseball player, who is gunned down before his first major-league game. 20 years later, he tries again. Everyone laughs at him because they think he's too old to play baseball. But he isn't. There's a choice at the end of The Natural, but that isn't the only thing that keeps it from being just a happyfic. It's also got a universal theme: You're never too old, or some bullshit like that. It may be a lie, at least in the specific case of pro baseball,  but it's an answer to a universal question: Is it time for me to give up on my dream?

Character explanation

I didn't say "character exploration". Telling us things we already know about Celestia does not get you bonus points. Writing your own head-canon about her may get you bonus points, but doesn't, for me, rise above the level of the fic unless it's something important and non-obvious.

Chris just reviewed "Let's Just Say" (description: "Suppose I killed them all?") and concluded, "... there's not really a lot here other than the promised hypothetical." Sure, there's a crackfic here: Celestia muses about, just hypothetically, killing everypony off and finally having some peace. But I think there's a lot more than that. Imagine the story had instead been Twilight thinking, "Suppose, whenever somepony returned a library book with pages torn out, written in, or highlighted, I... just killed them? Would that be so bad? If a book makes its author immortal, then destroying it is murder..." and then ended with a knock on the library door. That might be funny, but it would be just a crackfic, because it wouldn't give us any new insight into Twilight.

(Yes, I saw "Testing, Testing!" I'm talking about my head-canon, non-canon, actually-gives-a-shit-about-library-books Twilight. I can only handle so much character dissonance.)

"Let's Just Say" gives us a whole new head-canon about Celestia: Ponies follow her night and day, adoring her, asking her questions, "looking out for" her, making she fulfils her many royal duties. She feels like a prisoner, and she feels very tired:

She felt free for a flickering moment. Not free enough to forget that she was still the Princess and that inevitably, invariably she’d be found and brought back, but so what? ...

She was technically away from it all.... The ponies. Her loyal subjects. There were no sycophant upper-crust Canterlot ponies in these woods, nor were there any of the rustic Ponyville types, who’d throw themselves off a cliff if they thought their Princess would like the sound of the splatter. It was nice to be ten miles distant from either of them. She was, at any rate, sick of both of them.

... There were a few ponies who didn’t make her despair, but those were few and far in between. Most of the populace, though... Well, there was something wrong with them....

A squirrel scampered by, twisting and turning its way past her legs. Birds who hadn’t the good sense to go south already chirped in a lovely little chorus. Yes, this was lovely. The sort of thing a Princess needed when she wanted to get away from it all.

Not away from it all forever. She’d never get away from it forever.

Unless...

I hadn't imagined Celestia thinking things like that, but once Obs puts it out there... is it so hard to imagine thoughts like that sometimes flit behind her royal smile? Is this really just a crackfic?

"The Light Goes Out" could have been just a Twilight-is-dying sadfic, but it has a lot to say about Twilight Sparkle:

"I don't want my accomplishments be tied to the expectations others hold of me. I don't want them to be defined by somepony else. Not even you." ...

Meticulous, precise, and organized to the last, needing permission, needing structure. Even as she claimed she didn't want her purpose to be dependent on another, those who loved her knew better. She needed the authority of it. She needed to know that she wasn't disobeying any regulations, wasn't breaking any rules. ... Twilight Sparkle sat before her teacher, seeking her final grade before allowing herself to be dismissed.

Theme and character blend together when a story investigates human nature. Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is more than just a darkfic because it's about human nature. A lecturer I heard talk about it kept describing the actions in it as "inhuman", but that was exactly wrong: The actions are human. That's why it's a great story. ("Inhuman", oddly, is only ever used to describe things that only humans do.) It's believable enough that some readers thought it was real, and wrote The New Yorker to ask where they could watch such a lottery.

Putting it all together

So take your sadfic and add one, two, three, or all of these things to it. Some examples from my own stories:

The Corpse Bride: Sadfic + Drama + Themes. Twilight kills Fluttershy, again, and that's sad, but it is the outcome of a drama, and it's used to talk about friendship and hubris.

Twenty Minutes: Sadfic + Character. Chapter 1 is about a pegasus who's a sex slave, and that's sad, but  the story is really about the zebra who tries to help her, and why he does it, which is why chapter 2 is there.

Alicorn Cider: Sadfic + Tension + Decision + Themes + Character. Mac loses/gives up Twilight, and that's sad, but it also says a lot about how Mac sees himself, and says something at the end about birth and freedom vs. destiny, service/religion as love, and the grace of offering such with no expectation of repayment.

Fluttershy's Night Out: Sadfic + Drama + Character. Fluttershy oh heck you can guess, and that's sad, but it happens only at the end of a drama and after a series of bad decisions, and is used to explore how Fluttershy feels about herself, both before and after, and show the vicious cycle she's in that has made her the mare she is at the start of season 1.

The divide between commercial or genre fiction and literature used to be something like this:

Commercial fiction: Must have drama. Character explanation is nice, but not necessary (see Twilight, The da Vinci Code). Should preferably not have controversial or upsetting themes, because we don't go for that literary crap.

Literary fiction: Must have themes. Should not have much tension, and certainly not action/adventure, because we are not circus entertainers.

Today, though, the short stories published in literary magazines today all (and I mean that literally, as in I don't recall a single clear exception in the dozens of lit-mag stories I've read this year) is, rather, to throw out the plot entirely, so that rather than starting with a just-fic and building on it, there isn't even a just-fic. There are vines, but no lattice. Character explanation is supreme. There is probably no tension, and drama is forbidden. A decision may be considered, but will be shown to be impossible; the characters must continue on as they have been doing. Themes may be present but must not be clear, and the author's opinion on the matter must remain ambiguous.

There's another distinction between commercial and literary fiction that has to do with the type of themes allowed. I think that literary fiction is supposed to challenge people, while commercial fiction is supposed to reassure them. But that's a subject for another blog post.