Trials and tribulations of writing the au

[llassah.livejournal.com]

This is a response to the question posted by bathsweaver about AU fics,

Oh, I've got questions about setting up/casting AUs, what's kosher or not (given the assumption that everything is acceptable, but some things are more acceptable than others).

Names, for example. If you're setting up an AU in--ah, bah--the Irish Potato Famine (examples are hard!), does it really make sense to have characters with Italian and Polish surnames? And familial relationships--is splitting up/fusing characters' families (Vecchio and Smithbauer are brothers! Frobisher is RayK's dad! Turnbull and Thatcher are siblings!) simply not done?

Or a better question, is there a way to make it work, without asking too much indulgence from your readers?

Notes: I have cited a fair few Alternate Universe fics in this essay. I am aware that the list is incomplete- there are fics I have not touched on, mainly due to time and space (I need a tardis). However, I might not have come across them, and would be very grateful if you could chip in with aus you have enjoyed. It is due to a peculiar cross between research and masochism at this point that I want to read them, for reasons that will become clear below. This essay should also possibly be called a meandering…chip in, correct, interact- I am in a position as far from knowledge as the original questioner. Enormous thanks go to eledhwenlin for her amazing powers of finding a fic based on a few vague phrases, and enormouser thanks go to lamentables for an amazingly fast, amazingly insightful beta on this thing. Errors are mine, the good things are hers *g*.

The Au: Trials, Tribulations, and…other things that begin with ‘T’

Now I have been writing/thinking about writing a due South alternate universe fic for about six months or so now. It’s…it’s almost a rite of passage, like the post COTW story- in both types of fic there are towering examples that are staples of the fanfiction canon, that define and explore the characters and their relationships. There are Aus involving hockey, pizza delivery, scientists, geologists, professors, car mechanics, mermaids, members of the Russian corps de Ballet (well, perhaps not, but you get my drift). It’s a wonderful genre…

It’s also terrifying.

See, the very concept of the alternate universe is, in itself, a vast and nebulous one. The principle of an infinite number of alternate universes, in which there are changes made to perceived reality, states that these changes can be any size. This means that a fic in which Fraser had a smaller nose would be a valid candidate for the AU genre. It would be absurd, and a pointless exercise to advertise said fic as an AU fic, but it is an illustration of the breadth of classification here. Here, though, is a brief examination of types of AU, some of which I have examples of, some of which I would be grateful for examples of. The terms I use are ones I have pulled out of my hat.

Pivotal Event AU- This AU explores changes to the plot arc canonically set out. These changes are to momentous events, like the end of Victoria’s Secret, Juliet is Bleeding, Mountie on the Bounty, Ladies Man, Call of the Wild, to name but a few. Events we see unfolding on screen are skewed, changed, meaning that the lives of the characters are radically changed. Fraser and Ray part ways after Mountie on the Bounty. Well, Fraser would go to Canada, Ray would stay in Chicago, miserable, and…well, hth’s amazing ‘ghosti’ gives you a possible sequence of events. In science fiction writing, these pivotal eventpoints are called Jonbar Points, but I prefer my wording *g*. The Pivotal Event AU is one that takes canon for a walk and ends up in some interesting places.

There is a subsection here of aus where an event or situation before the Pilot episode means that while the 2-7 exists, one of the main characters has a different role although the environment has not changed. The framework of due South still exists, but there is an absence there, with a corresponding shift in events. (bdtmfh- a beautiful fic, which is….horribly plausible, considering the replacement Canadian in question *g*) This should possibly be called the ‘it’s a wonderful life’ au.


And then we get to …well the rest of them in fact. The vast wilderness out there, uncharted, full of possibility. To the uninitiated, it’s a strange way of writing. In the beginning of writing my AU (more on that later), I read out a section to a writer’s group I attend for some feedback, and one of the comments I got was ‘why not write original fiction, if you’re not using the canon?’(the original versus fanfiction debate feels far too much like revisiting old territory, but I wish I had a notebook full of links that I could give to people who said that, to make ‘em say three hail cesperanzas, like this link, an incredible essay from  cupidsbowhere) I possibly mumbled something indistinct, looked down at my woefully holey plot outline and wondered why I was bothering. But the joy of the AU, at least in due South, is that these people could be anyone, and still be them. Errm…yes, well.

What I mean is that you can change the world these characters live in ( troyswannReal Boys , Elizabeth, the slaves au ), you can change their careers ( kelliem's Somewhere else to be) and still have them as recognisably Ray and Fraser. There are perceptions of character, fandom in-jokes, and other characters the actors have played that can be used. In other words, there is a whole canonical background and emotional and motivational landscape for the writer to play in. The shared language of fanfiction and other fannish interactions means that calling the evil figure in the AU ‘Tori’ will make sense to the collective readership, just as the names ‘Franklin’ and ‘Warfield’ will set off alarm bells in the reader’s mind. There is a game here between reader and writer of how much can be changed while remaining recognisable- how much of the characters can be chipped away at? How many of the bricks can be taken away before the roof collapses?

Could Fraser be made into a liar? Could Ray Kowalski become a living statue? Could Ray Vecchio become a soldier? Welsh into a medieval knight? The wonder of it all is that the answer is ‘yes’. The ‘if’ that follows, though, that’s the reason Aus aren’t peddled out with the same joyous frequency as alleysex fics.

This brings me in a rather tenuous way to the issues bathsweaver has asked about, audience indulgence being the most important one. With this fandom comes a willingness to suspend disbelief, the integrity of the canon coming not from its rigorous attention to probability but from the goodness inherent in the main characters and their personal codes, ethics and interactions.

But with an AU where the world is different, there is another layer. There is an interweaving of canon and the fabric of this other world. The hockeyfic taught us all we needed to know about hockey, the assumption being that the situation into which the characters are being placed will be researched, and make sense from that perspective too. It also gave us poor saps trailing afterwards the impossible task of even coming close to this fic’s amazingness. So we have

a) characterisation
2) research of the world into which they are placed- plausibility, shall we say
iii) the character’s places in this world

This is, I think, the crux of what bathseaver’s question addresses. Theoretically, every single character in due South could be given a role in this alternate universe, right down to that annoying ambassador’s daughter in Chicago Holiday. Where to stop? Who changes, who stays the same? This is, of course, up to the writer, and is a mix of character and plausibility. Roles and names are things that are decided initially, provide much of the impetus for the story, and are ornery tricksy things. And now, I come to my process of writing, and explaining about my own alternate universe.

This is called the Musician Au in my head, and will, I expect, be called that even after I have a title. Its basic premise is that Fraser is a cellist, Ray Kowalski a violinist, Ray Vecchio a pianist, and Bob Fraser a composer and conductor (deceased). Those were the essential characters, the characters I started out with, my foundation stones. From the point of view of plot impetus, Sam Franklin needed to be Ray Kowalski’s mentor, and Gerard needed to be a composer and friend of Bob Fraser. The rest was secondary.

Now, reasoning. I needed to know why they were playing music not solving crime, even if I didn’t show it, for my own sake really. Exposition isn’t really necessary- in this alternate universe there might not really have been a pivotal point at which everything changed for each of the characters. In many cases, long explanations are tedious. I just found it helpful, as I was working with some people having changed their roles, some having…upshifted, and I didn’t want a situation where all of them just…decided to become musicians, without any plausible reason for it, like a career-based version of the ‘character x woke up gay’ stories that proliferate all fandoms.

So Ray Vecchio’s change in career happened for the simplest of reasons:

My dad won something. He actually managed to win something gambling. Still a deadbeat, but a deadbeat with money. The day after he wins it, he sits each of us down and asks us what we want. I said I wanted to be a basketball star, and he said yeah, sure, I can make you one of those, but…I didn’t want it to be just him waving a wand, throwing some money at someone and bada-bing, I could do it. I was ten and I still thought he could do that, cause he was my pa, y’know? So I changed my mind, told him I wanted to play piano. He ruffled my hair- yeah, sure, laugh, I had some then, Kowalski- and bought me a piano, got me set up with a teacher, and…even when the money was gone from that, the piano stayed. I did odd jobs, got a paper round and paid for the lessons myself when pa drank the housekeeping money away, and I worked at it, practiced hard, as hard as I could. And…I made it, I guess. Didn’t hit the big time, but who does? A handful. It’s what I’m good at, though, what I chose.

The placing of secondary characters was also something to consider.

I was going to have Frannie as an opera singer. Because clearly, as her brother is a pianist, it must run in the family, right? (well, no, but still) But I thought it would be more interesting to shift things around within the canonical framework, and have Frannie as the detective, partnered with Renfield Turnbull, who first came to Chicago on the trail of some illegally imported cheese and stayed for the pizza, and because he managed to lose his passport. I realised that not everyone has to be changed, and sometimes it’s better to change a few things, not everything. Besides, it keeps the readers on their toes.

Suspension of disbelief, as I believe I was getting round to. What I find is that you can put the characters anywhere, as long as you have a reason to, and can sustain it. Finding them roles isn’t the tricky part, in many ways. It’s the changing aspects of them to fit those roles- their pasts, opinions, habits, names…

The characters and plot are subordinate to the framework and context in this case, and things that are not essential to the character should be assessed with regards to context- do they fit in? Does the world fit around the characters and do the characters fit into the world? Would Fraser be an outlaw in a cowboy AU? Kneejerk reactions say no, he would be the sheriff. Thinking about it some more, I could see him becoming an outlaw, but only if his crimes are ones he didn’t commit, were committed as an act of conscience, or he lied to protect someone he loved. You want Fraser as an outlaw, fine. Make sure it makes sense. So you have the character framework there. Now what do you do? Hopefully, you research. The legal system, bounty hunters, what a fetlock actually is, how far a horse could ride in a day, whether sand would be an issue having open air sex out in the desert…

World and characterisation intermesh well by this point, hopefully.

Names are a part of this world; I couldn’t agree more with bathsweaver on this point. When working in an au historical/ geographical framework, anachronisms jar for me. Renaming…well, that’s another question for those with knowledge of this. I only know that unless you explain it away by having the Kowalskis emigrate from Poland, it is not a name you would find in Ireland, just as I know that writing a musician au and calling the violin strings f,a,e and g shows sloppy research. These details don’t change who the characters are, but they change how real the world seems, and how jarring the transition seems. Sadly, there have been no fanfics set in Ireland during the potato famine. I feel that this needs to be rectified *throws down gauntlet* but once my behemoth of a fic is finished, I will be laying off anything that requires any sort of explanation beyond FraserandRayarepartnerssometimestheyhavesextheend.

I did, however, find an alternate universe fic set partly in Renaissance Italy, Ecce Homo, that dealt with the name issue and got away with it very well indeed. How do the names Raimundo Vecchio, Benedetto Frasier, René Voltabufalo and Stanislaus sound to you? Raimundo is, of course, an Italian merchant, Benedetto is French, René (hee hee, Turnbull) is Italian and Stanislaus is Polish. It’s a short read, and I really like the way canonical references are woven into it, and also the way that having it set in a port means that the nationalities being together is plausible. There’s one good example for you, and I would love to hear more, and also hear your views on the names. I think the worldsetting takes preference over canon, what do you think?

Splitting up and fusing characters’ families…another thing I hadn’t considered. It hasn’t been done before really, I suppose because changing around parents changes the person- it is an inescapable genetic change, and one that seems to interfere with who the character is, which is something that, for all that their roles change, an au doesn’t do. The difference in the character’s respective upbringings is going to shape them, forming their characters (either as an acceptance or a reaction against) and opinions. On the other hand, of course, Turnbull being Fraser’s slightly simple younger brother would certainly add a certain…comedy. Canonically, it has been done with Maggie Mackenzie, but she grew up away from Fraser. I don’t know if it’s ‘simply not done’ or if it takes thinking about, and a fair bit of planning.

It boils down to ‘how much can you change, and keep it feeling like a due South fic?’, which is a fascinating dilemma, and one which I am not sure if I have worked out yet, or ever will. It’s a bit like Theseus’ boat, where on a voyage, every plank, beam and sail was changed, one by one as they wore out, except as lamentables pointed out, the ship also gets painted differently, and maybe the sails are set a different way. Was the ship that arrived at the docks the same ship? How much can you change of a character before they cease to be that character? What can you discard, what must you keep? Are there any boundaries to it, really, and where should limits be imposed on the seemingly limitless?

Comments

[ultra-chrome.livejournal.com]

I've been kicking an AU around for a while now, too. I've written wee snips of it for the ds_aprilfools thing. So this is a wonderfully timely post. Thank you!

I was asked why I didn't want to write it as original fic by a friend I was discussing it with. My answer was that the characters where not mine. I didn't make them who they are. I merely chose to put them in different places. So to take that and call it my own would be dishonest.

She then asked why I didn't change them and make them mine. Which is an entirely plausible question, the answer to which is... because I don't want to explore what other characters would do in this world. I want to play with RayK and Fraser. So fanfic it is.

The AUs I love best are the ones that mix it up a bit, but still have some characters in their original roles. Take The Hockey AU. Ray Vecchio is still a cop. Bob was a Mountie and the whole how he was killed thing stayed the same. But Fraser took a different path to the same outcome. Those are the ones that get me.

Which means that any where Fraser ends up boffing RayK? Different path...same outcome.

The one thing I find most annoying is too much exposition. That holds true in any story I read. It's a rare person who can pull it off without becoming tedious. I mean, you need some yeah, but it's a fine line. I think that's another area where The Hockey AU stands out. It's all there for us to look up if we don't get it, but it isn't detracting from the story. Can you tell that's one of my all time faves?

You've given me even more to think about now, for which I'm grateful. (The image of Fraser as a cellist is among the finest of those things. :p)

Oh, and what are the strings on a violin called?

[joandarck.livejournal.com]

(I was going to link you to this AU discussion with recs from china_shop, but looking down in the comments I see we already talked about it (http://community.livejournal.com/ds_workshop/10884.html?thread=61828#t61828)! Hi, I didn't realize we'd interacted that far back.)

Anyway. Aside from that, what I'd been going to say was, stepping away from Due South for a minute, because I tend to be the most emotional about that... you know that Starsky & Hutch AU _unhurt_ was reading recently, where it's set in 2077 and the Roman Empire never collapsed and Starsky is still named Starsky and Hutch is Norwegian and...?

Yeah, so, she quoted me a passage, and my reaction was, "Wow, that's a terrible Starsky POV." And then I started thinking, well, futuristic Romans, and he's a slave-owning lord and whatever, he'd have had an entirely different educational system, an entirely different mental voice, even somewhat different values... so his POV would sound completely different. Okay. Fine. But, so, at that point, in what sense is he even Starsky? He looks like him and has the same voice. He may to some degree act like him. But his relationship to the Starsky on the show is tenuous enough to lose me completely.

So, I guess, taking that back to what you were saying... Irish Potato Famine AU. Unless it's done in a deliberately cracky-meta manner, everybody's going to sound Irish. Ideally you'd tweak that in way that mirrors the show, with some people speaking in a formal, educated way and some people sounding more, hm, ethnic, although translating Kowalski-speak into Irish dialect, *boggles* You'd need to be some kind of scholar, really, wouldn't you? Well, no, because you mention that Italian port AU, where presumably they don't really sound Italian, so it's back to the old historical fiction challenge of writing in a way that sounds compatible with the setting, but is much closer to modern language than the real thing. But people usually solve that by keeping it simple, and so when you've got characters known for their odd speech patterns and slang, wow, you do have a challenge.

Um. Ramble? Useless ramble? Sorry. (http://community.livejournal.com/ds_workshop/10884.html?thread=58500#t58500)

[bathsweaver.livejournal.com]

::picks self off floor::

Oh, hoorah! Yay, and wow, and thank you! I've been wondering how people write AUs, what makes the ones that work successful, and never getting any further in my own mind than "as long as the characters speak and act according to canon, any scenario is workable" which is...right, but somewhat unsatisfying (and also more condescending than helpful)? Because if it is an AU, with different situations and histories, the characters can't be exactly who they were, in canon.

So, yes: thank you! This went a long way toward making sense of it. Thank you!

[sage]

Yay, this is so interesting! I have a small handful of AUs, although I should probably preface this comment by distinguishing between Alternate Universes and Alternate Realities. In other words, Current, my Spanish Civil War AU is a time and place entirely different from the show. But Blood Sugar is an alternate reality, where Frannie is Detective Vecchio and Meg is Constable Thatcher -- the setting and basic premise of the universe (Canadian Mountie comes to Chicago on the trail of the killers of her father and remains as a liason, et cetera) are the same as in canon.

Anyway, what I was going to say was I think both these stories still feel like Due South fics, even though they're wildly different from canon. There are partners, a mission to accomplish, unexpected difficulties, something wacky or surreal happening, and some not-subtle flirtation...and hopefully the voices sound fully in character.

Name changes do get to me. I adore the way "Ecce Homo" dealt with it, because it kept it recognizable and appropriate, but part of why using the International Brigades for "Current" fit so well for me was that the soldiers literally came from all over the globe, so RayK could be a Polish immigrant's son from Chicago and Fraser could be from the Arctic. And...well, DS is fundamentally structured around the question of nationality and national identity -- and there's really only so much of that that can be removed without destroying the essential DueSouth-ness of the universe.

I do wonder if it's easier for people to read Frannie & Meg in the traditional Ray & Fraser roles than it is for people to read RayK & Fraser in a totally different universe. I'm no good at guessing what readers will have a greater acceptance of.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Hey - you give me too much credit! And I forgot to mention how much the 'it's a wonderful life au' pleases me.

[nos4a2no9.livejournal.com]

What a fantastic resource this post is. I've been struggling with my rentboy AU forever and I think this little essay on AU fics has made a big difference in the way I see and understand what needs to happen for everything to come together. I've been mainly having a problem with the burden of exposition - how and why to explain why Fraser is suddenly a street hustler is hard. You've come up with some great suggestions/examples/explanations of how to deal with Pivotal Event AUs and I think it will end up saving my poor beleagured 30,000+ word story.

Also, in terms of *cough* researching other dS AUs, I'd like to pimp out visciouscat's comprehensive list of AUs written in the fandom. It can be found here (http://viciouscats.livejournal.com/1313.html) and already lists 76 different stories with (I'm sure) many more on the way.

[kill-claudio.livejournal.com]

OMG, now I really, desperately want to read
a) Your Musician AU
b) Fraser as an outlaw and
c) A potato-famine AU.
Like, now.

As far as changing family ties goes, I think that I only buy it when the relationship between the two characters remains essentially unchanged. So I could believe a fic where Frannie is Ray Kowalski's little sister, because they already have that gentle sibling bickering going on. But I could never believe, for instance, that Ray Vecchio and Stella were siblings, because clearly they don't have that kind of relationship.

If you want an AU rec, I would highly recommend thehoyden's wonderful Academic Punk (http://www.theburrow.net/ds/punkp.html). It has Fraser and RayK as university lecturers in an English department, and the background is so skilfully inserted that you don't even notice it as exposition. I particularly love the explanation of why Fraser never became a Mountie, purely because it's so succinct;

"My father was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and he hoped that I would follow in his footsteps."

Ray raised his eyebrows in curiosity. "So why didn't you?"

Fraser leaned back in his chair slightly. "My father was often away, so my grandparents raised me. By the time it occurred to him that I wasn't going to be a child forever, I'd already become far too attached to the written word."

In conclusion: AU's! Yay!

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

speaking of the Kowalski issue, I remember a Victorian England AU, where the Kowalskis had emigrated to England, but earlier, and Ray was a cop in London. Admittedly they could've kept the Kowalski name, but had gone with what was a bit common at the time, which was to have them take on a common name - which meant Ray was now 'Smith', as it's what Kowalski translates to.

[etcetera-cat.livejournal.com]

*kidnaps your brains and runs away to Gretna Green with it*

I'm too brain dead to contribute in a metaish and intelligent fandom, so in lieu of that-- and as down payment for your brain-- I leave you a couple of links to AU fic:

Pas de Deux (http://www.dueslash.com/archive/905.html) by Shihaya Black, in which Fraser is still a Mountie and partnered with Ray Vecchio, and Ray Kowalski is a dance instructor that Fraser meets when he and his fiancee Victoria gor for dancing lessons in preparation for their wedding.

Palimpsest (http://www.dueslash.com/archive/1069.html) by Purna. Fraser never left Canada and Ray Kowalski used to be a cop, but now flies a plane in the Northwest Territories.

Both of those stories are long, satisfying, brilliantly characterised and jump off from what I think are really plausible starting points and there's porn. YAY.

[mickeymvt.livejournal.com]

I love AU's and I love you for writing this. Some many thoughts here- but as one who has two AU's running around in her head (RayK as baseball picher w/Fraser as Mountie and RayK as Wild West Bank robber w/Fraser as the Mountie brought in to bring him in(aka"The Ballad of Ray the Kid"), I think the key is to keep them as close to the canon characters we love, while putting them in a totally different situation. Granted, that is the hardest part of writing an AU, IMO and the one that I am sure AU writers have struggled with.

I mean, how do I keep the RayK we know and love while turning him into a multi-million dollar, successful MLB pitcher? I have no idea, to be honest, but that's part of what makes AU's so interesting. Seeing HOW the author keeps the characters in character, while totally changing everything else.

Your point about exposition is dead one. Again, how do you work in what made them change from being cops to being what-have-you, without going into that long, lengthy, boring exposition. For every story it's going to be different.

In conclusion: WOW! Lots to think over here and consider before I actually get my ass into gear with these.

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

This is a great post (and I'm late reading it, of course). I think AUs can tell more about the characters than any other genre of fanfiction, because the world we're used to them living in is either gone completely or changed in some way. When that happens the characters stand out more, become more clearer, because the clutter of the ordinary is stripped away.

I have two AUs in the works. One would be a Pivotal Event AU, since it's the Fraser-went-with-Victoria premise (it's also kidfic. Yeah, I know.) The voices in this kind of AU aren't the hard part, it's the jockeying of events and timelines to fit the plot and still be plausible. The hard thing for me in this one is that the fic is F/K, so I have to figure out how to work Kowalski into it. I'm thinking that Ray V. went undercover just like he did in canon, and Ray K. replaced him. My problem is I don't think linear very well and I'm going to have to do a LOT of outlining, which is something I'm not used to doing.

The other AU I'm working on (and 'working on' means 'just starting to seriously research') keeps the names and faces but changes the era and setting. The universe involved is an amalgam of the storylines in two folk songs: the traditional "Irish Rover" and Stan Rogers' "Barrett's Privateers". The whole thing started as late-night cracked-out LJ commenting (basically "the end of BP is way too sad and needs a fix-it"), but now I really, really want to write it. This one's the most challenging of all for me, because I have to make up a whole new scenario and still keep the characters true. There's also a boatload of research because of the actual historical nature of the thing.

mickeymvt and I are looking into doing a role-reversal AU where Fraser's the cop and Kowalski's the Mountie *see above comment*, because it's seldom if ever been done and we wonder why. We figure we might find out if we actually attempt to write it.

[buzzylittleb.livejournal.com]

Hi. I found this in my del.icio.us tagged AU and this is a great post. You may well have reignited the fire on my current AU (Kowalski/Turnbull music gay bar thing I wrote for dsss) because word I agree with everything you have written here. (dude, I sound like a valley girl) I even made Frannie an opera singer (she's Elaine's understudy and is currently dabbling in fortune telling) and Vecchio is a pianist... (so this may well have been lurking in my subconscious, or RayV just channels pianists (I want to make dirty comments about Stella's pianist now)) And this comment is a mixture of complete scramble, but I love that you got it down straight; AUs are great provided they are consistant with the characters and show the right motivations etc... <3 <3 <3 I don't know how to end this comment, and I don't care. *segues into Hugh Dillon*

[0walking-naked0.livejournal.com]

Yay, this just made me rethink a hell of a lot of an AU I'm writing. Rewrites, excellent. Grrr. But y'know, writing is a learning process and all that.

Also, uh... "members of the Russian corps de Ballet (well, perhaps not, but you get my drift)" does members of the National Ballet of Canada count? *hides*