Delightfully Useless

So stunt_muppet was wondering on her journal how other people manage to write such little short fics - a whole story in 400 words or some such. She asked, "Short-fic-writers on my flist, how exactly do you do it? How do you find the perfect small slice of a scene to write about? How do you condense an idea into such a small space?"

Well, in a classic example of "the grass is greener", I've always wondered how other people can write so much in one story that ficathons with minimum requirements of 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 words are common! So I offered to do a ramble/analysis post about how my fics are so short. Here it is.



Take for example my 600-word Who/NCIS crossover Well, That's Just Ducky. Someone who habitually writes longfic could probably have made the same story ten times that length - adding scenes to show more of the setup and resolution, giving more details of what happens, maybe getting inside the characters' heads and telling why they act as they do... any number of things.

* One thing that helps make Well, That's Just Ducky shorter is that it begins in medias res, in the middle of things. The first line is "'Oh, dear,' said both men at once"; it's instantly clear that Something Bad has happened, that there is a problem to be resolved.

* Terseness is also important. The next 127 words lay forth the problem, describe the setting, introduce our two heroes, explain their presence there, and give their initial reactions to the problem. Within 150 words from the start, they're working on a solution.

* Which brings us to another important point about writing shortfic: I don't describe or explain very much. Usually, I imply, and let the reader fill in the details. (I took that method to an extreme in Intersection, in which I carefully avoided explaining what Liz was studying because I didn't know, and in Medical Convergency, which I wrote without the least notion of why Ducky had been summoned to Stargate Command at all! I do not recommend doing that. *g*) For instance, here I remark that Ducky is "a man who wanders around L-Space on his day off", thus implying both that it is his day off (hence the rest of the NCIS team will not be appearing) and that he's familiar with the locale - which in turn tells readers who don't know him, if they do know L-Space, that he's a well-read and intelligent man with major pwnage points. ;-)

* Since Well, That's Just Ducky is a crossover, I did feel compelled to provide a little description for those who might not be familiar with one hero or the other. Still, "the taller man, white-haired and flamboyantly dressed" is probably one of the longer character descriptions I've ever done. I rely heavily on fans knowing what things look like to save me words. My only really thorough description of a canon character was when Illya was undercover as a girl in The Winner by a Nose Affair Part 1; in that case, the description was necessary to convince readers that the disguise would work.

* Once the problem is resolved - which happens fairly quickly because I stink at coming up with unexpected plot twists - "Well, That's Just Ducky" stops in medias res, too: the injured girl who motivated the plot isn't yet fully okay, but we're assured she will be. At the end of the fic, Ducky is beginning a story to pass the time while the guys wait with the girl to protect her, thus implying (there's that word again!) most of what will happen among the characters after the story closes and before they split up to go home.

* As for "finding the perfect small slice of a scene to write about"... I think that's just the way my brain works. I start with a sort of mental snapshot or a line of dialogue as my plot bunny, and I just don't tend to flesh it out much more than I feel is absolutely necessary. Take Liaison Poetique at 280 words - I don't see any need to explain why Illya, a Russian, is living in France and going to move to England. Everyone who reads MFU fic has fanon to explain those two canon facts, so I just let them explain it to themselves while I move on to the important part of my story: the first night of Illya's love affair with English poetry.

In short, everything I write is a missing scene. It always fits into my personal fanon-verse for the characters in question (which would be why I've written so much MFU fic; my fanon is much more developed than for other shows, thanks in large part to st_crispins and the mfu_canteen), and I explain just enough to show the "anchor points" at which it touches canon. The rest, I figure my readers can imagine.



LOL, now I find myself wanting to remix "Well, That's Just Ducky" and see if I could make it into a longfic! *g*