Guest Post: R J Theodore Gives Away an Old Family Secret

Note from Cat: I copy-edited Alanna’s recent novel, The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus and was pleased to do so because I think it’s one of the outstanding fantasy books of 2019. It is gentle fantasy, an on-the-road feminist version of Peter Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place. I highly recommend this book, particularly to people who love literary fantasy. If you enjoy her essay, please check the book out!

I still remember the moment I learned what fanfiction was.

I was in seventh grade and deep deep deep in an obsession with the Harry Potter novels. I was speaking to a ninth grade girl in the same school play as me and she mentioned that she loved Harry Potter as well, and all the extra stories she had found.

Extra stories? Had JK Rowling written something about Harry Potter that I hadn’t gotten my hands on yet? Where could I find these stories? This girl corrected me: no, these were written by other people, but they were about all sorts of things not in the books. People were writing these stories and all I had to do was look for them and I would have no end of Harry Potter, long before the next book came out. This revelation rocked my world. Who else knew about this concept? What was out there for me?

Through middle and high school I set about reading as much fanfic as I could get my hands on. I wrote a great deal of my own, testing out ideas just for the thrill of making a mark on stories I loved, but didn’t have the courage to share it online until I was in college. That became yet another revelation, a world that I could now access as an active participant. It was some of the best concentrated writing practice I have ever gotten, and best of all, there was an eager audience ready to read and support what I had put out there. I know for a fact that a lot of that practice paid off in my professional life.

Sometime around 2013, I got invested in a few audio dramas, particularly the fitness app Zombies! Run, which used audio clips to tell a zombie apocalypse story in the second person, with “you” as one of the survivors who had to run to escape danger. I fell in love with many of the characters and set about writing as much fanfic as I could, but found myself with a unique challenge. The only way I and the rest of the audience had ever interacted with these characters was through their voices. No visuals, no narrative prose to set the scene, no facial expressions to analyze, we only had a few sound effects and the dialogue. So if I wanted the readers of my fic to know when the snarky Canadian radio host was speaking, as opposed to his sappy British partner, I had to make sure their dialogue “sounded” as close to the dialogue of the show as possible.

Once I started focusing in on dialogue, this became a personal challenge for me, beyond what fanfiction already was. Could I write a fic with only dialogue and make it clear who was speaking when? How about a scene with more than two people? If I read this dialogue out loud, could I imagine the character’s voice actor saying it, or would it sound strange in their mouths? What sorts of words and verbal tics did these characters use that I could employ to indicate when they were speaking? The harder I worked at getting these voices down, the more positive responses I got from my new friends in the fandom and the harder I tried. (And in a fortuitous story of the modern age, I became friends with another fanfic writer for Zombies! Run who, six years later, is now my fiancee.)

When it came to writing my debut novel, The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus, I took those lessons and utilized them as well as I could. A large portion of my novel concerns the three main characters (two ghosts and a mime) embarking on a road trip and talking with one another along the way. Giving Chelsea, Carmen and Cyndricka distinct voices became a vital part of my writing process, and thankfully my work has been worthwhile, with reviews pointing out the distinct voices as a strong point of my book. Spending so much time working with voices that other writers had laid out for me helped me to find unique voices of my own, and I could not be happier about that.

Which is not to say that everything that works in fanfic works in a novel.

One of my biggest struggles was getting back into the habit of writing exposition. In fanfic, you can always assume that the reader knows the world, setting and background of the story you’re working within. More than once when writing Triple-C, I had to remind myself that all of the rules of the ghostly world were not already common knowledge, that I had to set the stage and articulate whatever the reader needed to know in order to enjoy the story. Sure, if I was writing an alternate universe story in fanfic, I would need to sketch out the world more, but in my writing in the “canon-verse”, I had gotten lazy about exposition. At least a few of my early editors were confused why the ghosts could not get into a car for the road trip and save everyone some time. (The answer to that, incidentally, is that the physical car would move through the ghosts’ incorporeal bodies, leaving them behind.)

Without the thriving fanfiction community that I was part of, I think my novel would look (and sound) very different from how it does today. And I know for certain that my life would look different without the people I met through my fandom days. I have not been very active in writing fanfiction for a while, but every now and then I dip my toes back in to stretch out some old writing muscles and remind myself what I love about it. Writing fanfiction is not a lower or lesser way of writing than original work; they can feed into each other and overlap, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

And beyond all of that, no matter if you ever make a cent off of it or not, writing fanfic is fun. Because really, what’s better than writing an angsty canon divergence fic or a fluffy Tattoo Artist/Florist AU? Nothing.

About the author: Alanna McFall is a novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Originally from Minnesota, she lived in a number of places on either coast before landing in the Bay Area, where she is a resident playwright with PlayGround San Francisco. Alanna is the 2019 winner of the June Anne Baker Prize for female playwrights representing a gifted new comedic or political voice. When not writing, she is a theater administrator, avid cross-stitcher, and podcast nerd. Follow her work and upcoming projects at alannamcfall.com or find her on Twitter as @alannamcfall. The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus is her first novel.

Unlike the more familiar Greco-Roman or Norse pantheons which feature vivid characters and well-defined myth cycles, the Inuit myths tend to ramble, skipping madly about with the rapid scene changes of a disjointed dream and likely to end abruptly with a stoic, “˜”Here ends this story.”

The mythology is peppered with impressive spirits with interesting names. But aside from a name and a job description there’s little else to go on. So when I decided to write ALAANA’S WAY, an epic fantasy series about the first female shaman in an arctic world based on Inuit myth, I had my hands full. As shaman it’s Alaana’s duty to negotiate with the great spirits, and they all became colorful characters in the story. Their appearance and personalities were entirely up to me.

Another problem. A nomadic lifestyle, the vagaries of a mostly oral tradition and a fractured tribal system leave little agreement between different versions of the same story. Even the most established figure, Sedna, Mistress of the Sea, owns multiple conflicting origin stories. One version claims she was the daughter of two giants with such an uncontrollable urge for flesh that she tried to devour her parents in their sleep. Another tribe insists she was a young beauty forced to marry an elderly neighbor who turned out to be a monstrous carrion bird, leaving her no route of escape except a plunge into the salty depths. Or perhaps she was a poor orphan girl mistreated and cast into the sea by the other children; her fingers, chopped off as she clung desperately to the side of the kayak, fell into the water to become the walruses and seal. I had to tread carefully here. I decided, in a flash of Solomon-like insight, that all of them were true. I supposed that in the Beforetime, where dreams were reality, she was all those things, lived all those lives. But here and now she is simply Sedna, the Sea Mother who controls all the animals in the ocean.

Another established figure is Tulukkaruq, the Raven, who always represents a mischievous spirit in Native American folklore. The Inuit Raven is impressive indeed, having been credited with creating human beings and bestowng the gift of fire on us as well. But really, this one was easy. I gave him the personality of the Dark Knight’s Joker and urged him to plague both my shamanic heroine and her villainous nemesis in equal measure.

But what about the rest? Interpreting an entire pantheon is a daunting task, but I never flinched. I’m a fantasist. This is what I live for.

Consider Tornarssuk the guardian spirit of the polar bears. The name spoke to me. I pictured an enormous shimmering white bear with starry eyes. He would be fierce and deadly but also benevolent and wise, with a soft spot for human beings as well. Tekkeitsertok is the guardian of the caribou, so a tawny-furred man with cloven hooves and an impressive rack of antlers. I figured he was an old and docile spirit, more interested in sleeping than fighting, but he does get into at least one good brawl before the series’ end. The Whale-Man may appear as a gigantic black bowhead or a Poseidon-like man, and let’s make him the estranged lover of Sedna for good measure. I wrote a scene in book four where the two have a torrential undersea battle, her sharks on one side vs his whales on the other.

What about Erlaveersinioq, the Skeleton Who Walks, a terrifying spirit who loves murder and death above all things? I guess we can chalk him up in the villain’s column. Sila, spirit of the Wild Wind, was a wild card but in the southern tribes he is also the spirit of justice. Let’s put him with the heroes, but leave some question as to whether he’ll really show up to help. As for the snowy owl who leads the souls of the dead across the great divide, she should be petite and cute, with a light as bright as sunlight on fresh snow. Narssuk, who controls the weather, is an insane sky baby who lets down his caribou skin diaper to issue a stormy blast of thunder and snow.

Somewhere along the line I found mention of the Tunrit, a race of people who lived in the arctic before the Raven created human beings. A race of prehistoric supermen. I could find nothing more about them except for the name of the tribe, but that was enough. I had found my villain. A promethean figure among the first men, who had wrestled sabre-toothed tigers and brought the sun from the other side of the sky, and who turned to sorcery to atone for that terrible mistake.

So are my versions of these mythological figures accurate? Probably not, since they came mostly out of my own imagination. But they might be. And that’s an important point. In dealing with a cultural belief system, albeit an archaic and disfavored one, I felt a duty to be respectful. My books sit proudly on the shelves of the Toronto Public Library and in a home for wayward Inuit boys in Nunavut, Alaska. In correspondence I’ve received from Inuit people reaction varies from praise for giving these mythological figures new life, to a stoic acknowledgement of the fact that at least I didn’t contradict anything.

That last is not entirely true. A pivotal figure in the series is the Moon-Man. Many Inuit tribes posit the familiar Native American myth that the lecherous Moon-Man chases his sister the Sun across the sky each day in hopes of an incestuous liaison. This didn’t fit in with my elderly, romantic Moon-Man nor my version of the Sun as an extraterrestrial spirit. What to do? I decided to have my shamanic heroine Alaana ask the Moon-Man, on one her soul-flights to his realm, if the story was true. “Oh no,” he says, “that’s just a story people tell.” So at least the contradiction comes right out of the mouth of the Moon-Man himself. Who could argue with that?

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Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.