On writing Pern fanfic
I’m an old school Pern fan fiction writer. I cut my teeth in the online Weyrs of the late ’90s, years before the Kitchen Tables fan fiction forums opened things up, and even longer before it was okay to publish your Pern stories openly on the web. I was a member of Northlight Weyr, founded and ran Lakesedge Weyr for a few years before it all got too political, then went into semi-retirement with a blue rider at Fort 13. I must have written hundreds of thousands of words of Dragonriders of Pern fanfic, and that’s before I even start counting Dragonchoice (circa 70,000) and Dragonchoice 2 (c. 140,000).
I’ve been taking a break from it in recent times, but now, as I’ve started to get back into the swing of things, something’s struck me about writing in the world of Pern. It’s incredibly bland.
I don’t mean the concept, which is of course brilliant – Anne’s talent has always been in coming up with a great concept, a fantastic hook to hang her stories on. With Pern it’s the dragons. But the rest of the world is very thinly populated with history, culture, flora and fauna, and as a writer, that actually makes life really difficult.
Metaphor and simile are two of the most useful items in a writer’s toolbox, but here we’re somewhat cut off at the knees by Pern’s setting. The cultural, social, geographical and even zoological references that make up a vast number of expressions and analogies just don’t work on Pern. You could never describe a character as being a king among men, a real lioness, as ugly as a gargoyle, so cunning you could put a tail on him and call him a weasel. Those things simply don’t exist on Pern, and while the expressions might have hung around past the point at which their etymology was forgotten, they wouldn’t sound right coming from the mouths of Pernese characters a Pass or two down the road from landing.
Instead we have a clutch (geddit?) of Pernese expressions which almost exclusively refer to dragons and Thread. Historical figures are limited to Faranth and perhaps Moreta, and there’s little sense that even relatively recent historical figures of the last few generations are remembered or revered. You can count the number of Pernese animals on the fingers of five fingers (dragon, fire-lizard, wherry, whersport, tunnel-snake) if you don’t count fish, insects and crustaceans. The imported animals are rather painfully referred to by use; “as healthy as a runnerbeast” has no ring to it, and “canine-tired” doesn’t sound right either. Even the swearing is unsatisfyingly anodyne, with “Good Faranth!” (“Good God!”) and “Shells!” (Blimey! Bother! Gosh!) being about the limit of things, neither of which would make me feel better if I’d stubbed my toe on a door.
It enormously limits the vocabulary available to writers. Which isn’t to say that fan fic writers can’t indulge in purple prose (as that one six-foot tall, golden-skinned, red-haired – down to her ankles no less – violet-eyed, snow-leopard-owning, queen-riding, baby-kissing, beloved of all character we had lurking around at Lakesedge at one time will attest). But God, when you’ve been reading something with the richness of A Song of Ice and Fire or the clarity of the Farseer Trilogy, writing Pern fanfic sometimes makes me feel like I have one hand tied behind my back!
Continue to How to name your chapters
Pern is one of the strangest fandoms I’ve ever been in. I just can’t figure other people out sometimes. But I’m relatively new to the books and still interested in them, which I guess means I’m the unicorn of Pern fandom, so I have no idea what history has gone behind what.
But I digress! I actually think what you’ve done with the Dragonchosen series is the best thing you can do with Pern under the circumstances– you add a lot of content that most people might not think about, because Anne doesn’t write about it herself. Maybe some of that is from the DLG (I personally don’t care for it– it just sucks whatever magic Pern has out of the books) but my point remains.
Pern isn’t a very rich setting. You’re right. Some of the later books add in a bit more flora and fauna, but for the most part, it’s lacking. That is where it’s up to the fanfiction author to make stuff up, I suppose. The trick is making it fit seamlessly- but it can be done and has.
Another thing is that the source material your working with is full of contradictions… all the tiiiiime. For example, I like to pretend that all the stuff about cows and horses isn’t actually right, seeing as herbeast and runnerbeast are described as more fantastical in Dragondrums than later books. Plus Whelan does a mean portrayal of a skybroom (Renegades).
Half the time Anne describes it as one way, then half the time the other. So why not pick the more fantastical way? Frankly I just have fun picking what I want, and making up the rest. No one seems to mind.
@ “A Reader”: Pern IS a peculiar fandom. I think it’s due to a variety of factors. One of those is that it still had a few vague breaths of life in it when internet fandom started becoming commonly accessible to the middle class, right around the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, new Pern books penned by AMC (not her son) were still being released (Masterharper of Pern, Dolphins of Pern, The Skies of Pern, and Red Star Rising/Dragonseye). There was a TV show in the works with the WB, although Ron Moore walked out on it and it was canned. There was a computer game for the PC and I think Dreamcast. But fanfic was still not really allowed outside of the Weyrs, which removed the type of rich canon-character fanfic that other fandoms had and concentrated fandom around RPGs and self-insert characters, and by the time that ban had lifted, AMC had largely stopped producing new material, which meant that A) most fanfic writers had focused on other fandoms, and B) no “new” blood was coming in. Most of the “remaining” active fans are old farts (28 is an old fart compared to the driving teen-to-college-age demographic of most thriving fandoms) who long ago formed their Pern-fandom habits.
Given the original topic of Pern being shallow–which it is, AMC’s no world-builder, and as Faye said AMC’s talent is really for the Big Idea or hook and it sort of peters out after that–there’s little to entice people back to it.
Unless the Pern movie is made; there HAS been movement on that, with a screenwriter attached to it, and renewal of the options which I’m told was announced at Dragon*Con this year. If that happens, and the movie isn’t bad, we could finally see a renaissance in Pern fandom, sort of how the world mysteriously discovered George R. R. Martin’s work when he’s been a fantasy genre gorilla for over a decade already, but it’d likely be movie-based.