Mark Arbour

September 10, 2001 “What?” JJ demanded rudely as he answered his phone. “I want to know what your plans for today are,” I replied in a firm way. “I just got in last night, so I thought I’d sleep in. It’s not working, for some reason,” he said, being a smartass. “If you’d called me when you got in last night, we could have worked this out, and I wouldn’t be bothering you now,” I said in a patronizing way. “So what are you doing today?” “I figured

What is telebision? TV thrives on stereotypes. Ask any Black, Asian, or Hispanic guy. I'm not sure if America is ready for a straight-acting gay guy who' successful. Maybe.

Alright, I'll risk going off topic for this one. What do you do? I find that for my major characters, they tend to be an amalgamation. For my second tier characters (or minor characters), they often derive from someone I've encountered in life. I was on a cruise, and the bartender was this amazingly handsome, masculine dude, with a distinct bump in his nose, that reminded me of that trait I've seen so often on Dutchmen. He became my vision for John Travers, in the Bridgemont Series.

I was driving home tonight, thinking about this discussion, and I had a bit of an epiphany. It occurs to me that we all write fanfic to a degree. Even a story set today, in our environment, is saddled with a pre-made world. Now, they won't necessarily have pre-made characters, but as you pointed out, you don't necessarily have that in fan fic either. When I write historical fiction, that's an even closer analogy, because the world has already happened, and events have been defined. I have to work within that world, and I have key characters that will ultimately come into play, and that I'll have to weave into a story. The bottom line (in my epiphany) is that it really doesn't matter what it is, good writing is good writing.

Thank you. That is why I clearly (so it seemed) tried to delineate the different types of fanfic. What I was talking about, and emphasized that I was talking about, was the kind of fanfic that takes the characters and the settings that already exist and just maneuvers them around. Maybe people who write that stuff are not only less creative, they're more sensitive.

LOL. Raging teen; raging teen hormones. He usually has a reason for the rages, though.

You mention that Will seems upset that fights expand beyond him and his antagonist, and I think that's an interesting contrast between Will and Brad. Will is very much an individualist, and he would probably prefer to deal with Brad (or whoever he's pissed off at any given point in time) on a one-to-one basis. Brad is much more likely to seek allies to back him up, which stems from his need to control and influence. That probably frustrates the crap out of Will. In a simplified example, Will and Brad walk out of the bar, ready to fight, and Will expects to slug it out, just the two of them, while Brad's got an army waiting to back him up.

Actually, what you generated really is nothing more than a hollow outline, but I get your point. Here's where I see it differently. To make either one of those stories viable, an author would have to do what you said, and write them, and yes, that would take some creativity. But if you're dealing with fanfic, and again, at it's more pedestrian forms, much of that flushing out has already been done for you. The characters have already been developed: their desires, their flaws, their strengths, their weaknesses...all of that is already done. The setting has already been laid out: the mystical land has trees or is arid, there are castles and ships, or warthogs and muffins. Maybe there are wizards who can zap your dick off, and urchins that wallow on the ground and gnaw at your toes. Whatever. It's done. The only thing you really have control over is the plot, and even that is going to have limitations. I think that writing fanfic may actually be harder because of those limitations, because if you're going to do a good job and not get lynched by fans, you have to make sure you work within the parameters of the world that exists, and with the characters that live there. I just don't think it's as creative.

Right.

Well yeah. I don't want to write about a character who is miserable and loses all the time. I think it's pretty apparent that victors write the history. To me, the fun part about it is trying to sift the propaganda apart from what really happened. Thinking back to the Battle of St. Vincent, if I were to be objective, I'd probably give Jervis a "C" grade for the way he handled things. He was too tied to existing doctrine, and too slow to react to changes in the weather, and almost let the Spanish slip by him. I think that if he'd have let his ships have their freedom to go at the Spaniards, he would have doubled the prizes he'd taken. Yet history records it as a big victory, and he received an earldom for his efforts. Then again, Jervis did not have the confidence in his captains that Nelson had (IMHO), and the results that Nelson was able to achieve at the Nile (and later, at Trafalgar) show what a truly brilliant leader and strategist could achieve.

Probably not. More like 36. Maybe 37, depending on how I sequence it.

I thought I was clear, but I'll try to simplify things for you. 1. I think that fan fic takes many forms, and they range in difficulty and creativity levels. 2. Those fan fic stories that take existing characters and merely put them through different scenarios are not, in my opinion, very creative. There is no factual evidence to prove that this is true or not, because it is an opinion. If you take a world that is already created, and you utilize the same characters that have already been developed, I find it hard to visualize how subsequently creative you can be with plotlines, since the environment and the characters will drive so much of that. Maybe that's because I haven't read much of it, or I haven't considered all the things that Thorne pointed out to me. Food for thought. Just because I don't think fan fic as referred to in (2) above isn't very creative doesn't mean it's not useful. It can probably be a fertile training ground for a writer who wants to focus on plot development without having to create worlds or characters.

Hmm. I don't see the creativity here. Taking something that's already there and molding it about is, in my mind, more like glorified editing. But that doesn't mean it isn't good, and that people don't like it. It just means that I don't think it's creative. I think you expressed my feelings better than I did.

I've been thinking about this a little more. Seems to me there are different degrees of FanFic. I guess my knee-jerk reaction against it (and that's just my personal opinion) tends to think of stories where people take existing characters and simply have them do different things. That smacks of a lack of creativity, IMHO, because you're not really developing characters, you're just using characters someone else already created. On the other hand, if you're taking a world and populating it with your own characters, that's a bit different. Don't all fiction writers do that?

Noah isn't a Hispanic Jew, but I thought that guy's facial features worked pretty well for what I had in mind for him. I was playing him in my mind as a young Andy Samberg. Daley is a really good Cam.

A really excellent post.

Despite the reaction you've gotten from some others on this, I thought you explained yourself quite well. Then again, that may be because I agree with you.

I've probably said this, but I think that Brad really feels that Will is on a path to self-destruction. He's probably thinking of Billy and Mouse, for starters. The horror of what happened to those two is probably easily conjured up in Stef's mind as well. JP is more logical, and he's a better appraiser of Will's personality and his behavior.

Actually, this guy is a better match for Noah, IMHO

You crack me up. I'm making sure Tony survives the attacks just to annoy you. ;-) I'll send him off to Iraq later on (not really). I think Noah's deal is so easy to understand: he's totally whipped.

Thanks for the review, and for sharing your experiences. As I've written this, I've tried to incorporate things like that (phones being almost useless) where I have the info.

I don't think Marie's endgame is all that unreasonable. She probably figured that if she made Will's life miserable enough, he'd count his time at Menlo as a weird sabbatical and go back to H-W. If you think about it, when she started these machinations, Will was doing well with Brad and Robbie, and both Darius and JJ were moving back to LA, or thinking about it. So it's not unreasonable on her part to think that Will would say 'fuck it' and follow the rest of them home. RE: 9-11: You're wrong.

You touch on something that is underplayed here (and I neglected to incorporate into the upcoming chapters), and that is that there were many non-US people in the buildings. It wasn't an American tragedy, it was a world tragedy.

Yes.

I wonder if people ever really dance on eggshells. Hmmm.