chickening out of remixes

[dbskyler]

There are two remix challenges going on that I know about, who_remix and remixredux09 and I've decided that I'm not signing up for either of them.

Why not? Well, despite the fact that I have now participated in a grand total of two (yes, I know, unbelievable, that's not one but TWO) whole ficathons so far, I am still not that confident in my ability to write to deadline. After all, even when I'm writing to my own prompt it gets excruciatingly slow sometimes (as anyone who's been wondering whether "Turn Again" will ever get a new chapter can attest*).

Also, I have yet to sign up for a ficathon, or a fic challenge, or whatever a remix is categorized as, that involved someone assigning something to me. Both ficathons I participated in allowed me to look over the prompts and claim the one I wanted, which is far less stress-inducing. I get that an assigned prompt is the "challenge" part of a fic challenge, but I feel challenged enough already, okay? ; )

Finally, I think a remix in particular would be difficult for me to do. I find the idea interesting in general, but instead of being constrained to the same characters and plot, I'd rather be allowed to take the premise of a fic and completely re-do it to whatever extent I wish (along the lines of an AU, if that makes any sense). Also, I took a look at my own stories and tried to imagine how they might get remixed, and I think most of them would cause a lot of problems. It's possible that as the author I just can't imagine them being written in any other way, but some of them just seem structurally un-remixable to me, like "Subtext". And as for "Fallacy Somewhere," good luck with that one . . . can't change the POV because it bounces all over the place already anyway, and as for changing the tone, a G&S tragedy just isn't going to work.**


*Yes, it will . . . eventually. I just wish I could tell you when.
**No, "Yeomen of the Guard" is not a G&S tragedy. Nice try, though.

Comments

[dbskyler.livejournal.com]

I guess I wonder if I should challenge myself more as a writer, but you're right, ultimately it has to be fun, and there's nothing wrong with not being attracted to remixes. As for deadlines, they might do me good but I still get stressed by the idea of them, which makes the writing not so fun anymore -- I have enough deadlines at work, I don't need any at home. Also, and this might be really unusual, but I don't like the word count minimums. Some of my favorite stories are under 1,000 words -- hell, I recently recced two stories on Calufrax with words counts of under 500 -- and I really don't get the point of requiring a story to be a certain length (unless it's a drabble, where word count is part of the definition).

Anyway, no remixes, but I have done well with ficathons and hope to get inspired by another one at some point -- preferably another choose-your-prompt, low (or no) word minimum one with a generous (or no) deadline. : )

[curuchamion.livejournal.com]

Word minima are the reason I don't do more ficathons - I absolutely can't tell before I start a story how long it's going to come out, and the likelihood is it'll be short. 600 or 700 words can be a full-fledged story for me, and the last time I tired to write to a word minimum (for help_haiti - I said "300 to 500 words") I didn't quite make it. I got to about 270-something and ran out of scene padding.

(Yeomen of the Guard is only a G&S tragedy in the sense that it doesn't work. lol)

Incidentally, if you wanted to try out remixing at some point... have you seen Dwth's new "remix_gone_wild" comm? They've got a lot more leeway in the remixiness than Redux - you can AU-ify pretty heavily, change pairings, plot causality, even fandoms (though usually not all at once! *g*) And you get to pick your story, from a list of authors who've volunteered to be remixed, or bring one in from somewhere else with the author's permission. I've signed up to possibly give it a shot.

(just a bit of FYI...)

[dbskyler.livejournal.com]

I think a good story has a natural length, and you should never pad it out just to hit some arbitrary word minimum. (Unless you're writing for television, in which case you have to pad it out to fill the timeslot. But that's what running down corridors is for.)

It's funny, but after I did Yuletide in 2009 I started to feel better about the 1,000 word minimum you frequently get in ficathons. I think that some ideas support 1,000+ word stories, and some don't, so it's more about choosing the idea before starting the fic than about padding out a 600-word fic to be 1000 words. Or it should be, anyway. But I also still strongly believe that the quality of a story is not related to its word length, and personally I'd far rather receive a great 250-word story than a mediocre 750-word one.

(Yeomen of the Guard is only a G&S tragedy in the sense that it doesn't work. lol)

Ha, you don't like "Yeomen of the Guard" either??? Most G&S fans seem to love it, but not me.

No, I didn't know about remix_gone_wild. I just peeked at it, and it looks like an interesting comm. Still don't know if I'd ever do a remix, though. If the remix wasn't as good as the original, I'd think, "why did I bother?" And if I liked the remix better than the original, I'd worry about how the original author felt about that. (Not to say they would agree with me that my version was better, though!)

[curuchamion.livejournal.com]

'And if I liked the remix better than the original, I'd worry about how the original author felt about that.'

...well, I must admit, the one remix I've done so far (for an "exhibition remix challenge" - it's complicated) was based on a story I knew the original author was dissatisfied with. That's not the only reason I chose it for the challenge, but I'll admit I was pretty darn chuffed when her reaction was "thank you, you made it so much better"! *g*

I don't know if I'd say one story would necessarily have to be better than the other, though. The thing I love about remixes is... how to say this? A good remix is a reinterpretation of the same story, sometimes even the same dialogue, through a completely different set of eyes. The focus, tone, theme, will all be different even though exactly the same thing is happening. In my case, people thought my version was "better" because the story (Napoleon musing on how Illya has changed him) needed a terse first-person Napoleon voice that the original author just couldn't achieve, any more than I can write good atmospheric stream-of-consciousness like Calapine.

Anyway, that's why I like them. YMMV. ;-)