Guest post by Dan Hanks
Dan is a writer, editor, and vastly overqualified archaeologist who has lived everywhere from London to Hertfordshire to Manchester to Sydney, which explains the panic in his eyes anytime someone asks “where are you from?”. Thankfully he is now settled in the rolling green hills of the Peak District with his human family and fluffy sidekicks Indy and Maverick, where he writes books, screenplays and comics. Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire is his debut novel. You can find Dan on Twitter and Instagram, along with at his website.
Fan fiction isn’t taken seriously enough.
I understand why, because I’ve been guilty of underestimating its worth in the past. It always felt a bit like cheating. Taking someone else’s work, their characters and worlds they’ve probably bled over to create, and then simply shuffling the bits around until it pleased you. There didn’t seem to be much creativity involved.
Of course, that’s all rubbish. And in 2008 I took a path that made me finally realise how wonderful and useful it can be for writers.
It happened when I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Or, more precisely, when I left the cinema feeling a little shell shocked and decided I needed to make sense of what I’d seen – by writing an Indiana Jones adventure of my own.
I’ve since made my peace with the film, acknowledging that at least half of it is pretty solid, but I’d grown up with the first three and even studied archaeology because of them. I knew the beats inside out and backwards, and it was troubling to be presented with a fourth instalment that didn’t feel quite right in this universe.
So, like any jackass writer with ideas beyond his station, I decided “hey, I can do better” and cracked open Movie Magic Screenwriter to start writing Indiana Jones 5.
The thing is… it turned out pretty well.
Let’s be clear. In no way was the resulting script a reflection of my writing ability at the time. Rather it was because I’d discovered a magical secret. That writing a story for characters you already know, with beats you already feel deep down in your soul, in a universe you’ve already lived in for years in your head, made it far easier to tell a great story in that genre. More importantly, it allowed me to learn how to tell it well. Writing fan fiction allowed me to write something as if it had already been written. That may not make much sense, but that’s the only way I can explain it.
I didn’t really enjoy writing dialogue previously, yet with the initial draft of this project I could hear the characters talking in my head because of how I had seen them portrayed on screen. I knew the tone, the mannerisms, the words they would use. Which meant no longer stumbling through awkward conversations and second guessing whether they sounded right. The dialogue flowed easily and naturally, because I already knew how these people would be feeling and what they would say to each other in any given situation.
This allowed me to find the fun in letting my characters speak, as well as teaching me that if I ever got stuck with someone, I just needed to ‘cast’ an actor who I would love to play their role – and it frees me up to channel their acting into the story.
The structure of these films also gave me great templates to follow, which made the writing process a bit like colouring within the lines. It gave me creative freedom to make the final piece very much my own, while still hitting all the important beats and giving the audience what they expected. And let’s not forget the particular brand of light-heartedness that these films employ, always acknowledging the ridiculous nature of the story, but stopping short of poking fun at itself. A sense of fun which – once you’ve experienced it a hundred times or more (on worn out VHS tapes) – implants itself in you so fully it becomes instinct.
Being able to write as a fan within this universe allowed me to eventually create my own spin on these beloved adventures while still sticking to the rules that made them great. Which in the end gave me a fantastic lesson in learning how these types of story can be told and told well.
It was also a hell of a lot of fun. And that’s exactly what writing should be about.
My novel Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire is the end result of this entertaining process. Everything has changed since that initial script, of course. It got a whole new cast of characters. The story twisted and evolved in weird new directions. The script became a book, and everything grew in scope and detail.
Eventually it took on a whole new lease of life with a far wearier and more cynical hero than Indy, and a central conflict that is as much to do with sisterly attitudes on post-colonial archaeology as it is to do with family bickering.
But in the end you can still see those all-important beats and feel the sense of fun that lay at the heart of all these wonderfully fun adventures. And that was all down to the joy and education that writing fan fiction gave me.
Good piece, man.