turning fic into of/aus

[abhorsen.]

so @something wicked and i were talking today about how glad we are that we write next-gen in terms of our continued discomfort with jkr, and then we were talking about possibly making some of our fics original fiction or at least more changed from the main series.

where are others on that? how easy would it be to switch your fics over even if you wanted to?

[abhorsen.]

some things i've already done with my major wip:

• changed the dormitory system to be more like college suites + not gender-based
• added a lot of other classes and got rid of some canon chapters
• more magical creatures

some things i'm thinking about adding in (will not do all of these, just me brainstorming):

• making the magical population much bigger + calling non-magical people just non-magical rather than muggles
• axing the hogwarts express as A Thing and just having people take different methods of transportation to get to school
• giving everybody their own room and removing the issues with people being in other houses' areas
• making them all take normal classes as well as magic ones
• introducing other magic systems rather than just relying on wands
  • old kingdom bells/charter magic? clayr's library?
  • bending from atla/lok?
  • graces from graceling?
  • chrestomanci magic/worlds??
  • ambient magic from emelan??
• add some sci-fi elements that everyone (inc. non-magical) has access to (e.g., from heir apparent)
• idfk?

[down-in-flames]

i am in the rather convenient place where like 90% of my fics are au's anyways and most are so far removed from the magical world that tbh i could probably find+replace names and they would be original fiction just like that.

the deer puns might make less sense tho. 

[sunshine_locks]

ayyy i actually agree with taylor. most of my stories could genuinely be original fiction as they're usually some type of au; at this point i think i'm just attached to names, and the personalities i gave those names. as you'll notice (well if you read my stories i guess, lol), there aren't a lot of characters that i write that are affected by their parentage, so that wouldn't be a problem either. if anything, one of my stories could actually work better off as original fiction, as trying to stick to writing hp fic is adding a lot of constraints to what i can and can't write (for one thing, setting, where the cultural norms and colloquialisms of a country matter A Lot so it bothers me that i can't get it right), and is bringing down the quality of my work as a whole. (god, i never thought the day i say i OF might be better fanfic would come. also maybe i should get to editing my stories.)

[dreamshadow]

i'm also in the same boat, especially since i typically write for the 100. the one thing i've found is having original characters in a modern au makes it more accessible to people who might not be as familiar with the source material. i mostly take away names and relationships, which are primarily the main characters of the show. these fics could very easily be switched to original fiction if i wanted to, but i really love writing emma and how she relates to murphy (and bellamy, if i'm being honest ) because he's such a dynamic/complex character. (this is the most polite way i can think of saying what i really want to say )

my hp fics on the other hand, are more grounded to the canon-verse of hogwarts, but i really like the idea of changing up the worldbuilding & things like that. i really love the idea of making the dorms more college/suite like and giving everyone their own room. it honestly just makes more sense?? like, if it's a magical school, why wouldn't they be able to have their own space??? and some of these ideas seem really fun in general  

but yeah. overall i think i'd be able to make the switch if i wanted to, but i haven't really had too much of a desire for writing hp fic outside of aus which is why seeking normal is still sitting without an updated chapter these last few months

[Guest pookha]

I have just started writing more OF in general over the last year or so. Now that GULP is done, and a couple of challenges are knocked out, maybe it'll be time to write that novel I've been thinking about for a while.

 

I'm not going to go back and change what I have written in the HP verse because it shows my growth as an author and a person. It shows my interpretation of those characters. So much of what I had written was so universe specific that I just cannot picture it changing over or being scrubbed.

 

I think that your changes make a lot of sense, @abhorsen., especially the regular classes and the dorm changes. 

On 9/15/2020 at 4:58 PM, sunshine_locks said:

god, i never thought the day i say i OF might be better fanfic would come. also maybe i should get to editing my stories.)

This growth is exactly what I was talking about. Even if you don't decide to write OF or HP verse again, or do either, you still have that experience behind you, and while JKR may own the characters and setting, you own that experience, your love for the characters and setting and you shouldn't let what is happening now taint your past self. 

That may have gotten off topic, but I hope it wasn't too rambly.

[Oregonian]

I have tried to switch a few of my fics over to OF, mostly for my creative writing classes, and in their OF guises these stories did receive good evaluations from my classmates and professor.  It was doable because I used stories that were about OCs and even set in other periods of history, so there wasn't a lot of HP cast and scenery to be hauled off stage and replaced with new actors and sets.  

Of course, anything having to do with the functioning of magic had to be rewritten in a non-magical way, and since magic is an important (even if not prominent) element of a story predicated on the existence of magic, writing the magic out of the story can leave holes that are patched over in a not-completely-satisfying way (it was better when they were magic).  One exception to that previous sentence:  when I wrote the magic (but not the ghosts) out of Forgive Us Our Trespasses, I had to change Hogwarts castle into a semi-ruined ordinary castle inhabited by ordinary people who were role-playing their conception of the ancient Druid religion (the way some people actually do).  The change worked well; I didn't mourn the loss of the magical version, though my professor, who looked down on anything out of the ordinary, didn't like the ghosts.

I rewrote Beloved Son for that same class and had to remove the bit where Edward recognizes that Eileen's stick is a wand, so the implication of the stick was lost *sigh*, and the whole rich backstory of who Eileen's recently deceased son was, during his life, was lost and replaced by some much-less-rich sentences about what his (non-magical) life had been, so a lot of the impact of the story was lost, IMO, but my classmates liked it.  The professor did not like the title, Beloved Son, because without knowing that the son was Severus Snape, you don't see the contrast between his mother's perception of him and everyone else's perception of him.

The screenplay Relics began as a 700-word HP drabble which had virtually no magic in it, so it was easy to expand into an 8,000-word story for my Fiction class and later into the 2-hour screenplay for my Screenwriting class.  (But nobody ever detected that the 700-year-old relic they found after searching through the attic was Haraldr's wand, even though I described it.  Secret is out now!)

My daughter and a friend from my church feel strongly that I should redo the small bits of magic in Tiramisu and publish it as YA fiction.  But again, as in Beloved Son, those places in the story are important, generating some good writing, and it would be hard to make non-magical patches that are as satisfying.  I suppose it could be done.  It's rather ambiguous in the final couple of chapters, almost like a real-life story that has been passed down over the centuries, picking up a mystical aura through countless retellings.