The dreaded (?) songfic

[railenthe]

 

I come from the ‘look it up’ school of fic-writing. That is, before I ever set text to word-processing gear, I researched the proper elements of fic writing and the like. Of course, most writing is the same—apply the rules of style, et cetera, to whatever it is, and you should be in good shape. So with that background in mind I started researching fic-writing technique. Now, this led me to several sites, and they all had similar advice. Like how to put an end to ‘that evil bitch Mary Sue once and for all’ (swear to god, those are not my words), and how to weave plot twists into the piece without it seeming overdone or cliché (even if it has been done before, there’s always another way to do it).

The most common piece of advice by far was on songfic. The most common piece of advice on songfic was simply “Don’t do it.” There never really was any much explanation on it, simply ‘DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.’ Thin explanations in other sites just said that most of ‘em were all-caps BAD.

I didn’t think that was quite adequate, but still I have yet to write any songfic. It isn’t because of any advice or anything, it’s because I’ve got yet to have that muse string me up by the shoelaces.

However, my reading was slanted by that information so I usually avoided them. This changed, however, when I was reading  kayrademashi’sjournal and spotted lyrics from ‘Sola Sistim’ by Underworld.

Yes, that very same song that I’m usually listening to when I write.

When I see those lyrics I have to find out where they’re connected to, so I started reading, and was quite shocked (read: *went splam*) when I’d gotten through with it.

It came back to me today when I was listening to my computer music and it shuffled to this song. This idea, that is. The way that it was written (and KUDOS again to you, Kay-chan) was just like WHOA, and out of nowhere, I had the thought: “Music video.”

Sounds random, I know, but when I stopped to actually think about it, a good songfic feels a bit like a good music video…or am I just nuts? Anyway, the flow was perfect, the song itself was—well, I’m sure everyone’s heard me rant on and on about this song already. No matter how I look at it now, songfic now seems equivalent to music video, when it’s done right anyway.

And that was sooooooo done right. *nods frantically and ruffles chibi!Xemnas’s hair*