Filing off the Serial Numbers

Every so often, a new, old, or would-be writer reads a story that grabs their imagination and won’t let go. Many, many of these writers attempt to exorcise the demon by writing fanfiction, some successfully, some not. Those who are successful eventually face a choice: they can continue writing fanfiction about the story (or stories) they love, they can start writing (and hopefully publishing) completely original fiction, or they can file the serial numbers off their first love and call the result “pastiche” or “heavily influenced by…” (which will also, hopefully, lead to publication).

But what, exactly, does “filing the serial numbers off” mean?

It should be fairly obvious that simply changing the names of characters and places isn’t enough, even if the hero is Reginald Trellick rather than Daisy Cloudrunner or Duke Dyewalker. What is slightly less obvious is that merely recombining events and rearranging roles isn’t enough either (unless you’re doing parody). Making the heroine the daughter of the freedom-fighter heroes of the last war, and the villain an orphan with a cute robot sidekick, isn’t filing off serial numbers; it barely counts as going over the surface with a polishing rag.

So how do you do it?

There are two basic techniques: extraction and recombination.

Extraction is removing a few of the writer’s favorite elements from the original story, renaming and/or rearranging them, and building an entirely new and unrelated story around them. This requires the writer to think carefully about exactly which specific things draw them most strongly to the original work. Which character/characters are the ones they keep wanting to write about? Which plot holes in the original story are the ones they really want to patch? What bits of worldbuilding are most annoyingly incomplete or unexplained? Starting with those things, what can the writer do with them that is really different from the original?

Depending on what the original work is, the result can even be easily recognizable if some major aspect of the story is sufficiently different. Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw takes the plot and many of the characters of Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, and converts them to dragons, in a dragon society that she designed to make certain unrealistic (to modern eyes) romantic conventions of Victorian novels a true, biological necessity (for dragons, anyway). Lois Bujold’s novella “Labyrinth” lifts several bits of situation from the legend of Theseus and the minotaur and converts them into a space-opera, but it’s not a retelling. Unless you start off knowing what to look for, it’s easy to miss the connections.

The temptation with extraction is nearly always either to extract too many elements of the original story, so that the “new” work has very little real difference from the original, or else to make the “new” part too small. Walton kept a large number of characters and plot points from the original; if she’d tried to keep the characters human and the society the same as well, she’d have probably ended up with a too-similar, unpublishable work, even if she’d rearranged some of the events. Treating the “minotaur” as a character, rather than a mindless monster, changes the outcome of the original (well, that and the fact that Miles simply would not have followed Theseus example; it’s not in his personality).

Recombination is a variation on the old saying that “if you copy from one book, it’s plagiarism; if you copy from a lot of books, it’s research.” If the writer is obsessed with one and only one source, this technique can be very difficult, because it relies on pulling dissimilar elements from several different sources. However, a “source” doesn’t have to be another work of fiction, and some writers find it interesting to dump a favorite character into a different real-life setting – another country, society, or time period – and combining them with recognizable people from history or real life. Their story-question becomes “What kind of life/adventure would Character X have in 1930s Hollywood/Heian Japan/Renaissance Venice?” Part of this is determining how Character X came to be the way he/she is, given the necessary difference in upbringing and background.

More commonly, though, recombination means something like having a Yoda-like character teaching a young Minerva McGonagall character and a young Hercule Poirot character at a medieval scholarium in a magical version of the Verona from Romeo and Juliet before the family feud got settled. In other words, taking one element – whether that’s plot, setting, or character – from each of four or five or more sources and putting them together into something new. Each of the original elements will have to change, because in this setting Yoda can’t be a two-food tall green alien … though he could be a dwarf or elf. Minerva and Hercule would need suitable family backgrounds that explain their personalities (if the writer wants the Minerva character to remain Scottish, there’ll need to be an explanation of why she’s being educated in Verona – possibly her family is part of a diplomatic mission, or assigned there by a Scottish merchant house). The writer needs to decide how the feud among Verona’s great houses has affected the school, and whether the ultimate threat is going to be an attack by Smaug, the murder of the Duke of Verona, or invaders from Florence. And of course all of the names need to be changed.

The things to be wary of with recombination are pulling too much from any one source, and/or pulling elements from sources that are too similar. There are any number of stories of orphaned (or presumed-to-be-orphan) children with great power who go bad (Tom Riddle/Voldemort, Darth Vader) or more commonly become great heroes (Frodo, Peter Parker, Taran, Harry Potter, the Baudelaire children, Luke Skywalker, King Arthur). There are at least as many wise mentors who die or mysteriously vanish ( Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-wan Kenobi, Yoda, Dumbledore, Merlin, Gandalf). Combining any of the wise mentors with any of the characters one of them mentors nearly always results in something that is too similar to the source material.

Whichever method one chooses, one has to remember to bring something different to the story. Schools for magicians, Jedi, knights, thieves, and assassins all end up looking pretty similar; one corrupt government taken over secretly by the bad guy is a lot like any other corrupt government taken over by a bad guy (see Voldemort, Palpatine…). What’s different about this school, this corrupt government, this orphaned hero, this bad guy?