Cascade Library Interview with Laura Picken

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Cascade Library Interview with Laura Picken
Interviewer:	Cascade Library
Interviewee:	Laura Picken
Date(s):	February 28, 2000
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	The Sentinel
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In 2000, Laura Picken was interviewed for Cascade Library.

Some Excerpts

[I became a fan of The Sentinel] through the fan fiction. The first episode I ever saw was the last half of Flight (1st ep 2nd season). Was too weird for me (then again, I didn't know the back story). Then I was surfing the net for fan fiction several years ago and stumbled across Guide Posts (back in its really early days when Daenea used to run it). I was hooked from then on in.

[I became a a Sentinel fan after] I read a crossover by Sarah on the slash archive. Highlander/Sentinel. She did a great job of describing the loft, and that's actually why I asked someone to lend me tapes -- I wanted to see what it looked like. I guess that makes me a loft-babe.

Oddly enough, [the story I'm most proud of is] not a Sentinel fic. There's a Touched by an Angel/X-Files/Piercing the Darkness crossover on my website called Divine Intervention. It's about 120 pages long and took me three years to write. It was the first piece of fan fiction I ever started, and I'm proud as heck that I actually went back and finished the darn thing. :-)

I think that the unique and inherent challenges of crossovers are the main reason that I enjoy writing them. The two challenges I find with crossovers are: 1) You have to find a believeable connection between the two shows. Making Mulder be Blair's second cousin doesn't really work for me. If your connection can make sense in the universe of *both* shows, it does half the work for you. 2) The interaction of the characters. Although the overall tone of your story will (inevitably) lean towards one universe or the other (mostly depending on the setting of the story), it's crucial in a crossover to keep the characters from all shows in character. That was a big one for me with Sentinel, Watcher, Warrior, Guide -- Jim, Simon and Blair are above all else, survivors. So SWWG had to balance the dark tone of La Femme Nikita with that ray of hope that always shines through TS. That was tough for me... When you do a crossover, know every show in the crossover well. If you don't, fans of one or both of the shows will (politely) eat you for breakfast. Every time I've done a TS crossover with a show I wasn't that familiar with I've gotten criticism from a fan of the crossed-over show...and they were always right.

Sharon has been a character that I get a lot of flack for. Let me state this clearly, once and for all: Sharon is NOT a Mary Sue character. Her relationship with Blair made sense to me not because I wanted to put myself in a romantic relationship with Blair (I don't), but because Blair, as Jim once put it, would "jump a table leg". Sharon is a character I'm developing for an original novel I'm writing. I use her in fan fiction for practice. I put her in different situations and see how she'd react. That way, when I write her into the novel, I know her better.

Folks, fanfic writers aren't doing it for the money (there isn't any). They're doing it for one of two reasons: 1) The muse is driving them crazy and the voices in their head won't stop until the writer writes down what they're trying to say, or 2) FEEDBACK!!!!!! It truly is the only way a fanfic writer can know if anyone's reading their stories and if their stories are any good or not. So after you read a story, please, please send the writer a little not saying what you liked about the story AND what you didn't. Include ideas for them to use for future stories if you want. Who knows, you might get a story back in return.

I think fan fiction is a great training ground for writers, because you have a strong measure to compare yourself against: the show itself. Dawson's Creek fan fiction, for example, is almost universally ridiculed because, with only a couple of exceptions, the vast majority of writers don't even come close to the intelligent writing that the show succeeds with every week. TS fan fiction, however, tends to get stuck in a closet when they talk about fan fiction. Why? Because in many cases, the writing in fan fiction is better than the writing for the show ever was.

I think it will become harder and harder to write fan fiction for active shows. Our society is fast becoming lawyer-driven, and I think some well-meaning schmuck is going to send their fan fiction in to a show, the show will make an episode close to the story that person wrote, and that person will sue the network. At that point, any fan fiction site with stuff for an active show on it will be shut down due to copyright violations, regardless of the author's original intentions. The internet is becoming way too popular for fan fiction to hide in the closet for much longer.