Del Floria's Interview with Linda White
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Del Floria's Interview with Linda White |
| Interviewer: | Del Floria (Live Journal) |
| Interviewee: | Linda White |
| Date(s): | July 31, 2011 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Man from U.N.C.L.E. |
| External Links: | full interview is here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Del Floria's Interview with Linda White is an interview with a Man from U.N.C.L.E. fan.
It is part of a series at Del Floria's. See Del Floria's Interview Series.
Excerpts
Why MFU? What is it about the show that fueled your creativity? I was captivated by the affection I saw on the screen. Two guys could be best friends and more (I was a budding adolescent), and women had nothing to fear from them, because after all, they were only interested in each other. I know now that my reaction to same-sex matches was shaped by being molested as a five-year-old. But I had blocked that memory completely, and as a teen, I had no idea why I loved seeing those guys together, and why all those innocent females made me uncomfortable. Seeing one of them slink off with Napoleon made me very uneasy. Add to that the fact that I was a lesbian and didn’t know it, I just loved seeing two guys facing the world together.
What do you consider your weakest piece of work and why do you consider it so?As an adult? In fan fiction? Or overall? I won’t count anything written before the age of thirty. :-) I wrote all through college but studying made completion of novels impossible until after college.
I would consider my weakest work to be my first novel written as an adult. I wrote it in 1982. I look at it now and just cringe. I had been publishing some ST stories in print zines in the late seventies and early eighties, so it wasn’t necessarily my wordsmithing. The book was terrible because I wrote it trying to please some unknown editor somewhere. Instead of writing it to please me and my sensibilities (like I wrote my ST stuff and how I write my MFU fiction), I was constantly playing a guessing game. Will an editor like this? Does this sound like something they would buy? All that crap. :-) That spells disaster for a writer.
And I confess that it’s still a struggle. I rewrote the last third of my North Rim Delight novel because it didn’t stand up to what my own internal editor would want.
How would you respond to a critic who says, “Oh, you write fan fiction. You’re not a real writer.”That used to bother me. But when I met St. Crispins in 1995, she set me straight. Her explanation is awesome. Her analogy about people who play sports or a musical instrument and are allowed to be athletes and musicians without signing with a pro team or a record label really puts it all in perspective.
Having said that, I recognize a difference in what I experience when writing fan fiction versus “original” fiction. I can get away with less body description in fan fiction because we all know what the guys look like. They are very real to me (and to you all), so all we have to say is Solo or Kuryakin, and those images are right there for us. Not so much in the other fiction I write. I have to do a lot of keeping track. How long was her hair? Which hairdo did I say? Etc. That’s why some writers use pictures out of magazines for their characters. Easy reference.
You're a slash writer whose always been gen friendly. Has your own view of the Solo/Kuryakin relationship changed over the years?People used to say I write “slashless slash.” In a twenty-five page story, maybe two pages will be sizzle. But there is always emotion. I love stories with feeling. Gen writers who fill their stories with feelings and let me see the guys deal with those feelings are a joy to read.
My view of NS and IK’s relationship has changed over the years, but that has more to do with how old I happened to be at the time. I find it interesting that today my NS is often the more vulnerable half of the partnership in certain areas. When I was a teen, IK was the vulnerable one, always, and NS was the “big brother” and the pillar of strength.
Your stories have an overall arc and you've built a consistent MFU Universe with a closed ending. Have you ever gotten the urge to break out of it? My Third Level stories do exist in their own universe, but I have written outside of it on more than one occasion. That was the fun of doing the “Dimensional Shift” novella, and other alternate universe stories. And of course, for gen zines, I have written gen stories. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always written NS and IK as gay, but in some stories, I place them in a time frame before they became aware of their affection for each other. It makes for fun double entendres. I just cut out the sexual parts. :-)