The Doctor Who Fanfic Review Interview: Nehszriah
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Doctor Who Fanfic Review Interview: Nehszriah |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | Nehszriah |
| Date(s): | May 24, 2015 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Doctor Who |
| External Links: | Nehszriah Part One, Archived version Nehszriah Part Two, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Doctor Who Fanfic Review Interview: Nehszriah was posted at The Doctor Who Fanfic Review on May 24, 2015.
See: The Doctor Who Fanfic Review Interview Series.
Some Excerpts
TDWFR: To our great shame, we used to scroll past fics that were marked AU, until we came across In Want Of An Heir. We can only assume that you employed some kind of voodoo magic because we found ourselves completely drawn into the world of Johan and Clara. It’s pretty much been our gateway drug into the wonderful world of alternate universe fics. What are some things you love about writing AU?
Nehszriah: Voodoo, hoodoo, things I ought not to try… can’t rule anything out really. I’m just happy to be considered a gateway drug to AUs, because they really can be just as fun as canon-compliant fics.
AUs, for me anyways, are both one of the easiest things in the world for me to write as well as the most difficult. It’s that double-edged sword of the ease and challenge that really get me and keep me working on them. On one hand, I already have a whole slew of characters with set traits and backstories and all this other stuff so all I have to provide is the setting. The other hand? Well, it’s about staying in-character and making the world the characters now inhabit a believable one. As much historical knowledge as I had before writing The Time That We Love Best, I still had to spend HOURS on Wikipedia weekly looking for source articles and combing web searches and browsing through personal books I have on World War II. Shoot, the only reason I even remembered the Blitz happened in the Clydeside area before writing was because my great-grandparents and my baby-sized grandpa lived through it. I’m still doing research for TTTWLB to this day, despite having worked on it for over eight months at this point. It’s not just that story either, but just about everything I write. There are almost always new notes in my worldbuilding document for In Want of An Heir/Stars in A Sky of Blood and Blue, with everything from character bios to a seventy-year timeline (my notes are just over 14k while published material for the story is ~29k, for perspective). The Thick of UNIT, a Thick of It/Doctor Who crossover AU series I’m beginning work on, is still mainly in the notes process, and I have a couple more series that I’m developing at the same time that are also just barely out of the planning stages. An AU can be as simple as the addition/loss of a character to a complete overhaul of characters or setting, meaning it’s a varied process. So while it’s fun putting old characters into new settings, it’s also extremely time-consuming and exhausting, and I love every second of it.
TDWFR: You have been writing fanfiction for quite a long time for a variety of fandoms. What do you like about writing for Doctor Who specifically?
Nehszriah: Doctor Who is the largest fandom I’ve ever written for, bar none, and it’s essentially the one where you can find anyone and anything you could want. Of course this means there’s quite a bit I raise my eyebrow at and go “really…?” but for the most part the fic-readers are simply enthusiastic and thirsty for their fix. Whouffaldi in particular is pretty rabid in the fanbase, which is both its greatest strength and biggest downfall, but there are plenty of other subsets that are just wonderful. We have multishippers across the entire show and so many different versions of the same man and so many companions with varied relationships that there’s always something out there.
The complexity in the show’s current writing is also a draw for me, since the past four seasons/series have had some stellar work put into it. Since I first got into the show back with Eleven’s initial appearance, the writing’s been good-to-super-compelling, the actors are all charismatic, and the characters they play are stellar. Since then I’ve even gone into Classic Who, which is a mixed bag of camp, allegory, Rule of Cool, and the charm you can only get with a shoestring budget. At the end of the day, it’s all the same dorky alien time-space travel show that millions of others fell for before and after me, and it will be going on for a very, very long time. There is no such thing as an endgame, the only way someone “loses” when a ship happens or doesn’t happen is when it’s unhealthy, the show is ever-fluid, always changing, and so eclectic that there’s always going to be something to look forward to seeing. You can do virtually anything with the over fifty years’ worth of characters in fic, which is great, and since it’s not going to end any time soon, we’ve got plenty of material ahead of us. It’s one of those shows I’d love to write for, personally and professionally-speaking, just because of how interesting and fun it is.
TDWFR: We think it’s important for new writers to have the freedom to experiment and work out what their passions are and what they’re good at. Sometimes it takes a while, and some writers go on to develop a distinctive style and favourite genre. As a person who started writing fanfiction in high school, how have you developed as a writer over the years and what have you learned about writing?
Nehszriah: Oh man, I learned a ton about writing. Aside from little comics I did in elementary school the first time I shared a fic with anyone other than my friends and family was in 2004 just towards the end of ninth grade. At the time I had a Digimon fic up on ff.net and I really wish I hadn’t deleted it in retrospect because it had the review that changed my writing style forever. They were polite and explained that I should write so that anyone can have any level of fandom exposure and be able to understand, but to not treat readers like they can’t figure things out for themselves either. Since then I wrote more and more, eventually deciding that I wanted to write for a living. While I took creative writing classes (both high school and community college), I also concentrated heavily on fic and the feedback I got on that. A lot of my style is pure instinct from having read a lot as a child, but it’s also the characterization and story-building skills I learned while studying film. In high school I learned how to be confident, but college and university taught me to be good and always strive to be better. An alarmingly large section of my screenwriting class was about building characters and essentially doing meta on our OCs, but it played to my natural tendency to overthink things and enhanced it. Even when running on Rule of Cool, you need to make sure that as an excuse is a legitimate excuse and not a cop-out answer.