niceolelevy

I’ve done a lot of posts about TV writing. But this is a post about the before… the writing I did when I was still learning how to write TV and hoping someone would pay me to do it someday.

Before I even knew it had a name I was writing fanfic. I filled notebooks with stories about my favorite characters from soap operas and prime-time shows, weaving the stories I wanted to see that had never been told by the writers who made me fall in love with said shows.

Once I learned what fanfic was officially called (from an article about the “Star Trek” fandom) well, then I knew that I was writing it. And thanks to the Internet, I had a way to post it and see if other people liked it. To my great surprise, some folks did, and so I kept writing it. And writing it. And writing it.

Oh, did I ever keep writing it.

I wrote a lot of other things, of course – because when you want to be a TV writer, you have very specific things you must be writing, like TV specs and pilots. Lots of TV specs and pilots. But whenever I got stuck or frustrated or just couldn’t make myself stare at a script page for another second, there was always fanfic to go back to.

My first big fandom was “The Pretender.” I was all about some Jarod and Miss Parker and if Steve and Craig were going to hold out on me FOREVER (I love you guys, but for real!), then I was going to write a hundred different scenarios wherein my favorite genius and my favorite badass ended up together.

Next, there was “General Hospital.” In truth, GH was technically first because I hand wrote a ton of stories in those notebooks about GH (Brenda Barrett epics, y’all) that have long since met their end during one of my mom’s spring cleaning frenzies. But in my official days as a fanfic writer, GH took up a lot of my time. A LOT of my time. I wrote mostly Sonny and Alexis fics, but also Cassadine family stories and more Brenda stories (Brenda and Jason, you guys… BRASON FOREVER!) – and then there was my other favorite Alexis pairing – Alexis and Jax. There are all kinds of other random little stories and one shots of things that caught my attention, but 90% of it is easily Sonny and Alexis.

And then there came my deep dive into the “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice” fandom. I consider them one and the same because I got into both shows for the same reason – one Addison Montgomery, legendary kickass surgeon in Jimmy Choos. I wrote Addison winning Derek Shepherd back. I wrote her making it work with Mark Sloan. I wrote her falling for Alex Karev. I wrote her with Pete and with Sam and with Wyatt and Noah. I even wrote her with Burke and the bomb guy (yes, The Kyle Chandler bomb guy.) Because Addison was this amazing woman who just wanted to be forgiven for not being perfect. And really… isn’t that what we all want?

There are for sure some other random stories from other fandoms, but these were the ones that sucked up the majority of my time.

When I became a working TV writer, I pulled all my fanfic down where I was able to because I was worried people would think it was weird or cheesy. Would think I was too much of a fangirl to be taken seriously. And then one day I mentioned it casually to another writer who admitted she had written some fic, too — and she was impressed with the sheer volume of stories I had written. And then I started talking about it more, and finally what the reaction I really got from people was “That’s so cool! I bet you learned a lot doing that” I stopped acting like it was a secret shame — and the truth is, I really did learn a lot from writing all those stories.

— I learned how to write for my whole audience. There are characters in my fics that are characters I absolutely hated on the show, but I couldn’t write them like I hated them. I had to write them for the people who watch the shows. Not to say that there aren’t a few fics in my collection where I didn’t take a swipe or two, but I quickly learned that meant I was alienating some readers. So to the best of my ability, I tried to write those characters fairly. And it was a great lesson. Because any writer who writes TV who tells you they love every character they’ve ever written equally is lying to you. Sometimes there are just a few who don’t resonate for you the same way as others. But you have to write them for the audience that loves your show. That’s your job. So practicing that in fanfic came in very handy.

— I learned that I have a type when it comes to the female characters that often pull my attention the most on a show – tough as nails, often deeply misunderstood, with demons that lead them to make painful mistakes, but who will sacrifice themselves in a heartbeat for someone they love. This is pretty evident in my pilots. They are script worlds built around women that definitely fit the description above.

— I learned a lot about problem solving. I wrote one of my most popular fanfics on a regular schedule… posted a chapter every Friday or Saturday night over a couple of months. In this particular fandom, friends would message me asking when I was going to be ready to post… so the pressure was pretty intense. And if I was stuck on a story point or a line of dialogue, well… the clock was ticking. So I learned a bit about something being “good enough” to meet a deadline. How not to be too precious with every last word and just get the damn thing done. Because that’s a lot of what TV writing is… just getting it done. You want it to be good – great – brilliant, always, but sometimes it is literally just about turning it around to get a script distributed by a certain time – so “good enough” has to do.

In my most recent writers room, several conversations about my fanfic writing led to a declaration that I should repost it all. Then I looked at how much I have. Guys, I’d need to hire an assistant just to post fanfic if all of it was getting reposted, so that is probably not happening. But I will post some of my greatest hits here on the blog as I have time to assemble them.

But here is what I’m not going to do as I repost these stories:

— I am not going to rewrite them. Not even proofing them. You get them as is, typos, formatting issues, and all. Because the point isn’t to pretend like they aren’t chock full of mistakes. The point is that I wrote and kept writing and got better as I did, and that’s why they’re still worth something to me. Each of these stories is a building block to the writer I have become, so whatever they are or were, they have value to me. The mistakes are part of that. My need to make a proofing pass just to see if I used the same word too many times in a script? I figured out that bad habit writing fanfic. And the subtle difference between reusing a line or phrase for effect and just being repetitive? I learned that from writing fanfic, too. So other than copying and pasting separate chapters into one PDF file, you’re getting what the original readers got.

— I am not going to shy away from things that, looking back now, make me roll my eyes at myself. You will see that baby writer Niceole loved her some cliched phrases like “Make love to me” and “You are the love of my life” and so on and so on. Some of my “love scenes” are so trashy romance novel in style that I honestly should have probably tried to write a romance or two back in the day… and my obsession with happy endings is rarely disrupted (though I did write a “Pretender” story once that had people ready to yell at me because it most definitely did not have a happy ending).

— I am not going to change the ridiculously pretentious names of some of these fics. Oy! I have learned a lot about titles since way back, let me tell you. But they are called what they’re called, so… laugh away.

With those rules in place, here’s the first fic I’m reposting – the Destiny Series. It’s a very early one from my “Pretender” days, set just after the season three finale when Miss Parker got shot and I had a lot of time over the summer to obsess about what should happen when the show came back. For those who don’t remember, season three was basically the season of massive Miss Parker heartbreak because she fell in love with Thomas Gates, and then he got murdered, and then she got shot by Willie Gault, and basically my girl couldn’t catch a break.

It’s long, y’all. Most of them will be. So if you’re brave or curious enough… the file is attached.

More to come…

Destiny Series Whole File