If you want to, you can read “The Wind Comes” my erotic fanfiction is up for download. That’s the story I wrote as part of the Worldbuilder’s fundraiser.
Knowing you, I suspected you’d want to know a bit about how I wrote it. The voice parts, not the sexy fun times.
To write this, I wanted to be as true as possible to Pat’s books. Yes. I could have written this for camp, but I promised fanfiction. Fan writers are some of the most ardent supporters out there, so I didn’t want to be poking fun at their form. Besides… I’m a fan, too. I wanted to write a real story.
But, being me, I wanted to try to write it in the style of Patrick Rothfuss.
To begin with, I looked at the text to decide who would be the most fun to have together as well as who would actually make sense. Again, I wanted to be true to the books so, to me, there needed to be some underlying chemistry.
I actually thought about Kvothe and Elodin, but the teacher student power dynamic felt really icky. I considered Denna, but there’s no point in the novels where that makes sense and the unrequited nature of the relationship is huge. I settled on Penthe to open with, because Pat fades to black for the sex scenes with her.
Once I sorted that, then I figured out who, I had to figure out why.
The novels are told in the first person, with interludes in third. In the first person sections, Kvothe is telling these stories for specific reasons, so I had to figure out why he would tell this one and be explicit rather than fading to black.. Here’s the thing about erotica, and stories in general: The thing that makes them interesting is what it reveals about a person.
Most of my clues to the motivation were in the interludes, which is interesting because stylistically they’re not only in third person but also very cinematic. At no point do you dip inside the character’s heads, so Pat’s telling it all incredibly nuanced body-language and this deeply lyrical narrative voice. He does a lot with that. You might be wondering why those sections would be more useful in figuring out motivation. Because Kvothe is an unreliable narrator. Pat is not. He plays fair with his readers, but Kvothe will sometimes embellish things as he tells them because he’s a performer. So the parts that I could trust most thoroughly were the ones where the narration was observing him rather. Make sense? Anyway, once I figured out why he would tell an erotic story, that motivation gave me my plot and structure for the overall story.
Next, I sat down with the original text and reread the section where Kvothe was in Ademre. I also went back and all the existing sex scenes. Most of them fade to black right after they start. I marked sections that I would want to refer back to. Primarily the scenes with Felurian, the ones with Vashet, and with Penthe.
Then I started rekeying the pages leading up to the scene I was going to write. This is an old trick for getting another writer’s rhythms in your brain. It forces you to interact with the words differently. In fact, the first paragraph of my story is directly from The Wise Man’s Fear.
Saying my farewells in Haert took an entire day. I shared a meal with Vashet and Tempi and let both of them give more more advice than I needed or desired. Celean cried a bit, and told me she would come visit me when she finally took the red. We bouted one final time, and I suspect she let me win.
Lastly, I went to Penthe.
And that’s where I veer off, but there’s actually still a fair bit of Pat’s text in there.
Take for instance, this passage.
When I arrived at her snug little house she met me at the door with a single candle. The light played around her heart-shaped face and teased the smile from her lips. The sweet smile of a true friend. That secret curve and small flash of teeth. There is nothing more appealing in the world.
I grabbed a description of Penthe’s smile from a previous scene and reworked it. The original was:
The sweet smile of a young woman. There is nothing better in the world. It is worth more than salt. Something in us sickens and dies without it. I am sure of this. Such a simple thing. How strange. How wonderful and strange.
Throughout the text, there are places where I grab a description and use it. Here’s the thing… writers quote themselves all the time, so if you’re trying to mimic someone else’s style grabbing a two or three word paring and reusing it will fit right in.
When we get into the second scene, the first six pieces of body language are all pulled straight from the book. I just have them in a different order and with different dialogue. I also took a couple of the descriptions and used their subject/verb/adjective structure to create totally different sentences. When I did that I picked things that stood out to me as “ooo! lovely writing” because those were the most distinct representations of voice.
For instance, Pat wrote:
His voice was perfectly calm. It was a perfectly normal voice. It was colorless and clear as window glass.
See how he uses repetition for emphasis? So, I used that structure to write this:
Kvothe shrugged and his voice was perfectly calm. It was perfectly normal. It was smooth and solid as polished wood.
Having those beats of familiarity might lull some readers into thinking that the entire text is like Pat’s, but it’s not. What happens is that you hit that and think “this sounds familiar so it must be ‘right'” when really it’s just a thin veneer. These are all tricks to make text sound like someone else. It’s the text version of doing an impression.
But that’s not the same as being able to write like them.
Still… If you want to shake up your prose or have a different voice for a particular story, these are tricks you can employ — only… don’t lift entire lines straight from someone else’s book. For obvious reasons.
