By Nicola Simpson

Let's talk about "The Professional" a little. The two things that strike me about that story are the voice of Amy Callahan and the characterization of Scully, which is painfully realistic. How do you go about building original characters such as the narrator? And how important do you feel POV is in that story?

Writing original characters is such a blast, because you aren't bound by the characterization on the actual show. But it's also a challenge to create an original, compelling voice, to make someone new three-dimensional to readers and not have her be a "Mary Sue." <g>

Amy Callahan was a character I created early in my fanfic career (I always feel weird about using the term "career." I mean, it's not like anyone is paying me.) in the vignette "Musings of a Professional Girl." I envisioned her as a breezy, intelligent call girl with a good sense of humor and a touch of the amoral. After I wrote the vignette, I sort of forgot about it until Plausible Deniability were casting about for an idea for a case file for us to write together. We sort of used the original vignette as a template for her character, building from the basics set out there. We wanted to make her complex, a woman who on the outside seems to really have her shit together, but who is always feeling like she has to justify the way she makes her money and lives her life.

POV was very important to the story and for PD and me, it was challenging. When we'd co-written the "Momentary Lapses" stories before, we'd each chosen a character and written from that character's POV only. This time we both wrote all three characters and that made it harder, because we had to make our writing more seamless, so that readers couldn't tell where one of us left off and the other picked up. But it was a fun challenge and very interesting to explore this case file and the resulting angst from all three angles. I think I can speak for PD when I say that we both learned a whole lot about writing from that story.

Working with another writer can either be the most hellish experience on earth or it can be heaven. I've had both. I had one writing experience go to pieces because the writer decided to bail on me. I co-wrote a story I'm not very proud of because I was too scared to tell the writer that I thought the idea was really sappy and already done. But I've also had amazing experiences working with Plausible Deniability on the Momentary Lapses series, the Professional and After Eight and on In the Closet with Gwendolyn.

One of the best things about writing with a partner is that you're not doing it alone. Writing can be a lonely business, hunched over your keyboard, gnashing your teeth over a difficult part. When you have a partner you have someone who knows the story as intimately as you do, who is (hopefully) as invested as you are. And it's nice to have that sense of accountability, to know that you have to get the next part finished because your co-writer is waiting for the next part.

I have really enjoyed working with Plausible Deniability. It's too bad that the two of us seem to be in our sunset years of fanfic, because we just have too much fun writing together. We're like co-conspirators, giggling with glee over certain parts. Also, we seem to have writing voices that mesh well together. I have had tons of people tell me that they just can't tell who wrote which parts of the Professional, which to me is a huge compliment. Sometimes it's really weird to think that I wrote a novel with this person I've never met in real life and probably never will, but our writing styles blend so well.

Not to say that it's always been moonlight and roses. PD and I have never had a serious disagreement over writing but you do get little clashes and conflicts over small aspects of the story. But we're such good friends that we can easily work though it and try our best to write a good story.

Well, head-hopping, or 3rd person omniscient POV, is VERY hard to do. I have never been able to do it. I was betaing for a writer's first story and she was trying to do it and I finally had to tell her to stick to one POV per scene. It's tricky, tricky business, like performing brain surgery in high heels and a feather boa. There are some writers in fanfic who do it wonderfully well. A.I. Irving is one writer who comes to mind. But if it's done poorly, it's very difficult to read.

POV definitely affects the way a reader experiences a story. First person POVs have a warmer, more intimate feel and there's a little bit of remove with third person. I'm not sure which I like better. It's weird because I often don't consciously choose which kind of POV and which tense a story is in. It's just how the characters end up telling me the story in my head.

When I say "head-hopping" I mean the jumping from one person's head to another, for example:

Scully sighed. Why was this so difficult? Her mother had never told her this would be so difficult. Her blue eyes shimmered with tears; she looked lost and very very small.

In this brief paragraph, we jump out of Scully's head to "see her" from a different angle. In her POV, she can't see her eyes shimmering, and she can't see how she looks. Often in XF fic, we'll then jump into Mulder's POV.

Well, aren't we, essentially talking about the same thing? It's just poorly done 3rd person omniscient, where the writer is trying to get into everyone's heads and see things from the outside.

Yeah, that drives me nuts for the most part.

Exactly.

Well, I would disagree that very few writers write deep 3rd person POV well (the POV I was taught to call 3rd person limited-- to stick to one person's POV per chapter or section). It's probably the second most popular form of POV after 1st person and I find it to be a more "literary" style than 1^st person. What I mean by that is that it's easy to get into simple, monologue-type statements when a writer uses 1st person. "I was so mad at

Mulder I wanted to clock him on the head. Why did he have to be so annoying?" Using 3rd person forces the writer to approach the situation from outside, to look at it from a slightly removed angle and often that makes for more beautiful writing.

Ahhh, but that's the fun part! Seriously, if a writer is just writing from one POV, it is a special challenge to convey the conflict and feelings of other characters. But there are so many ways to do this, through dialogue, from facial expressions and body language. And part of the fun is that when you see a scene through one person's eyes, you aren't getting an objective point of view. If Mulder and Scully are having an argument, and the scene is Mulder's POV, we get an unreliable narrator in Mulder. But that's cool to see it from only one side, sometimes. And sometimes, later, we get to see the same thing through another person's eyes and it can look totally different. Plausible Deniability and I had a good time playing with that with the "Momentary Lapses" series. Mulder and Scully would tell the same story, but their motivations and issues were different, and so they remembered events quite differently.

I love getting into the heads of characters. It's so much fun to suddenly be Skinner or Diana Fowley for a day. It reminds me of a quote I once heard by an actor (which one I forget) who said something like, "I love to act because I get to live someone else's life without the consequences." It's the same in writing.

If I'm writing a story with a character's POV I haven't done before, I often will try to watch a bunch of episodes with them in it to get a feel for him or her. How does Skinner talk? What was *really* going through Krycek's mind at the end of "Speechless"? And then I sort of sit down and figure out how I truly see that character. Sometimes it may diverge a bit from what you see on the screen. For example, in the "Red Valerian" series, Skinner is sort of a secret romantic. Granted, we have some hints in "Avatar" that he could be, but nothing explicit has been shown on the actual show. But the challenge for me was making him into a romantic without altering his characterization so much that he didn't seem like Skinner anymore. That can be tough, but it's one of those challenges that are really fun for writers.

When I first started writing fanfic, I was sure that I would only be able to write Scully. I had never really tried to write from a man's perspective before and it seemed like an insurmountable challenge. But sometimes I actually like writing Mulder better than Scully. It's often easier to figure out his motives and emotions because he's more "out there." Scully is a much more inscrutable character. But on the other hand, the hidden nature of Scully's emotional life makes her fun to write, because there is so much left unsaid on the TV show. Behind her placid mask, you can have all sorts of interesting things going on. <g> So, to answer you question, I like writing the both of them. I tend to write Scully more for some reason, but I'll happily write from Mulder's POV any time.

Well, I wouldn't exactly call it a relationship in that series. In the series, it turns out that Scully has been having the occasional one night stand with women. I have a hard time buying Scully slash stories where she falls in love with another woman and lives happily ever after. It just doesn't fit in with what we know about her and Mulder. Not that I don't believe that two women can have a lifelong relationship or that Scully would have sex with women, just that I don't see her throwing herself into a love relationship with anyone but Mulder. Yeah, I'm a shipper. <g> But I can see why she'd consider a relationship with a woman to be "safe." It would be so entirely out of the flow of the rest of her life that it wouldn't affect it at all.

I see Scully as someone who needs control in her life. Wouldn't you if you'd been abducted, expiramented upon, given cancer, etc? <g> She likes to have the personal things in her life under her strict control because she can control it. There are other things that she cannot control at all. So I envision her as a woman who always flosses her teeth, calls her mother twice a week just to check in, works out three mornings a week. She doesn't have the time or energy or desire to lose herself in a huge relationship. I see that as one reason why she hasn't gotten involved with Mulder (although that's certainly up for debate these days). She's afraid of that loss of control that falling in love brings. She doesn't want to be overwhelmed, "taken over," or lost to the feeling. And knowing her history, I find that understandable.

Well, I don't think I really need to justify writing slash. Why write MSR? Why write case files? For me, my occasional foray into slash is fun, it's something different, it's a challenge and it's a nice break from MSR. And I've enjoyed writing the original character of May, a sometime partner of Scully's in the Jitterbug Perfume series.

Why slash? I'm probably repeating myself, but I found it an irresistible challenge to write Scully with another woman and make it halfway believable. But to tell you the truth, I never sat down one day and said to myself, "Hmm, I think I'll write some Scully slash today." In fact, before I wrote it, I don't think I'd actually read any slash with Scully in it. What happened was I got a idea for a story. I was on my way to work and I got this image of Mulder, on the second floor of a dance club, watching the dancers below. I pictured him seeing a woman who looked like Scully, in a very hot outfit, dancing with another woman and then I saw her kissing the woman. It was just this flash, but then I had to know what happened. Why was Scully kissing some random woman in a club? Why was Mulder there, too? What did he think of this? Would there be a confrontation? My mind started working overtime on it and before I knew it, the story was writing itself.

As for reading Scully slash, I actually don't read a ton of it. :::hangs head in shame::: I just don't. For one thing, there's not a ton of it out there and quite a bit of it seems to be formulaic. But there are some terrific Scully slash writers who are great to read-- Izzy Izenthe, Katharine F., Selena Koontz, Fialka,to name a few.

I don't think there's any advice for writing slash that really differs from writing gen fanfic. Just stay true to the show's characterizations. Oh, and if you're unsure about what you're writing about, do some research. There's actually a number of web pages for female writers of male-male slash, so they can get to know the "mechanics" of gay sex. Ah, I LOVE fanfic!

Does it break from the show's characterizations? Before last season, a lot of slash writers were able to say, with some pretty good justification, that there was just as much UST between Mulder and Krycek as there was between Mulder and Scully. Granted, it was hard to see Mulder being with a guy who'd killed his father and assisted in Scully's abduction (the main reason why I have issues with the M/K coupling) but you also couldn't deny the raw, simmering sex appeal that was generated between the two men. Also, I don't think it's too hard to see Mulder as bisexual. I can see him being experimental at Oxford or having the occasional relationship with a man.

I haven't read tons and tons of slash, but I've read some stories that seem incredibly plausible. In torch's "Ghosts," the relationship that springs up between Mulder and Krycek happens with a very natural and real touch. Same with the relationship between Mulder and Tristan in Cathleen Faye's amazing "Wind River." It's not like Mulder wakes up one day in these stories and says, "Boy, I feel gay today!" He happens to meet someone or spend a lot of time with a particular man and the attraction grows from there. But he's still the Mulder we see on the show and in the best kind of fanfic. But yeah, there's also slash that has characters wildly out of character, where Scully is a screaming man-hating shrew, where Mulder is a pretty-boy puppyish bottom, where Skinner is the avuncular master-top with a whip. I especially take issue with slash that refuses to deal with the Scully question and the fact that no matter what, Mulder loves Scully. Whether or not that's a romantic love can certainly be debated but I don't think you can argue that he doesn't have any love for her at all. There's a number of slash stories that either reduce her to a walk-on character, don't feature her at all, or have her as this horrible, megabitch who hates Mulder and makes his life so miserable he has to flee into the arms of Uncle Walter or Alex the Wonder Boy.

Skinner is kind of a tough nut to crack. We only know the barest details about his background and his life outside of being the burly, gruff boss-man. But I actually like that about him, that as a writer I can explore what makes the man. The challenge, though, is to give him depth and sensitivity but still make him the tough, macho guy that's on the show. All I know is that I've adored writing him. In some ways, he's been my favorite character to flesh out and hopefully make seem three-dimensional.

Like I said before, it's usually something really random, just a flash in the middle of the day, when I'm supposed to be doing something else. It might just be a line, or an image of two characters. And sometimes it's something I see on the show, something I wish could be explored more fully. And once in a while, it's just plain a dare. That's how the Red Valerian series got started. Red Valerian, the Queen of All That Is Skinner, asked me to write some Scully/Skinner smut. I said to her, "I can't do that. That pairing is just so wrooooooong!" Ha, little did I know that I'd get almost 300 K out of a challenge.

To tell you the truth, I can't remember how I got the ideas for most of my stories. I swear, I have fanfic-based amnesia or something. The kernel of the idea would just come to me and then I'd start mulling it over.

I didn't have an initial protest except that at the time I was a die-hard shipper and I could not see myself writing Scully romantically involved with anyone but Mulder. Obviously, I've changed that view. <g>

You know, I didn't really have a special approach to writing the smut at first. I just sort of closed my eyes and picture Scully and Skinner together and how it would be. I don't even remember writing the first Red Valerian story. It just seemed to flow from my fingers to the legal pad and then onwards to the computer.

Hmmm, a difference between MSR and Scullyslash? Well, in my universe of Scully and Skinner there are a lot of repressed feelings. Skinner loves Scully to the point of obsession but he's afraid to show her and have her run from that. Plus, he subliminally knows that she truly loves Mulder. So, most of his affection for her is shown sexually. It's the only time when he can truly let go and worship her the way he wants to. And for Scully, she has a deep, very real affection and attraction for Skinner, but she doesn't love him. I see her lovemaking with him as an attempt to connect with Skinner, to make herself love him and to try to forget the things in her life that are haunting her.

I don't necessarily think there's a huge difference. Hmmm...this is hard to put into exact words. I just think there's a much different dynamic between Skinner and Scully than Mulder and Scully. Mulder and Scully have so much history together, so much invested that if you write them in a romantic vein, you have all that history behind them that adds a richness to their relationship. You don't have that writing Skinner and Scully. Which isn't to say that a relationship between Skinner and Scully won't have richness, just that you have to work a little harder, build more backstory and create more justification for why those two should be together. With MSR, most of the time it's just assumed. You can get them together on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Funnily enough, I'm not the hugest fan of Scully/Skinner stories, unless Jordan's writing them. "A Cold Angel" eye clobbers me right in the gut every single time. It's just so visceral and powerful and explores some things about Scully's character that may not be her most attractive qualities, such a need to be dominated and taken, but that seem very human and true. Every word of that novel just rings with pure truth.

I think what I enjoyed the most about writing a Scully/Skinner story was creating a Scully who wasn't perfect and idealized and finding her Mr. Right and having a Hallmark relationship, but a woman who was trying to find a calm in a storm, a respite from a horrible period in her life. Skinner wasn't her Mr. Right but he was Mr. Right Now. Not to say that she used him in the Red Valerian series, just that she found herself in a situation where she thought she had an uncomplicated relationship with an attractive, intelligent man, where she could have a little sex and companionship and gather strength for dealing with the rest of her life. Of course, it didn't really turn out that way, but like a lot of things in life, it seemed like a good idea at the time. <g>

Oh man. I've heard writers say this before, but it's like choosing which one of your children is your favorite. I don't think I have a story that's THE favorite. I like different stories for different reasons. But I certainly don't think any story is perfect. If I had a year off to do nothing else, I'd love to tinker with all of my stories because they all have things about them I'd love to fix and somehow make better.

"Blinded by White Light" was probably my favorite writing experience because the story seemed to flow out of me nearly effortlessly. It was one of those times when I swear I wasn't writing the story, but channeling it from some other source. Ooooh, you could write an X-File on that! "Red Valerian" was my best learning experiences, since I got to play with different styles and forms of POV and write Skinner for the first time. But my favorite stories are probably two of mine that aren't even very popular. I loved writing "Doubled," which is a crossover with Red Shoe Diaries, because I got to write Scully having the conundrum of falling for a man who looked a lot like Mulder, but who wasn't Mulder at all. And I have a soft spot for "Faltering," a story set during "One Breath," because I got to write some hardcore Mulderangst and try to write Melissa Scully as something other than a flake.

Least favorite? Got a month? Well, there's all those early stories from when I was a raw newbie and didn't know anything about beta readers, proper formatting or how to do quotation marks properly. But I can chalk those up to being new to fanfic and not knowing any better. However, there are a number of stories from when I was more experienced that I have regrets about. "Christmas in Silver" is an entirely implausible story that's not even well-written. You can practically hear my yawning as I wrote it. And I'm still not happy with the way my post-Requiem story, "Alunakanula" turned out. It's not a terrible story, but it just didn't gel the way I wanted it to. I keep meaning to re-write it, but I'm lazy. Even though I actually like "Fingers," I regret posting it because I'm convinced that certain people think I'm a sick, sick puppy. And we just won't talk about the babyfic series I wrote a long, long time ago in a faraway galaxy, okay?

The pregnancy on the show scares the crap out of me, to be perfectly honest. Not that I don't find it believable or interesting, it's just that I don't trust Chris Carter anymore. He's really proved that he doesn't care about the backstories of his characters and that he's perfectly willing to re-write history at will when it gets in the way of his plotlines. I just have a very bad and sinking feeling that something terrible is going to happen. And that makes me angry, because the show could be *so* good if he'd just pay a little more attention to the interesting people who inhabit his little world. But I will admit that I was surprised and delighted by the end of "Requiem." I had studiously avoided spoilers, so it was a real shocker to me. So, that was fun but I'm worried about where all of this is going to go. If Scully ends up with a freakish, mutant child, I swear to god that I'll personally go pay dear Chris a friendly little visit to set him straight about a thing or two.

<g>

And babyfic, oh dear, dear, babyfic. I've never been particularly for or against babyfic. There has been some great babyfic in XF fanfic. Mustang Sally and RivkaT's "Iolokus" saga is one brilliant, freaky, fascinating piece of babyfic. But what separates it from the sappy, sugary babyfics out there is that it's real. Their baby, Miranda, is as three-dimensional as any of the characters. She's moody, mercurial, adorable, naughty, frustrating and has a disturbing propensity for drooling. And having a baby doesn't mean that all is bliss or roses for Mulder and Scully. In fact, this baby tears apart their relationship for a while and does not mean that Mulder and Scully have suddenly entered into the realm of the suburban dream.

The babyfic that I have a problem with is the kind where Mulder and Scully don't seem like themselves anymore. Suddenly, these two armed federal agents are dealing with the wacky hijinks of diapers and burping. They talk mostly in babytalk and have a minivan. The story could be about any two new parents, but it's Mulder and Scully. And that's what bugs me about the babyfic stories I wrote early in my fanfic "career." They're just not very in character.

I got to try to redeem myself in the babyfic vein with "Blinded by White Light" where both Mulder and Scully each have a child. It was fun to try to develop Scully's daughter Julia along the Sally and Rivka lines. Not to say that Julia was anything like Miranda, just that I attempted to keep her real and make her as much like a typical two year-old as possible and not make her into some angelic Uber Child. Whether I succeeded or not, I can't say, but I was more satisfied with that attempt.

The babyfic that's come out of this season seems to be more balanced, grounded and angsty. And that, to me, is a good thing.

Thanks, Dasha. Let's hope that the upcoming episodes mirror the babyfic!

You can read Dasha's stories at http://www.visi.com/~dashak/.