A few years before The Riot Club. They used to attend events together.
OK, you know what? I was about to say Freddie and Sam was nothing alike until I saw this picture. they look so much alike and yet not at all alike. I’ve never seen anything like it. Freddy is giving effortlessly elf-like androgyny… wtf? Gorgeous. Sam was handsome but has grown into that type of beauty as well.
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I'm of the opinion that the best AUs are driven by great characterization. Even when an AU is far flung from the source material, picking and choosing the right homages to the original content will give your reader an excellent new experience that has all the right connections to make it feel brand new and familiar at the same time.
Just as it's important to consider all of the literal character traits of the originals, always pull back one more layer and look at the reasons and motivations that make these characters interesting and make them tick. That's where the good stuff is for this exercise.
When I'm forming characters for an AU, I start with two lists pertaining to the source characters:
'What a character IS' as well as 'what a character DOES'
After that, I’ll start making modern day correlations that make sense to keep the character similar to the source, but new and special for the AU.
I’ll walk you through a quick example of taking it one level further:
So you want to write a Star Wars College AU. Star Wars is a widely known franchise, so it works for an example. If you don’t like Star Wars, hit me up with the fandom you’re writing in and I’ll do an example for it!
Han Solo is a cool dude in his original universe, so the choice to make him a cool guy who throws parties and gets ladies in college is obvious. You could do that. It will work, no question.
But consider some of his other traits.
His profession is that he's an illegal smuggler who continues to find himself in hot water. He has good friends who are super loyal and one best friend in particular that he doesn't necessarily have a ton in common with other than history. He's crafty, he's confident, he's cocky and he's funny. He has deep love for his ship. He lives by a strict honor code akin to pirates. He's traditionally hunky, but he's also very clever.
Perhaps in your universe, Han isn't the super personable Van Wilder driving a car he cares about more than most people that you might originally gravitate towards. That's obvious for hunky dudes who are personable. He's well connected, well-loved or hated depending on which side of his connections you're on. You could make him a jock like most conventionally hot dudes are.
But consider his source material. His whole sense of being is that he's a big-hearted scoundrel. He lives off illegal acts and he's pretty good at it (most of the time).
Maybe in this college universe, he's the drug dealer instead of the popular hunk who drives a beloved ancient sports car that looks like trash and runs like magic. A good dude misguided by the wrong kinds of success because at the end of the day, he's kind of selfish...until he isn't for the right people.
Leia in canon is a literal princess which gives you the softball of making her a figurative princess in a modern AU. That's fine, but remember that she lost everything she had, and when presented with the easy way out of rolling with the empire and saving her own ass, she knew it was wrong. She's stuffy by nurture, not by nature, and that's a very important detail for Leia’s fundamental personality traits.
Dropping her into college up against Han, it starts writing itself. Stuffy good girl from the right side of the tracks falls for hunky bad boy with a big heart. We've read it a thousand times and we love it even though its predictable.
This time, take it one step further and consider the source material one steo further. Leia is only a stuffy good girl to the people who don't know her. By Jedi, she's fucking crushing on a speeder and she's the one with the secret gun when Han thinks they're done for.
The less obvious, but still super believable College Leia is a mega activist, and she don't give no shits about where she came from. She knows what's going on is wrong, and she hates this drug dealing idiot, but she can't stay away from him either. He stays for a few extra circles when he stops by her apartment. They both lurk in the same dive bar because despite their shallow exteriors and friend groups they owe time and propriety to, they just kind of want to be alone.
Turns out she likes rock and roll and he wishes he could make something more of himself.
Shit, maybe I'll write this.
These are silly and quick examples to show you how considering things one level deeper, and looking at a characters’ reasons for acting the way they do can translate to AUs in infinite, exciting ways.
For your next AU, write down each character and make two lists, “what this character IS” and “what this character DOES” under their names. Thinking about the original canon characters, put at least five things in each list before you fully develop you AU character. Take a look at the lists together before fully commiting to new AU characters. You'll end up with much richer, dimensional characters in your AU that will bring your reader an experience on a whole new level!
Important advice to remember about writing in general is that readers are smarter than we give them credit for. I often get swept up in what I'm creating and shoving in every tiny detail I can think of, and upon editing, remind myself that the reader already knows a lot of what I have told.
For fanfiction specifically, this is a huge thing to consider since your reader knows A LOT, a lot. Your reader already knows, loves and wants this content, and if they've taken the time to filter by ship and check the tags, your reader knows this content WELL.
Descriptions are always important and giving the reader an immersive experience is half the reason some of us write in the first place, but it can drive home bigger points when it's more delicate while you're working with existing content. If descriptive writing is your thing, I'm sure you already know a lot about this. If you're just getting started, the urge to have your opening paragraphs giving head to toe descriptions of what these characters look like is totally natural.
Try to fight it, and instead of chunks of description, mix them in with your dialogue and action where it will be consumed slowly over time rather than skipped over because...your reader already knows.
A great way to satisfy descriptive lust as a fanfiction writer that is also satisfying for the reader is to describe your characters as others see them. You're giving your reader information they may already know in most cases, but via the lens of another character, it's exciting again. No one in love objectively hands over the eye color of their one and only simply as "blue."
Example of a factual description:
My girlfriend is 6 feet tall, she’s pretty and she has blue eyes.
I'm obsessed with her, so my perspective is:
She's two long yards of feminine excellence with eyes too blue to be ignored.
In both examples, your mind is picturing a tall blue eyed woman, but in the second, you're more involved, and it also is telling you something about ME.
The waters are a littler murkier in an AU than in canon, but the advice there is to describe what's different about this version of the character while leaving out some of the more obvious traits that are the same. Your reader will trip over details they already know, especially if there are a lot of them in a row that aren’t contributing to why this version is different or exciting.
With characters your reader is well aware of the appearance of, descriptions of their attitude will go a long way and your reader's existing knowledge will fill in the blanks. They'll never even know it happened. Readers know that water is wet, that snow is cold and that Lexa has a jawline that can cut diamonds. You can bring these facts up where appropriate, but you don’t need a list of them out of the gate.
Since most of you at this point found your way to me via my Clexa Fanfiction, I can use it as an example. In Quality Ingredients, there is not one mention of what anyone looks like in the entire first chapter. That chapter is over 5k words long, for reference.
I read it again to make sure, but there is nothing in there about Lexa or Clarke other than that fact that they're in their thirties and are wearing a chef's coat and lab coat respectively. The environment they’re in is much more descriptive. It's not until they meet each other in the second chapter is there any mention of their physical traits.
I let your brain do all the heavy lifting for me because you already know what they look like.
Of course this style tip doesn't work for every scenario and every fic every time, but give it a try sometime! Don't let getting hung up on a character's description in a fic keep you from getting to the story or moving forward with your writing!
