What if I ain't no violinist?

54. Author's Note - the mathematics of fanfic

Hi y'all,

I started writing this as an announcement but decided to put it here. 

I've been wondering of late, what makes a piece of writing "good" ?  And here I'm not talking about grammar or sentence/story structure because such qualities should remain pretty much the same for the same author (although I'd like to think I've improved a bit because I haven't been writing for long and I've been "practising" almost daily.)

Anyhoo, I find it iNtErEsTiNg how some pieces resonate with readers more than others and there seem to be no formula to make it happen. 

...Or is there ??

Now please excuse me as I geek out mathematically for a bit.

So in fanfic there is definitely some "constants" in a working formula:

a = description of how beautiful the characters are

b = description of shipping the characters (fictional shipping for me)

c = description of some kind of turmoil, something emotional but not too damaging (cos I'm mostly fluff, not angst)

Then you get

ax^2 + bx + c = 0

Can someone solve for x ? (I should go ask Eddy since he was so good at maths lol.  Incidently this is the quadratic equation that he wrote out the solution for when they did the video of "drawing my life".)

So I think there are two solutions.

Solution 1: x = pour in all your passion and emotion into the story

or

Solution 2: x = sometimes this "thing" just happens

The first solution sometimes fails, which I find rather interesting. Yes, somewhat disappointing but I understand we all have different tastes (mine are somewhat quirky anyway) and so I move on.

It's the second solution that intrigues me. I think some people call this "thing", the "flow"?? Come to think of it, it is kinda like a wave and when you get to ride this thing, stuff just pours out of you and can't keep up, even when you can type 100wpm !! 

It's just a shame that you can't just turn a tap and get this flow to happen, though I swear some writers seem to be able to.

P.S. More geek talk: I was momentarily distracted from my writing when I started thinking about the discriminant, which is denoted by a capital delta, the square root of b^2-4ac. It seems to tell me that the shipping (the underlying love interest ?) has to be much stronger in the story than the characters and turmoil put together (and even multiplied by 4!!) in order to get two solutions.

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