21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

Well, some of my fic probably wouldn't translate all that well. I mean, what do you do with a drabble? And, as far as my virtual season is concerned, it was written as a different medium. (This question has assumptions!) For FK4, the shift would have to work the other way, i.e. from script to prose. However, there's no doubt in my mind that some of my Arrowverse stories would work as television episodes. In theory, anyway. In practice, fan writers have the advantage over the pros: we don't have to hire the actors. The logistics of that are often insurmountable.

My story "Double, Double, Time and Trouble" is so like an episode that, as I wrote it, I kept thinking things like, "This would be a good place for a commercial break." Like an actual episode of Legends of Tomorrow, it's an ensemble piece; and it has much the same sort of plot. Of course, it's backstory of a sort: set between two actual seasons, with a plot that depends on one of last year's shows. However, that's in part because I'd already decided to do a story in which the crew had to return Shakespeare to his own time; and they jossed it just before the story reveals (for it was giftfic). There followed a mad rewrite.

When I wrote "Stopped Cold" a few years ago (also in a gift exchange), I had much the same experience of seeing scenes as if in an episode—indeed, I exchanged comments with sandrine about the differences between that story as fan fiction and the way it would need reorganization if it were part of an actual season of The Flash. Among a lot else, I wrote:

[I]f "Stopped Cold" were part of a Season of Rogues, it would need to be done over two episodes: one for the heist, and one for the fire. (In fact, the very first scene in the story would best be put as the tag for the previous ep; the heist would need to be shown in much more detail; and the last two scenes would probably be worked into the next episode.)

In other words, prose fic and scripts are different. I've known that for a long time since, after all, I wrote FK4 in what is basically a script format. Episodes of an actual TV series have a strict format: teaser, a specific number of acts, tag; and a rigid time limit. To fit in plot and character scenes is tricky, especially since (like most fans) I definitely don't want to curtail the latter. It is actually easier to do this over an entire season, since scenes that have to be clipped from one episode can often be fitted into another.

Basically, a lot of the Arrowverse fic I write is first seen in my head as if the actors were playing out a series of scenes. The same was true of FK4, of course: that's the reason why I wrote that as a virtual season. The organization of an episode (or a season) is different from the organization of prose fiction; but, in stories of this sort, the similarities outweigh the differences.

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