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Songfics are a genre of fan-work, similar to fanfiction and filks. A songfic is a work of fiction set to the lyrics of a particular song. The term is derived from "song" and "fiction"; as such, you might also see the genre referred to as songfiction.
Songfic can also be used as a verb meaning "to write a songfic".
Difference Between Filks and Songfics
Filks, by definition, contain rewritten lyrics to a well-known song; this is usually, but not always, done as parody. (The mainstream artist "Weird Al" Yankovic has made a career out of this sort of parody, though only a few of his songs meet all the criteria of a filk.) Filking is be a popular tradition in the Renaissance Fair gatherings and in some dark horror circles. If a song includes a note to the effect of "Sung to the tune of...", it is most likely a filk. Terence Chua (http://www.khaosworks.org) is a well-known filker, known for Lovecraft-based songs of this nature.
By contrast, songfics leave the lyrics of the source song alone; the song's lyrics are incorporated into a more-or-less separate story. It is similar in concept to a music video, where the music and the story are designed to complement each other. As a general rule, instrumental songs cannot easily be incorporated into songfics, due to the lack of lyrics to go by.
How Does One Write Songfics?
Very carefully. It does actually take practice, but unlike filks you do not need a rhyming dictionary to make everything scan correctly and be singable. Songfics, however, are not as well known as filks, and as such many people have not seen good examples of how one is done. (They only seem to account for a small percentage of fanworks across different fandoms - songfics are more suited to character studies, or summaries of particular actions.)
However, songfics do seem to be a growing genre in the Megatokyo forums, primarily in the Story Discussions and Role-Playing sections. Though the content in the Creative Writing Database (http://cwdb.azaphrael.org/) is strictly about Megatokyo and its fans, archived songfics can be easily viewed there. This is the largest known searchable archive that includes songfics as a seperate genre. The easiest way to learn how to write songfics is to learn by doing: listen to a lot of music, read some songfics, and try writing them.
External Links
Creative Writing DataBase-Megatokyo fanworks (http://cwdb.azaphrael.org/)
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