hmpf

as several pro writers encounter fan fiction:

here, and here, and here.

Read, disagree, discuss. Preferably here, so I can see your reactions. *g* I posted my own reactions in someone else's journal, but I don't want to flood his journal with even more pro fanfic propaganda than I already spammed it with, so I'm not posting a link. If you ask me nicely, I may cut and paste my various manifestos here.

Edited to add: all right,

coalescent has given his consent to link, so here's his original post and here's the fanfic discussion hidden in the avalanche of replies to that post. :-)

Aaaand... (I guess it is okay to include this link here, since you posted it in this thread, anyway, Scapekid?) - Scapekid says it all, only better than I ever could:

http://zippysatellite4.blogspot.com/2003_09_28_zippysatellite4_archive.html

*is a Scapekid fangirl*

Current Mood: curious

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

coalescent.livejournal.com

Oh, link away. I think that thread is beyond hope, anyway. :)

From:

hmpf.livejournal.com

Not that I'm sure that there will be *any* replies.

From: (Anonymous)

All right, I'll bite.

1. My arrogant confession is that I think a lot of fanfic is utter trash. This means it's easy to ridicule. I also, personally, think that writing about real people is weird. My reason is that no one can be hurt if I write something bizare about a character. Actors are humans and all humans deserve respect and privacy. Then again, this is my opinion without really researching the subject.

2. Despite their condescension, Mr. Todd spent a whole evening surfing up fiction, seemingly extensively and with purpose. Mr. Lee admitted that it's not solely the province of the science fiction fan. And if it's not limited to one sub-category of people, is it weird at all? What if it's just a lot like the obsession with celebrities and their glossy magazines which are socially accepted?

3. I have never experienced the possessive nature described by all three of the articles. People who hate writers because they won't play ball with the fanfic 'canon' do need to get over it. But again, I say, I've never experienced this. Ever. People will always get their own ideas about a show regardless of fanfic. If they become invested in it, then yes, they will care. But while I acknowledge this posessiveness must be an issue for some people it's either a minority or somewhere I've never been so I can't comment in any more detail.

4. People *do* write fanfiction about books. It happens less because, honestly? I think people read less. But look at Harry Potter, or Ann Rice, or Anne McCaffrey. People are less resentful of authors because the author is in control of the whole production. It is assumed that the author writes with integrity, exactly what s/he wants to write. The author loves and cares for the characters s/he created. We all know this is rarely the case in television. Actors play parts created by one person, written by a dozen others, interfered with by the networks and directed and produced by god knows who. People who love television characters are never quite sure how much the people in control of them care about them. This is probably why they sometimes start to feel resentful.

5. For ideas about why people want to play in the sandbox instead of creating their own sandbox, here's something I wrote a while ago on the subject:

http://zippysatellite4.blogspot.com/2003_09_28_zippysatellite4_archive.html

From:

hmpf.livejournal.com

Hey. Would you believe I lost that scrap of paper with your blog URL again? So, I'm glad I finally have a link. It's in my bookmarks now, so I can go on worshipping you, mwahahahaaaaa! On a regular basis, that is. ;-)

Comment on your latest column: I don't think you missed the SF boat. News of the death of the genre have been hugely exaggerated. You're probably just part of the next wave. And I, for one, can't wait to see what that wave will come up with.

From:

aprivatefox.livejournal.com

Hey there. I'm firmly embroiled in thesis-land, but (as I'm thesising on the topic of storytelling, and a lot of what you say interests me) I wanted to reply with a bit of what's going through my head. Please take the mention of thesis in the spirit in which it's intended, as a disclaimer for this being shorter and more addled than I'd like:

The bits connecting storytelling and the media landscape in which fanfic emerges are particularly telling, to me. As I read it, storytelling is changing (here comes the thesisy-bit) from a conceptual medium to a lexical one. I'll unpack my terms: what I mean to say is that the underlying conceptual framework of the story - what used to be the "whole story" - is becoming entangled with the original author's presentation of it.

Look at the story of Cinderella. If I were to write a "fanfic" in the Cinderella universe, and if my fic were to be really, really good, it might eventually become a part of the story - in the same way that the story we have now is effectively amalgamated from past stories. I'd be adding to the conceptual space of the story. Since each teller creates their own presentation (the lexical element) from the concepts of the story, each telling is different. Some might include my element. Others wouldn't.

Now, if there were a canonical presentation of Cinderella - for example, a book that is the telling that all others are simply retellings of - then you'd be able to say if I'm doing it right or wrong; the accuracy of my telling could be judged by my adherence to the lexical narrative in that book. A lot of (good) fanfic strikes me as attempting to tear down the lexical presentation, get at the underlying conceptual narrative, and tell parts of it that aren't presented.

Of course, this means that what I'd like to see is alternative presentations of the original lexical space. In the same way that bands can cover one another's songs, why can't authors cover one another's stories? Why can't a fanficcer pay an author royalties for use of their characters, much like a musician pays a composer for use of a tune? There's an established structure for it in music; why is it anathema to writing? For that matter, why do writers say "tell your own stories" all the time, when it's accepted practice in music to learn by first playing other peoples' songs? From my reading of the modern oral tradition's books, it seems that modern storytellers also tell one anothers' stories. Why is the divide between the printed word and the spoken so much deeper than that between the sung and the recorded?

From:

carenejeans.livejournal.com

I keep seeing the same two arguments against fanfiction. One is legal. One is literary. They are often confused.

In a literary sense, most fanfiction is pastiche, not plagiarism. Fanfiction writers don't lift whole passages and pretend they wrote them, but write new stories based on a show (or several shows) using the show's characters. Legally, this can be called theft because the source is covered by copyright. If it's not covered by copyright, you can take the source and do with it what you will.

This is not only legit, it's literature. (Okay, it can be hackwork and drivel too.)

But critics of fanfiction often confuse legit stealing with the other kind, and get all over fan writers' case for writing pastiche as if it were a crime against creativity.

Anne Rice has a lot of gall. Yes, her characters are copyrighted, so she can stomp her foot at you and call in her lawyers. But as far as telling writers to come up with their own original characters, ahem. Her "original" character is interesting (I guess; I've never been able to get through any of her books) but is based on a character whose image hovers toothily in the background whenever one says "vampire." Get a grip.

If you set aside the copyright infringement issue and look at writing -- professional, successful, even classic writing -- that "steals" from other works, there's a lot of playing in other people's sandboxes... Two examples: For literary fanfiction: "new" Sherlock Holmes stories. For Real People Fiction: Elvis novels. Some of it's terrible, some it's brilliant, a lot of it's "eh," but it's all legal, so the authors aren't told to "get a life," or that what they're doing is a waste of time, or that their stories are bad because they're not "true" to the originals from which they're "stolen"... well, not out-of-hand anyway.

(As an aside, I realize there's a difference between writing fiction based on dead/historical people and those still living. And yes I do know Elvis is dead. I'm amazed that some people are so bothered by RPF they're disturbed by fiction about dead real people. Banning Dead RPF would wipe out a great deal of literature.)

coalescent doesn't seem to like fiction based on other authors' characters, and here I think I have a fundamental difference of opinion, because I love it. I especially like whimsical historical fantasy, like Woolf's Orlando, or Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, both of which include historical figures (and in Woolf's case, a close friend). I like stories based on other favorite stories, such as Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog and Jasper Fforde's Lost In a Good Book. I've read and re-read most of Terry Pratchett's books, and just discovered Avram Davidson. I like the idea of cyberpunk, though some of it irritates me.

Sturgeon's law applies here, obviously. Pastiche and historical fiction can be done badly, very badly -- you can hang a sandwich board on a character and call him "Mark Twain," as Philip Jose Farmer does, and it's not going to work. But it's not automatically a bankrupt idea.

From: (Anonymous)

Hmpf - thanks for the encouragement and glad I was making sense. I was just whining because...I could, I guess. Scifi's far from dead, but it's difficult to convince the rest of the world of this sometimes. (Oh, and yeah, of course it's fine to put the link there!)

On the fanfiction tack, I find these comparisons between the litarary and spoken traditions and the recorded musical and oral musical traditions fascinating. I have been to many storytelling festivals and you are right. They do retell each others stories. Many times they retell great, classic stories in unique ways.

Which brings up an interesting point. Many, *many* people have, over the years, stolen 'archetypal' fairy stories and retold them in novel format. If I recall correctly there's a whole series of books based on fairy tales. ("Jack of Kinrowan," by Charles DeLint, a modern retelling of Jack the Giant Killer; "White as Snow," by, crap, can't remember, a 'realistic' retelling of Snow White.)

When I have seen other characters stolen (pastiched) in novels (and it does happen), they are usually characters from books whose authors are dead, and who are so famous they have, in effect, passed into the human literary mythology. In a way they 'count' as these archetypal fairy stories that no one owns.

So... Then it's an accepted thing to do - retell a story that no one owns? So what makes it accpetable? That, as you say, no one owns it? The idea is conceptual only?

But surely the desire represents something universal. This idea that you want to add to or change a story that is so much a part of our mythology all our lives, growing up.

So doesn't it make sense that a modern day story (told through television, film or book) that we invest time in and becomes a part of *our* mythos, would trigger the same response in us?

*sigh* No. Apparently not. Or perhaps it is just that we're divergent because we're not meant to *care* this much about a story. We're not meant to choose our own mythologies; we're meant to accept the ones we're handed.

Hope that makes sense. Must go now - road trip looms.

From:

maramcc.livejournal.com

I wrote a diatribe against slash fanfic a while back in one of my posts (shuffle shuffle, here somewhere, ah frell it), but as for "regular" fanfic, as a published author, I'd be flattered if anyone attempted it for any of my books.

Well, I THINK I'd be flattered, anyway. >:-D As long as the fanficcer doesn't stray so far from my characters/universe (my main reason for the anti-slash rant) that it no longer applies. But then, what can you do but shrug and hope others realize that it's crap? In that sense I don't have anything against fanfic that just builds on an established universe/set of characters. I've thought of plenty of fanfic myself, but mostly from the viewpoint of meshing two sets of copyrighted worlds (mine and... whoever else's!). I don't write it down, though. It's just something to pass the time when commuting or whatever.

Still, it's every creator's prerogative to accept fanfic or not. They have legal recourse to send out Cease and Desists to whomever they wish, but end up looking like meanies and ultimately send the fanficcers underground. So they don't really stop it.

Er, can't think of anything else profound or intelligent. Cheers!