Fanfic controversy: loads of interesting misunderstandings...

[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*

Comments

Re: From Scapekid.

[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?