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shadowkat1. Hmmm...found on SmartBitches of all places... From Star Trek to Fifty Shades - How Fanfiction Went Mainstream
I personally preferred it when it wasn't mainstream. A heck of lot more interesting and far less watered down. Mainstream publishing doesn't like taking risks, it makes them itchy. That's why JK Rowling received so many rejection slips before Scholastic finally took a chance on her. (Can you imagine how the publishers who rejected her manuscript felt? I betting a few people got fired.)
I've watched the publishing industry go from "phoo-phooing" fanfic, stating out-right that it was copyright infringement to...finally embracing it as alternative revenue stream. When you can't beat them, join them.
What changed fanfic? The internet. I didn't know it existed prior to the internet. Or that I'd been writing my own weird versions of it as a kid. I remember and even wrote a short story based on a real life murder tale of two fanfic writers. They were teens, Ralph and Lee. Lee was a huge Star Wars fan, who came up with this story for a film about the Clone Wars. He had the whole thing mapped out and had written a script and everything. Ralp, a popular kid at school, befriended Lee and convinced him that he could get the script to George Lucas. Sell it to him. No problemo. They were best friends. Ralph ended up bilking over a thousand dollars from Lee. Total con job. Leigh found out and with the help of his mentally challenged brother, killed Ralph. It was horrible. This was in the 1980s in a wealthy suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, on the Kansas side.
Anyhow...I discovered its existence tooling around the internet in 2001. Found fanfiction.net, BAPS site, and various others...and discovered a wealth of stories about Spike, Buffy, and the characters in BTVS. At that time -- we didn't have the ability to binge watch television shows. They aired live, and if you were lucky you recorded them on VCR. DVDs were just beginning to pop up and were extremely expensive as were DVD players. (So I didn't own either). And F/X was re-running the old episodes of the series. But the new one's aired sporadically, with long breaks between cliff-hangers. So, off I'd go to spoiler sites to find information. Or essays or anything. And low and behold? Fanfic!
As a writer, I can't really write it effectively. I'm too...worried about getting the characters right. See, for me, a story happens when it starts playing like a movie in my head. That's what is happening now -- I have a movie playing in my head, surround sound, images, tactile, etc...I have to write it down before it goes away. Someone else's story doesn't tend to play inside my head -- it plays outside it. So yeah, I'll ponder what if? And I might tell myself stories about the characters and often do. I told myself the whole story of Anakin Skywalker as a child, which is one of the reasons I despised the prequels, outside of the fact that they were horrible. Fanfic can spoil a story, if the story doesn't live up to your own version of it or you like your version better. That happened to me with Buffy actually -- I wrote a fanfic in my head about Spike becoming human instead of getting a soul, and was rather disappointed when they did the opposite. I didn't write it on paper. Why? Self-conscious. Also it didn't feel like something I had to say.
I've begun to realize that people don't write for the same reasons. Or they don't write stories or even read them for the same reasons. I write a story because I have to get it out of me. It's like some demon that needs to be exorcised. I tell stories in my head for a lot of reasons. Most of those really don't need to be told and I like to keep private. For me, I preferred to play with a show or novel that had been written with meta not fanfic. Mainly because I'd been taught not to write fanfic about it. That's not to say I haven't broken that rule. I have.
I remember arguing with a guy at a fanboard meetup once. He was phoo-phooing fanfic. And I said, but how is it any different than some of stories or riffs writers like Shakespear did, or Joyce Carol Oates, or the various published writers who have reimagined characters from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Moby Dick, etc. And really isn't it just playing with characters and story? What's wrong with that?
He saw it as beneath him. But hell, a lot of people thought Dickens and Shakespeare were pulp back in the day -- they were, they were paid hacks who wrote for the masses.
And there's some really good fanfic out there. Stuff that blows your mind. Some of it is actually better than the published stuff. It breaks rules, plays with narrative structure, even pushes boundaries on how to write a sex scene or a fight sequence.
The copyright infringement is...difficult to determine. It does fall under the fair use clause in that it is just play, and for the most part doesn't infringe on the actual material, unless sold for commercial gain. While you could argue that Mortal Instruments and Fifty Shades of Grey borrowed heavily from original source material, they are still original works and their ideas/plots are not copyrightable, because they are generic. Most plots, actually all plots are generic, they've been done before. There's no such thing as an original plot. Characters yes, for the most part, many or just archetypes. Setting, yes. World, yes. Language and use of it, definitely. How the story is told? Definitely. Cassandra Clare may have borrowed heavily from Harry Potter, but in no way is Mortal Instruments comparable. Same with 50 Shades, it may have started out as a Twilight fanfic, but there's little of what made Twilight distinctive in it. Neither take away from sources that more inspired that copied from.
As Stephen King once put it, all good writers steal. The trick is to make certain when you steal, you make it enough your own that no one notices. Also stealing is the greatest compliment. We don't steal from things we hate.
I don't read a lot of fanfic now, mainly because the fanfic people are writing isn't about anything that interests me. The Marvel fanfic focuses on characters that I'm not interested in nor care about, so I don't bother with it. And I've lost interest in Buffy. Fanfic sort of requires interest in the characters and world.
The problematic nature of fanfic is the only thing original about it is how the writer creates it.
Everything else is pretty much stolen. The characters (unless they created new characters in there, which is dicey -- the readership tends to hate that, they aren't reading fanfic for your characters after all, they are reading for the established ones), the world (unless it's AU or Everybody's Human , in which case -- it is original), the setting (see world), and the mythology (see world). The plot may be new, but we already discussed that there were no original plots. So that leaves...how.
Which isn't a lot to go by. So as a result, Fanfic isn't considered original work.
Whether you write it or not has a lot to do with how you think and why you write. Most fanfic writers that I've met have never written an original work. Which is okay. No reason you should. It's not like there's a shortage of original content at the moment. Equally not that many original creators of content have written fanfic, a few have, most have not. The one's who have tend to be genre writers, although there are a lot of literary writers in there too.
My take is why not write it? Why not read it? It's fun and harmless. I'd personally consider it a compliment if someone wrote fanfic based on the book I published. I don't understand the people like Diana Galabondan, Anne McCaffrey and Ursula Le Quinn who got all upset about it. J K Rowling has been rather cool about it, for the most part. But they can't read the fanfic, if they do, they could get accused of stealing ideas from it. Again, why? I mean if you are a fanfic writer and you discover the original creator took your idea, wouldn't you be flattered? Why would you demand payment? You were stealing from them first. If you hadn't put it out there for free - they wouldn't have seen it.
Also you make it less fun for everyone else. If you want to make money, put on your grown up pants and write something original or just get a job like the rest of us. (Sorry, that has always struck me as absurd.)
At Worldcon there's apparently a panel discussion on the topic.
Author vs. Fan Ownership, room 210DH: How much do readers “own” the books they read? Writing is a private art intended for public display. Once the story is out of the writer’s hands, it can take on a life of its own–inspiring fandoms, fantheories, and fan interpretations that can vary widely from the author’s. How much do the fans own the work? Can you (and should you) divorce the writer from their fiction? What is the writer’s role in participating via social media in debunking or encouraging fan theories? Can the author be “wrong” about their own work? Our panel of authors and expert fans discuss the various and increasingly complex interactions between work, author, and reader.
I've never heard of any of the writers on the panel, except John Scalzi, whose post I swiped this from.
I think a reader does own the work to a certain extent -- it enters the readers head and once it does, they get to play with it and interpret it however they please. But they don't own the book or work in the sense that they can make mass copies and sell them or write new stories based on the work and sell them.
Yet, if you buy something shouldn't you be permitted to resell that copy or volume? Of course. I can't keep people from reselling my book on E-Bay. I doubt they'll make anything off of it. But still.
But should they be permitted to rewrite it and sell it as their own? No. Or take it wholesale and resell in mass as their own? No. (By the way someone did that to a writer on Amazon recently.)
Can an author be wrong about their own work? Well, yes and no. All art is open to interpretation. There is no one way or right or wrong way of interpreting a work of art. And everyone interpret it differently.
Curious, what does everyone else think?
I personally preferred it when it wasn't mainstream. A heck of lot more interesting and far less watered down. Mainstream publishing doesn't like taking risks, it makes them itchy. That's why JK Rowling received so many rejection slips before Scholastic finally took a chance on her. (Can you imagine how the publishers who rejected her manuscript felt? I betting a few people got fired.)
The divide between a fanfiction writer and an original fiction writer can look very arbitrary when looking at authors such as Michael Chabon, who once described his own novel Moonglow as “a Gravity’s Rainbow fanfic”. Or Madeline Miller, whose Orange-prize winning The Song of Achilles detailed the romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and whose latest novel Circe picks up on the witch who seduces Odysseus in the Odyssey. Miller said she was initially worried when one ex-boyfriend described her work as “Homeric fanfiction” but has since embraced her love of adapting and playing with Greek mythology. The tag could also be applied to classics such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, reworkings of Shakespeare by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Edward St Aubyn in the Hogarth series, and a spate of parodies: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Android Karenina.
What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.”
Others may find it odd that published authors would bother writing fanfiction alongside or between their professional work. But it’s all too simple to draw lines between two forms of writing that, in their separate ways, can be both productive and joyful. Neil Gaiman once wrote that the most important question an author can ask is: “What if?” Fanfiction takes this to the next level. What if King Arthur was gay? What if Voldemort won? What if Ned Stark escaped?
“I believe that all art, if it’s any good, is in dialogue with other art,” Novik says. “Fanfiction feels to me like a more intimate conversation. It’s a conversation where you need the reader to really have a lot of detail at their fingertips.”
I've watched the publishing industry go from "phoo-phooing" fanfic, stating out-right that it was copyright infringement to...finally embracing it as alternative revenue stream. When you can't beat them, join them.
What changed fanfic? The internet. I didn't know it existed prior to the internet. Or that I'd been writing my own weird versions of it as a kid. I remember and even wrote a short story based on a real life murder tale of two fanfic writers. They were teens, Ralph and Lee. Lee was a huge Star Wars fan, who came up with this story for a film about the Clone Wars. He had the whole thing mapped out and had written a script and everything. Ralp, a popular kid at school, befriended Lee and convinced him that he could get the script to George Lucas. Sell it to him. No problemo. They were best friends. Ralph ended up bilking over a thousand dollars from Lee. Total con job. Leigh found out and with the help of his mentally challenged brother, killed Ralph. It was horrible. This was in the 1980s in a wealthy suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, on the Kansas side.
Anyhow...I discovered its existence tooling around the internet in 2001. Found fanfiction.net, BAPS site, and various others...and discovered a wealth of stories about Spike, Buffy, and the characters in BTVS. At that time -- we didn't have the ability to binge watch television shows. They aired live, and if you were lucky you recorded them on VCR. DVDs were just beginning to pop up and were extremely expensive as were DVD players. (So I didn't own either). And F/X was re-running the old episodes of the series. But the new one's aired sporadically, with long breaks between cliff-hangers. So, off I'd go to spoiler sites to find information. Or essays or anything. And low and behold? Fanfic!
As a writer, I can't really write it effectively. I'm too...worried about getting the characters right. See, for me, a story happens when it starts playing like a movie in my head. That's what is happening now -- I have a movie playing in my head, surround sound, images, tactile, etc...I have to write it down before it goes away. Someone else's story doesn't tend to play inside my head -- it plays outside it. So yeah, I'll ponder what if? And I might tell myself stories about the characters and often do. I told myself the whole story of Anakin Skywalker as a child, which is one of the reasons I despised the prequels, outside of the fact that they were horrible. Fanfic can spoil a story, if the story doesn't live up to your own version of it or you like your version better. That happened to me with Buffy actually -- I wrote a fanfic in my head about Spike becoming human instead of getting a soul, and was rather disappointed when they did the opposite. I didn't write it on paper. Why? Self-conscious. Also it didn't feel like something I had to say.
I've begun to realize that people don't write for the same reasons. Or they don't write stories or even read them for the same reasons. I write a story because I have to get it out of me. It's like some demon that needs to be exorcised. I tell stories in my head for a lot of reasons. Most of those really don't need to be told and I like to keep private. For me, I preferred to play with a show or novel that had been written with meta not fanfic. Mainly because I'd been taught not to write fanfic about it. That's not to say I haven't broken that rule. I have.
I remember arguing with a guy at a fanboard meetup once. He was phoo-phooing fanfic. And I said, but how is it any different than some of stories or riffs writers like Shakespear did, or Joyce Carol Oates, or the various published writers who have reimagined characters from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Moby Dick, etc. And really isn't it just playing with characters and story? What's wrong with that?
He saw it as beneath him. But hell, a lot of people thought Dickens and Shakespeare were pulp back in the day -- they were, they were paid hacks who wrote for the masses.
And there's some really good fanfic out there. Stuff that blows your mind. Some of it is actually better than the published stuff. It breaks rules, plays with narrative structure, even pushes boundaries on how to write a sex scene or a fight sequence.
The copyright infringement is...difficult to determine. It does fall under the fair use clause in that it is just play, and for the most part doesn't infringe on the actual material, unless sold for commercial gain. While you could argue that Mortal Instruments and Fifty Shades of Grey borrowed heavily from original source material, they are still original works and their ideas/plots are not copyrightable, because they are generic. Most plots, actually all plots are generic, they've been done before. There's no such thing as an original plot. Characters yes, for the most part, many or just archetypes. Setting, yes. World, yes. Language and use of it, definitely. How the story is told? Definitely. Cassandra Clare may have borrowed heavily from Harry Potter, but in no way is Mortal Instruments comparable. Same with 50 Shades, it may have started out as a Twilight fanfic, but there's little of what made Twilight distinctive in it. Neither take away from sources that more inspired that copied from.
As Stephen King once put it, all good writers steal. The trick is to make certain when you steal, you make it enough your own that no one notices. Also stealing is the greatest compliment. We don't steal from things we hate.
I don't read a lot of fanfic now, mainly because the fanfic people are writing isn't about anything that interests me. The Marvel fanfic focuses on characters that I'm not interested in nor care about, so I don't bother with it. And I've lost interest in Buffy. Fanfic sort of requires interest in the characters and world.
The problematic nature of fanfic is the only thing original about it is how the writer creates it.
Everything else is pretty much stolen. The characters (unless they created new characters in there, which is dicey -- the readership tends to hate that, they aren't reading fanfic for your characters after all, they are reading for the established ones), the world (unless it's AU or Everybody's Human , in which case -- it is original), the setting (see world), and the mythology (see world). The plot may be new, but we already discussed that there were no original plots. So that leaves...how.
Which isn't a lot to go by. So as a result, Fanfic isn't considered original work.
Whether you write it or not has a lot to do with how you think and why you write. Most fanfic writers that I've met have never written an original work. Which is okay. No reason you should. It's not like there's a shortage of original content at the moment. Equally not that many original creators of content have written fanfic, a few have, most have not. The one's who have tend to be genre writers, although there are a lot of literary writers in there too.
My take is why not write it? Why not read it? It's fun and harmless. I'd personally consider it a compliment if someone wrote fanfic based on the book I published. I don't understand the people like Diana Galabondan, Anne McCaffrey and Ursula Le Quinn who got all upset about it. J K Rowling has been rather cool about it, for the most part. But they can't read the fanfic, if they do, they could get accused of stealing ideas from it. Again, why? I mean if you are a fanfic writer and you discover the original creator took your idea, wouldn't you be flattered? Why would you demand payment? You were stealing from them first. If you hadn't put it out there for free - they wouldn't have seen it.
Also you make it less fun for everyone else. If you want to make money, put on your grown up pants and write something original or just get a job like the rest of us. (Sorry, that has always struck me as absurd.)
At Worldcon there's apparently a panel discussion on the topic.
Author vs. Fan Ownership, room 210DH: How much do readers “own” the books they read? Writing is a private art intended for public display. Once the story is out of the writer’s hands, it can take on a life of its own–inspiring fandoms, fantheories, and fan interpretations that can vary widely from the author’s. How much do the fans own the work? Can you (and should you) divorce the writer from their fiction? What is the writer’s role in participating via social media in debunking or encouraging fan theories? Can the author be “wrong” about their own work? Our panel of authors and expert fans discuss the various and increasingly complex interactions between work, author, and reader.
I've never heard of any of the writers on the panel, except John Scalzi, whose post I swiped this from.
I think a reader does own the work to a certain extent -- it enters the readers head and once it does, they get to play with it and interpret it however they please. But they don't own the book or work in the sense that they can make mass copies and sell them or write new stories based on the work and sell them.
Yet, if you buy something shouldn't you be permitted to resell that copy or volume? Of course. I can't keep people from reselling my book on E-Bay. I doubt they'll make anything off of it. But still.
But should they be permitted to rewrite it and sell it as their own? No. Or take it wholesale and resell in mass as their own? No. (By the way someone did that to a writer on Amazon recently.)
Can an author be wrong about their own work? Well, yes and no. All art is open to interpretation. There is no one way or right or wrong way of interpreting a work of art. And everyone interpret it differently.
Curious, what does everyone else think?
The way I'm leaning, today.
Date: 2018-08-09 02:21 pm (UTC)Mentioning Shakespeare in your post is entirely appropriate. So much of what he wrote was reworkings of earlier stories by other people. We think of the works of Homer as being set in stone. But the very nature of oral tradition is adaption to suit the story teller and the audience. Fanfic is pretty much in the blood of civilization
The problem is, of course, trying to make a living on writing. This isn't the 1600s. Publishing of a sort is just a click of a button away. If anybody has the right to rewrite your story to suit themselves and then spread it around far and wide for profit, then the value of your original work declines dramatically.
Back in the 1980s when I was trying to write sci-fi for sale, there were times I truly hated the Star Trek franchise for burning through stories at a horrendous clip. If one of their stories came close to what you were working on you might as well throw everything out you may have been working on for years and start over because no publisher would touch it. It would be horrifying to be working long and hard on a story with characters you've already published to have somebody toss out to the Net a similar story with your own characters and decent writing, which could get some broad circulation. You'd be afraid to publish what was rightfully yours for fear of getting sued!
As much as I think fanfic is useful and important, I think it is just as important for would-be writers to use their own characters, unless they specifically *do not* attempt to make any money off of it. Writing fanfic and sharing it for the pure joy of reveling in a fictional world is fine. If you'd enjoy the thought of the professional writers taking your story, reworking it into cannon, and claiming it as their own, then you probably have the right idea about fanfic.
You have the right to interpret any story any way you want. But don't use other people's characters to tell your story. Just because you don't think the story went the way it should have, or in the direction it should have, doesn't mean you have the right to make money on your interpretation of it. Having a ready made audience is not an excuse for trying to make money off it. Change the character names and the setting, and no one will know you *stole* the much of the idea and no one will care.
Re: The way I'm leaning, today.
Date: 2018-08-10 12:21 am (UTC)A writer goes through a lot of work creating a story. Coming up with characters, motivations, world, etc. In a way fanfic is sort of a short-cut, you don't have to come up with any of that...it's a ready made world for you to play in. You don't have to make up the rules, you don't have to even describe the characters or create their back stories.
J K Rowling drew a line in the sand. Fanfic was fine. But no one was permitted to make money off of her work without her permission. She took a guy to court for trying to sell a Harry Potter Encyclopedia -- he'd created one on his site with annotations and links, which was fine as long as it was free and just for fans. The moment he tried to publish for financial gain -- she sued and won. She was creating her own encyclopedia and his work would compete with hers -- and he was using her creation to do it.
There's a huge difference between playing around and sharing with friends or social media friends, and getting applause...and well publishing for financial gain. The original writer shouldn't lose money or lose the rights to their creation because a fan decided to play with it.
While I don't mind if people write fanfic based on my published book. I do mind if they try to publish their own stories based on it without my permission. (Not that that will happen.)
no subject
Date: 2018-08-09 04:47 pm (UTC)As you've correctly commented on several occasions, different people perceive both visual and verbal information differently, sometimes radically, and how they process that information as relates to how they write can be just as widely varied.
What struck me as I read the comment above is that when I write, the scene doesn't really play out in the way it does for you-- I may visualize a scene, but not in a movie like way, it more a series of still photographs. I look at the photo, and then write a scene that describes it. Then I ask myself, where does this go next? If this character says or does what I've just put down, what is the next logical scene? The best I can describe the process for me is like a slow animation-- I create a cell at a time,then the next, then the next. It stops and restarts, it doesn't "flow". Also, I might first imagine, say, not a character or a spoken series of words, but a background, or even a piece of music. Whatever that invokes then sets up the next element of the total scene.
It's hard to describe, as you may have just noticed. I've long since noticed my brain is not "normal", for which, personally, I'm mostly grateful. ;-)
I've begun to realize that people don't write for the same reasons. Or they don't write stories or even read them for the same reasons. I write a story because I have to get it out of me. It's like some demon that needs to be exorcised.
Nope, not for me, see above re: my creative writing process. I get some seed of an idea in my head, which usually pops up out of nowhere, although I realize that it's likely been triggered unconsciously by some external source-- a sound, a spoken words or words, a fleeting image, whathaveyou.
If the idea is intriguing, I then extrapolate in it. Where does it go next? Then what? It's pretty linear for the most part, but it only reveals itself a step at a time. Where the story eventually ends up may be very different than how I first imagined it. Another analogy might be like putting together a picture puzzle without first seeing the entire finished picture, like if the box cover was missing.
But I'm rarely "driven" to write something, there's no demon to exorcise. Which, I'm certain, is why I only write very sporadically. Sadly, the other reason for my low output is that life realities, usually monetary, always seem to be intervening and I have neither the time, nor the basic energy levels, to engage properly in the craft.
I did greatly enjoy participating in the Angel Season 6 ATPo project some years back, so I certainly have no problems working in the fanfic world. I know there were a number of readers of that project who disliked the script format, but I somehow (see "brain", above) found it perfectly natural, and liked writing in that style. I'd love to write an original script for any good existing TV show or film production, so, is it no longer "fanfic" if they buy my script?
You know, in a couple of years someone could reboot the "Angel" series, either as TV or film, with new actors, of course, and I happen to think what our team wrote could make for an excellent story basis.
Anyone care to pitch it? Bueller?
Bueller?
no subject
Date: 2018-08-09 10:55 pm (UTC)That's actually fascinating. So you don't hear the dialogue or the characters in your head? They don't speak to you?
Mine sometimes won't shut up. I feel like I'm channeling them or something, like a conduit, but not sure from where exactly. Movie isn't probably the best description. It's hard to describe how one thinks to someone else, isn't it?
And we all think differently. My mind tends to see multiple outcomes. I can see every possible thread in a story, all the potential consequences of the characters actions and I sort of have to get my brain to focus on just one, to stop overthinking it. And intuitively I get a sense of where the characters will go next, and what they definitely won't do.
It's as if I feel the characters in me somehow.
Whereas it seems that you get an idea, and see a scene, and think okay..this is interesting where does it go next? If I'm understanding it correctly? I get that. I sort of do that as well. The story does jump off of..more a character or feeling of a character than an idea. Really hard to put into words.
If the idea is intriguing, I then extrapolate in it. Where does it go next? Then what? It's pretty linear for the most part, but it only reveals itself a step at a time. Where the story eventually ends up may be very different than how I first imagined it. Another analogy might be like putting together a picture puzzle without first seeing the entire finished picture, like if the box cover was missing.
Oh, I get that. You write to explore or figure out something? An idea or a puzzle? I do that too -- although that tends to be internet posts or meta essays. Actually all my essays regarding Buffy were sort of about that. I got an idea...about the show, I wanted to examine it with others, and felt writing about it was the best way to do it.
I also do that at times with stories -- I write to figure out something. Although most often, I'm channeling. The book I published was sort of a combination of figuring out something, working through some issues, and channeling a story at the same time.
no subject
Date: 2018-08-09 07:37 pm (UTC)The whole business of turning fanfic into profic is disconcerting to me.
One fic I read that got that treatment was an X-Men AU. I didn't care for the concept at all. To me, if you take away Erik Lehnsherr's backstory as a Holocaust survivor, you aren't writing the character at all. For some canons, I have a problem with nearly all of this type of AUs. It probably works better as a M/M romance novel than as fanfic. It was a wildly popular fic before it got taken down, so I'm in the minority.
The last fanfic to profic I read started out as an X-Files novel and was turned into a mystery novel. I could be wrong but I think she had always planned to "file off the serial numbers." (Because I already knew the basic plot, I didn't bother to review or even rate it.) I can't see it as objectively as I'd like but I can say she scrubbed it clean as a whistle. There isn't a whiff of the paranormal or MSR. She has a second book in the series coming out in December. She's an excellent writer and should do fine with her own characters, etc.
I don't get movies playing all of the time but sometimes stories do come to me all at once, out of the blue. It's almost like I'm just a conduit. More often, I have to work hard for the words to get on the page.
But should they be permitted to rewrite it and sell it as their own? No. Or take it wholesale and resell in mass as their own? No. (By the way someone did that to a writer on Amazon recently.)
Plagiarism is a thing with fanfic, too. People will take a story from an old fandom, change the names, the title, and a few minor details, move it to a new fandom, put their name on it and voila, insta-fic!
no subject
Date: 2018-08-09 10:42 pm (UTC)I don't get movies playing all of the time but sometimes stories do come to me all at once, out of the blue. It's almost like I'm just a conduit. More often, I have to work hard for the words to get on the page.
It's hard to describe how I get stories...I'm not sure the movie bit is an accurate description, conduit actually works better. A friend of mine thinks I'm channeling them -- although it's not clear from where exactly. I don't know how they pop into my head. Usually it starts as a germ of an idea...then becomes this weird stream.
And yeah, sometimes it's hard to put them on paper. When I was younger, I told them aloud. I needed to hear the story. My parents bought me a typewriter and told me to write it. It took forever for me to figure out how, to type and to write. Didn't get the hang of it until my thirties.
So I sort of get or grok where you're coming from on that.
One fic I read that got that treatment was an X-Men AU. I didn't care for the concept at all. To me, if you take away Erik Lehnsherr's backstory as a Holocaust survivor, you aren't writing the character at all. For some canons, I have a problem with nearly all of this type of AUs. It probably works better as a M/M romance novel than as fanfic.
I'd agree on that one. Erik either has to be Romano Gypsey whose family was killed in the Holocaust or Jewish and his family was killed. (I actually preferred the Romano Gypsey Holocaust survivor...mainly because it was different and pointed out that not just Jews who put in the camps. They weren't -- gypsy's, people who spoke out, homosexuals, anyone who didn't fit the regime were put in the camps.)
Erik's motivation is tied into the Holocaust survivor bit, it doesn't work otherwise. Also his disenfranchised minority status regardless of whether or not he's a mutant is well part of his character and adds a bit of irony to some of his actions.
Alot of AU fic actually works better as original fic with the serial numbers completely filed off. Particularly Everybody is All Human fic...where apparently the characters are basically posing as whole new characters. I see that a lot with AU and EIAH -- also RFP, where it's almost as if the writer has decided to use "Buffy", "Mulder", "Spock", "Spike", etc as a way of avoiding having to describe the characters or do much description at all.
The whole business of turning fanfic into profic is disconcerting to me.
Me too. Although someone accused me of doing it once on Good Reads. I didn't. The story may have started out that way but I changed it and all the characters before I hit the ten page mark. Mainly because I didn't think it worked as a fanfic...and decided to turn it into an original story. This was at a time in which I couldn't write or read anything but fanfic on Buffy and Angel. Writing the original story broke me out of that finally. And publishing that original story -- opened me up to other stories and writing them down as well.
I also learned that sharing stories with folks on the internet tended to give me wicked writer's block unless it was completed, fully betaed, and published.
I have read one fanfic to profic -- 50 Shades of Grey (which I found amusing, due to the narrative style -- she reproduced a contract complete with edits, text messages, etc. It was a distinct and hilarious style choice, particularly if you negotiate contracts for a living. The story itself was rather...uninspiring and sort of on the dull side. I was bored halfway through the second book. And thought she should have stopped at one.
Haven't really read any others. Most of the ones I've seen are basically erotica.
The writer is writing a sex fantasy with the characters in the lead roles. It's basically porn with plot -- which is true of a lot of fanfic.
Plagiarism is a thing with fanfic, too. People will take a story from an old fandom, change the names, the title, and a few minor details, move it to a new fandom, put their name on it and voila, insta-fic!
Oh this was prevalent in the Buffy fandom. One guy who I knew on a Buffy spoiler fan board got caught about two years after the show had been cancelled doing just that with Xander fanfic. Someone read his fic and thought, wait a minute, this feels a bit too familiar and did a comparison -- line by line. And realized he was snagging other people's fic. (It's harder to prove with fanfic to fanfic, mainly because a lot of it is similar merely by default. The characters, often plot, setting, etc...but if the sentence structure and language and style is the same -- hello, plagiarism.)
Another person on my correspondence list back in my lj days...got upset because she caught someone plagiarizing her fanfic. I remember telling her that there wasn't much she could do legally -- since hello, fanfic isn't exactly protected under copyright law, but you can do a lot via public internet shaming.
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Date: 2018-08-09 10:19 pm (UTC)But I think of created works in much the same way I think of actors who inhabit what have become massively popular characters. It's clearly a mixed bag for the actors. They may have entered the profession wanting to have certain kinds of careers and to do certain kinds of work. They may have failed to do so for any number of reasons -- considered the wrong type, being in too many failed projects, not getting enough opportunities of any kind, etc.
But in the end what they intended and what they will be remembered for are likely to become very different things and they have little control over that. I saw a quote the other day from Colin Firth where he said he knew that if he ever got to go to Mars the headline would be "Mr. Darcy Goes to Mars."
From the audience POV I can't think of anything better for an actor's immortality than to be linked to a character embraced by a large audience. Chances are they'll be happier if they embrace it in turn. And I think the same about an creator's work -- if it's embraced by an audience at all, regardless of the reasons, it'll likely be better than for it to be seen and remembered only by the narrow audience who interpreted it in exactly (and only) the way the creator intended.
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Date: 2018-08-09 11:12 pm (UTC)I guess we'd need to start with a definition of "own." In the legal sense obviously the answer is not at all. If we're talking about whether the writer is owed control of their work after its release, the answer is a maybe, depending on what sort of control we're discussing.
Interesting. I was trying to figure that out as well, what was meant by "own". Because really -- ownership is defined loosely. Under intellectual property law -- the author owns the copyright on the story, unless they sell the rights to it, then whomever they sold it to, does. (Example - Joss Whedon sold the rights to Buffy to the Kazui's, who in turn sold the television rights to Fox. Whedon doesn't own the rights at all, even though he's the creator. That's why he never cared that much what fans did with his work and even encouraged it - because he doesn't own it.)
So yeah, ownership is...well hard to define. And once your dead, it's pretty much everyones. (See Shakespeare.)
But I think of created works in much the same way I think of actors who inhabit what have become massively popular characters. It's clearly a mixed bag for the actors.
Interesting analogy. Never really thought of it that way before. But in a way it makes sense, regarding interpretation.
We really have no control on how others will interpret our work, what we say, etc. I wrote and published a book, and I sat and listened to people interpret it in ways that blew my mind. And I remember James Joyce once stating in a written interview that he didn't feel the need to explain his work, how others interpreted it...was the point.
My brother once told me that all art was interpretative and interactive. That the viewer/audience interacts with it and in doing so changes the art. He found it more interesting to see how the audience reacted to his art or art, than what was intended.
And in regards to actors...this is true as well. If you end up playing an iconic role that magically hits an audience in just the right way, there's very little you can do to get past it.
Anthony Geary struggled because he became over-identified with the character of Luke Spencer. He lost roles, because people refused to see him as anyone but Luke Spencer. So he had a love-hate relationship with the role. Yet, it also gave him an audience and opened up other opportunities.
Same with Leonard Nimoy who famously despised Spock, but finally embraced it.
And now, James Marsters, Colin Firth, David Duchovny, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and even Hugh Jackman. Their career were launched by their iconic portrayal of a role to such an extent that the audience couldn't separate them from that role. But if it weren't for that role -- they wouldn't have the career they've had. It's a catch-22. Colin Firth smartly embraced it early on, even appearing in the Bridget Jones movies as Helen Fielding's Darcy.
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Date: 2018-08-09 11:49 pm (UTC)And this, to me, is what it all comes down to. There are definitely people who would rather their creations die with them than have anyone else touch them. Others would be thrilled to think that 300 years from now they'd still be remembered as the creator of X.
And as absurd as our copyright extension laws have become, one day everything will be public domain (and depending on laws in other countries, they may already be). So to a certain extent everything will one day be owned by everyone and no one, so the only question will be will anyone even care or remember it?
There's also a different argument to be made, which is how much of that creative work owes its own debt to works that came before it. So to some degree any owner/creator can only be considered a temporary guardian of that work.
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Date: 2018-08-10 07:27 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnUweQf8wAI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJr8jexaq9o
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Date: 2018-08-11 02:41 am (UTC)She's such a hypocrite about it too...apparently she started out as a fanfic writer in the Doctor Who fandom. (LOL! That's why a lot of people were boycotting her for a while there.)