Fanfic

[shadowkat]

1. 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.)

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?

Comments

[shadowkat]

I agree.

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.

[yourlibrarian]

And once your dead, it's pretty much everyones. (See Shakespeare.)

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.