Fanfiction and Dirty John
Dec. 8th, 2018 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Hmmm..
The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me, Fanfic and the Modern World
My experiences with fanfic and writing are VERY different.
So my perspective is slightly different.
I found hers interesting but....
I came into fanfic much later than most. When I was a kid the people who wrote fanfic were boys.
I wrote it in my head and did not talk about it. There was a murder in my community in the 1980s over Star Wars Fanfic. One teenage boy, Ralph, had convinced another, Leigh, that George Lucas was interested in filming his "Clone Wars" fanfic and wanted to buy the rights to it, with Ralph as the go-between. This boy, Ralph, was a con artist, who bilked Leigh out of thousands of dollars. Leigh found out and killed Ralph. It was fairly gruesome. There was a long article about it in the Kansas City Star around 1986. I wrote a short story about it years later. Also, in school, one of the guys in my theater class wrote a theaterical parody of Indiana Jones, entitled Idaho Jones, where all the male parts were female, and all the female parts were male. We performed if for area elementary schools.
It wasn't until my mid-thirties that I discovered fan-fiction and I came into it from a copyright and professional publishing perspective. At the time I was working at a library reference publishing company, as a rights and permissions manager. This was in 2001. I'd been on two copy-right centric list-serves, one was sponsored by the American Library Association and the other was with the content providers (Journals, Newspapers, Trade Publishers). My job at that time was acquiring rights to reproduce printed content and images in a series of online databases. Needless to say, the two sides did not see eye-to-eye, and the professional writing and publishing community felt threatened by fanfiction, they felt and perhaps rightly so -- that it was a potential infringement of their intellectual property rights. That someone was taken something they created and sweated over and co-opting it for their own personal gain. I remember having debates with another copyright and contracts specialist, who came from Oxford University Press and Penguine Books, she felt that fanfic was a clear infringement of copyright and illegal. I informed her it was only illegal if it was done for clear commercial gain and interfered with the original copyright or blurred it. She said -- if it is published on the internet and people can read it for free instead of the original book -- then it is interfering with that work. I argued that in the case of television, comic books, and film -- it was a different medium so most likely worked better as advertising for the original. She argued that this was a derivative work that competed with other "for purchase and legally acquired" works that were adaptations. I provided the "Fair Use" Doctrine as an example. She said there was no way in hell that a publisher would even consider publishing someone who wrote fanfic. This was in 2001.
When I discovered fanfic -- it was a revelation and it wasn't how I remembered it. I remember printing reams of it off at work and reading them on the way home. (Most of it was frankly godawful, but I didn't care. Although I swore if I saw the words "blond" or "brunette" or "redhead" in lieu of the character's name or he or she one more time, I was going to kill the writers.) In my experience -- you did not critique fanfic without getting clobbered. Squeeing was preferred. Meta -- you could criticize and rip apart and argue with, but fanfic was this holy thing that you dare not say too much negative about in the community. (I got into trouble more than once for doing constructive critiques of fanfic -- analyzing what worked and what didn't, why there was a plot hole, and how the characters were off here and there.) The fanfic that was considered great often catered to the fans perspective of the show or characters. (The most popular fanfic, I discovered had a lot of explicit sex. It's not that people didn't write generic fic or fic without a lot of sex scenes, they did, and I did, but few people followed it. And it was hard to get responses. The majority of the fandom seemed to want sex scenes and romance. I'm not certain why this was ...but that's what I noticed. I did read stuff that wasn't and most of the stuff that I read that did not have explicit sex was by far the better written fic. Read one that did an entirely different take on S6 -- where The Troika figured out how to manipulate Spike's chip and Willow is the one who gives him a soul. I rather preferred these to the porn with plot fic. )
As time moved on, an interesting phenomena happened or a shift...up until roughly 2008, fanfic had a stigma attached to it. I remember one on-line friend telling me that he had no issues with meta, but he had major ones with fanfic. He didn't understand how people could write it --- he saw it as a colossal waste of time. Then somewhere around 2008 and 2009, I began to hear the exact opposite. Something had shifted. Also, I ran into a woman who wrote RPF (Real Person Fanfic) and she informed me that the genre publishers were visiting various fan conventions hunting down fanfic writers, particularly Big Name Fanfic Writers with huge internet followings -- to help them become published writers. She said and I quote, "you should write fanfic, get a huge following, and that way they will publish your book."
What changed? Harry Potter and Twilight took fanfiction mainstream, with just a little help from the internet. JK Rowling permitted it for the most part, but she did stomp down on it -- when a few fans tried to go too far. Potter fanfic writers found ways to get published by ironing off the serial numbers and turning their AU fanfic into a published work -- all they did was change the names and polish it up a bit. Cassandra Clare is notorious in the Potter fandom for doing this with her stories. Twilight fanfic writers were similarly lucky in this respect -- they would write Everybody's Human Fanfic about Twilight, with lots of explicit sex, iron off the serial numbers, and publish it, with a scant bit of editing. If you think writing fanfic is a great training ground for writers -- go read 50 Shades of Grey, Beautiful Boss, and Cassandra's Clares novels and get back to me. While I'll concede EL James who wrote 50 Shades tried some interesting new things that she picked up from writing fanfic (which permits greater lassitude with writing formats, it isn't as strict and you can play more), I wouldn't say it was good writing or that she changed the trope or did anything all that interesting with her work.
That said, there are people who have -- but I don't think of them as "fanfic" writers. Cat Valente did some interesting things -- and was able to break out as a professional writer finally, but she did it with an original story on a web site that grabbed a large readership. It was not a fanfic. And CS Pascale did the same thing -- but is was NOT a fanfic.
The current world that we live in is not the same one of 2002. The climate has changed. Writing fanfic is no longer stigmatized, not really. If anything it is sort of celebrated. The detractors are dying off.
More than one famous and well-received writer has admitted to writing fanfiction. From Jane Espenson to Neil Gaiman. If anything, not writing fanfic or not being considered "great" at it in the fan community and elsewhere has had a far greater backlash.
Also, there's a lot of published fanfic out there. I know of at least twenty different adaptations and continuations of Pride and Prejudice, all fanfic. PD James just got her Pride and Prejudice fanfic turned into a movie. Wide Sagasso Sea is fanfic from Jane Eyre. The number of published stories that are riffs off of Shakespeare are legion. And if you follow superhero comics at all, you know there's a lot of fanfic, published fanfic about those characters.
As far as POC and LGBTQA stories go...the world has changed there as well. I've lost count of the number of POC and LGBTQA stories that I've seen on Amazon and Good Reads. Or in comics. Or in film.
We don't live in the same world that we did in 2001-2010. Things have changed in small and major ways. We can thank technological advancements for this -- I honestly don't think it could have happened without them. With great accessibility to information and the ability to self-publish whatever you want and send it out to a million reader with the blink of an eye, we're able to accomodate far more perspectives than ever before. I can write a romance novel about an African-American female veteran and a white slightly queer/gender fluid white male sex therapist, publish it myself, and not worry -- well too much. The publishing world can't censor me like they used to. They can't tell me what to write and they can't tell me what I can publish. Nor can any of you. That's huge. I may not make money off of it, but that's another discussion. By the same token, I can't stop people from openly discussing it, writing fanfiction about it, creating fan art, or developing fan vids on it. We live in the wild west in regards to intellectual property right now -- and it is making some folks decidedly nervous. Best to just ignore them and mosey on.
2. Tried the first episode of Dirty John and I'm not feeling the applause or acclaim for this series. It is sort of boring. I don't know what the critics are smoking, but whatever it is, I want some.
The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me, Fanfic and the Modern World
My experiences with fanfic and writing are VERY different.
So my perspective is slightly different.
I found hers interesting but....
I came into fanfic much later than most. When I was a kid the people who wrote fanfic were boys.
I wrote it in my head and did not talk about it. There was a murder in my community in the 1980s over Star Wars Fanfic. One teenage boy, Ralph, had convinced another, Leigh, that George Lucas was interested in filming his "Clone Wars" fanfic and wanted to buy the rights to it, with Ralph as the go-between. This boy, Ralph, was a con artist, who bilked Leigh out of thousands of dollars. Leigh found out and killed Ralph. It was fairly gruesome. There was a long article about it in the Kansas City Star around 1986. I wrote a short story about it years later. Also, in school, one of the guys in my theater class wrote a theaterical parody of Indiana Jones, entitled Idaho Jones, where all the male parts were female, and all the female parts were male. We performed if for area elementary schools.
It wasn't until my mid-thirties that I discovered fan-fiction and I came into it from a copyright and professional publishing perspective. At the time I was working at a library reference publishing company, as a rights and permissions manager. This was in 2001. I'd been on two copy-right centric list-serves, one was sponsored by the American Library Association and the other was with the content providers (Journals, Newspapers, Trade Publishers). My job at that time was acquiring rights to reproduce printed content and images in a series of online databases. Needless to say, the two sides did not see eye-to-eye, and the professional writing and publishing community felt threatened by fanfiction, they felt and perhaps rightly so -- that it was a potential infringement of their intellectual property rights. That someone was taken something they created and sweated over and co-opting it for their own personal gain. I remember having debates with another copyright and contracts specialist, who came from Oxford University Press and Penguine Books, she felt that fanfic was a clear infringement of copyright and illegal. I informed her it was only illegal if it was done for clear commercial gain and interfered with the original copyright or blurred it. She said -- if it is published on the internet and people can read it for free instead of the original book -- then it is interfering with that work. I argued that in the case of television, comic books, and film -- it was a different medium so most likely worked better as advertising for the original. She argued that this was a derivative work that competed with other "for purchase and legally acquired" works that were adaptations. I provided the "Fair Use" Doctrine as an example. She said there was no way in hell that a publisher would even consider publishing someone who wrote fanfic. This was in 2001.
When I discovered fanfic -- it was a revelation and it wasn't how I remembered it. I remember printing reams of it off at work and reading them on the way home. (Most of it was frankly godawful, but I didn't care. Although I swore if I saw the words "blond" or "brunette" or "redhead" in lieu of the character's name or he or she one more time, I was going to kill the writers.) In my experience -- you did not critique fanfic without getting clobbered. Squeeing was preferred. Meta -- you could criticize and rip apart and argue with, but fanfic was this holy thing that you dare not say too much negative about in the community. (I got into trouble more than once for doing constructive critiques of fanfic -- analyzing what worked and what didn't, why there was a plot hole, and how the characters were off here and there.) The fanfic that was considered great often catered to the fans perspective of the show or characters. (The most popular fanfic, I discovered had a lot of explicit sex. It's not that people didn't write generic fic or fic without a lot of sex scenes, they did, and I did, but few people followed it. And it was hard to get responses. The majority of the fandom seemed to want sex scenes and romance. I'm not certain why this was ...but that's what I noticed. I did read stuff that wasn't and most of the stuff that I read that did not have explicit sex was by far the better written fic. Read one that did an entirely different take on S6 -- where The Troika figured out how to manipulate Spike's chip and Willow is the one who gives him a soul. I rather preferred these to the porn with plot fic. )
As time moved on, an interesting phenomena happened or a shift...up until roughly 2008, fanfic had a stigma attached to it. I remember one on-line friend telling me that he had no issues with meta, but he had major ones with fanfic. He didn't understand how people could write it --- he saw it as a colossal waste of time. Then somewhere around 2008 and 2009, I began to hear the exact opposite. Something had shifted. Also, I ran into a woman who wrote RPF (Real Person Fanfic) and she informed me that the genre publishers were visiting various fan conventions hunting down fanfic writers, particularly Big Name Fanfic Writers with huge internet followings -- to help them become published writers. She said and I quote, "you should write fanfic, get a huge following, and that way they will publish your book."
What changed? Harry Potter and Twilight took fanfiction mainstream, with just a little help from the internet. JK Rowling permitted it for the most part, but she did stomp down on it -- when a few fans tried to go too far. Potter fanfic writers found ways to get published by ironing off the serial numbers and turning their AU fanfic into a published work -- all they did was change the names and polish it up a bit. Cassandra Clare is notorious in the Potter fandom for doing this with her stories. Twilight fanfic writers were similarly lucky in this respect -- they would write Everybody's Human Fanfic about Twilight, with lots of explicit sex, iron off the serial numbers, and publish it, with a scant bit of editing. If you think writing fanfic is a great training ground for writers -- go read 50 Shades of Grey, Beautiful Boss, and Cassandra's Clares novels and get back to me. While I'll concede EL James who wrote 50 Shades tried some interesting new things that she picked up from writing fanfic (which permits greater lassitude with writing formats, it isn't as strict and you can play more), I wouldn't say it was good writing or that she changed the trope or did anything all that interesting with her work.
That said, there are people who have -- but I don't think of them as "fanfic" writers. Cat Valente did some interesting things -- and was able to break out as a professional writer finally, but she did it with an original story on a web site that grabbed a large readership. It was not a fanfic. And CS Pascale did the same thing -- but is was NOT a fanfic.
The current world that we live in is not the same one of 2002. The climate has changed. Writing fanfic is no longer stigmatized, not really. If anything it is sort of celebrated. The detractors are dying off.
More than one famous and well-received writer has admitted to writing fanfiction. From Jane Espenson to Neil Gaiman. If anything, not writing fanfic or not being considered "great" at it in the fan community and elsewhere has had a far greater backlash.
Also, there's a lot of published fanfic out there. I know of at least twenty different adaptations and continuations of Pride and Prejudice, all fanfic. PD James just got her Pride and Prejudice fanfic turned into a movie. Wide Sagasso Sea is fanfic from Jane Eyre. The number of published stories that are riffs off of Shakespeare are legion. And if you follow superhero comics at all, you know there's a lot of fanfic, published fanfic about those characters.
As far as POC and LGBTQA stories go...the world has changed there as well. I've lost count of the number of POC and LGBTQA stories that I've seen on Amazon and Good Reads. Or in comics. Or in film.
We don't live in the same world that we did in 2001-2010. Things have changed in small and major ways. We can thank technological advancements for this -- I honestly don't think it could have happened without them. With great accessibility to information and the ability to self-publish whatever you want and send it out to a million reader with the blink of an eye, we're able to accomodate far more perspectives than ever before. I can write a romance novel about an African-American female veteran and a white slightly queer/gender fluid white male sex therapist, publish it myself, and not worry -- well too much. The publishing world can't censor me like they used to. They can't tell me what to write and they can't tell me what I can publish. Nor can any of you. That's huge. I may not make money off of it, but that's another discussion. By the same token, I can't stop people from openly discussing it, writing fanfiction about it, creating fan art, or developing fan vids on it. We live in the wild west in regards to intellectual property right now -- and it is making some folks decidedly nervous. Best to just ignore them and mosey on.
2. Tried the first episode of Dirty John and I'm not feeling the applause or acclaim for this series. It is sort of boring. I don't know what the critics are smoking, but whatever it is, I want some.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 08:44 pm (UTC)I think it was actually the other way around, but I definitely agree that these two fandoms were key, largely because they were both very widespread, particularly Potter, and dominated by very young fans. Those same young fans were growing up or born digital so they thought nothing of being quite public with their fandom.
It's not unlike what Harvey Milk said -- if more people came out the general public would support them because virtually everyone would know someone who was out.
And speaking of that, one thing that McGuire didn't really explore in her essay (which is fine, because it's not what it was about) is how closely that the mainstreaming of the LGBT community dovetailed with views of fanfiction, so I think you made a key connection there.
While I'll concede EL James who wrote 50 Shades tried some interesting new things that she picked up from writing fanfic (which permits greater lassitude with writing formats, it isn't as strict and you can play more), I wouldn't say it was good writing or that she changed the trope or did anything all that interesting with her work.
Hardly anyone seems to think it was well written although quite a lot of people found it a quick, interesting read. I've discovered the same with fanfic which is that if I like the author's approach enough, I can not only read virtually anything, I can also do so if the writing is not properly edited.
James didn't do the quality of fanfic any favors but she did make it impossible for it to be dismissed any longer. The amount of money made was astounding, and regardless of what people thought of the movies, they too did well. It certainly opened up a huge market for published erotica as well as fanfic participation.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 09:44 pm (UTC)James definitely took "Erotica" mainstream. How do I know? I stood waiting for the subway one day and listened to a woman go on and on to her boyfriend about how she didn't know anything like this existed and how cool was that? (I remember rolling my eyes and thinking, really? Honey, it's been free on the internet for the last fifteen years at least. But mainstream readers didn't know that it existed.)
James didn't do the quality of fanfic any favors but she did make it impossible for it to be dismissed any longer.
James, like it or not, also legitimatized fanfic and opened up the door for a lot of fanfic writers, including Seanane McGuire to get noticed. After James, publishers were combing cons for Big Name Fanfic writers. (Note only the big names were approached, you had to have a HUGE following. Because the publishers saw that as a ready-made readership or audience. And like it or not, the fanfic writers with the "biggest" followings were writers like EL James. I wouldn't say they were good, so much as popular.) I remember being told about this by various people in 2010, and walking in B&N, and finding row upon row of "push-to-publish" best-selling fiction that much like 50 Shades was based on Twilight fanfic. LOL! It blew me away.
Hardly anyone seems to think it was well written although quite a lot of people found it a quick, interesting read. I've discovered the same with fanfic which is that if I like the author's approach enough, I can not only read virtually anything, I can also do so if the writing is not properly edited.
I'm the same way. I was reading people online, my friends couldn't read. There is a lot of badly written stuff out there, fanfic and otherwise.
The difficulty is...that while there is well-written fanfic out there, a lot of its not written by "the BIG NAME Fanfic Writers", so falls beneath the radar. Popularity and being any good rarely goes hand-in-hand, or so I've discovered.
(There are also or so I've discovered quite a few award-winning literary novels, with great critical acclaim that are unreadable by mere mortals.)
Problem with the publishing industry -- and this has not changed over time --- is they want a best-selling book that can have lots and lots of marketing tie-ins, with very little effort. Basically they want a "Harry Potter". Think about Harry Potter for a minute -- that was a virtual gold-mine for Scholastic. I'm willing to bet the editors who turned that one down are pulling their hair out about now.
Basically they want a quick and easy sell.
And if you have a ready-made readership? They don't really care what you write. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to sell. And right now, the romance and YA fantasy market is the top seller -- and a lot of those writers were former fanfic writers.