The thing of it is - how much validity does what you produce on the net have? I guess more than just writing things that never leave the comfort of your harddrive or notebook.
Surely all of it's valid. It's there, people can read it, might or might not reflect on it. Is that really much different from something on a library shelf--say, maybe it's in a section you aren't interested in but happen to be walking through, and the last time someone actually took it out was in 1963, but it just happens to catch your eye or something.
I struggle with the concept of fanfic - because it cannot exist (due to that pesky thing called trademark and copyright law) outside of fan interaction. Nor for that matter is anyone outside of fans of the particular show you are writing about, going to read it.
I'm not sure that matters; most dialogues--and fanfiction is nothing if not a dialogue, just as art as a whole is--take place among specialized audiences, or are intially intended "just for us" in that sense, whoever a given "us" happens to be. That doesn't lessen their value, I don't think.
(Also, you never know: I've never been that much of an UNCLE fan, but I still have fond memories of a Man from UNCLE fan novel I happened to read back in the eighties [The Nowhere Man Affair by Pauli Gilmore, I think?].)
How do we define being productive? Creating art? When it gets published? When it airs on TV? If so what about all those wonderful pilots that never aired (there's a theater in LA that shows some of them, I've been told).What about those films that get made but never find a distributor? Or the books that never find a publisher?
I tend to think that making it is the productive act. I used to be a slushpile reader at a publishing house, a couple of careers ago; while most of what I read in that capacity was indeed amazingly awful, there are four or five manuscripts out there I've read that, while so far as I know were turned down and will never be published, I feel privileged to have been exposed to--at some level, they've affected my inner experience. That's art. Something can be discovered years after the death of its author--or never discovered at all-but I don't think that makes it retroactively not-art.
Yet, is writing a story using someone else's universe, someone else's rules, someone else's character's - art?
Yes. Unequivocably. You can get more money (and if you're lucky, exposure) if you concentrate on your own creations instead, but whoever created the elements, the person creating that particular act of storytelling is committing art, I think.
How do we define productive? Money at the end of the day? Or changing someone's world outlook?
My guess (and that's all it is): Making stuff. That's all. Money you need, affecting someone's outlook you hope for, but I don't know that "being productive" necessarily requires either.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 04:44 pm (UTC)Surely all of it's valid. It's there, people can read it, might or might not reflect on it. Is that really much different from something on a library shelf--say, maybe it's in a section you aren't interested in but happen to be walking through, and the last time someone actually took it out was in 1963, but it just happens to catch your eye or something.
I'm not sure that matters; most dialogues--and fanfiction is nothing if not a dialogue, just as art as a whole is--take place among specialized audiences, or are intially intended "just for us" in that sense, whoever a given "us" happens to be. That doesn't lessen their value, I don't think.
(Also, you never know: I've never been that much of an UNCLE fan, but I still have fond memories of a Man from UNCLE fan novel I happened to read back in the eighties [The Nowhere Man Affair by Pauli Gilmore, I think?].)
I tend to think that making it is the productive act. I used to be a slushpile reader at a publishing house, a couple of careers ago; while most of what I read in that capacity was indeed amazingly awful, there are four or five manuscripts out there I've read that, while so far as I know were turned down and will never be published, I feel privileged to have been exposed to--at some level, they've affected my inner experience. That's art. Something can be discovered years after the death of its author--or never discovered at all-but I don't think that makes it retroactively not-art.
Yes. Unequivocably. You can get more money (and if you're lucky, exposure) if you concentrate on your own creations instead, but whoever created the elements, the person creating that particular act of storytelling is committing art, I think.
My guess (and that's all it is): Making stuff. That's all. Money you need, affecting someone's outlook you hope for, but I don't know that "being productive" necessarily requires either.