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shadowkatThere's been several insightful posts online regarding the fight that erupted between professional writers and fanfic writers. I read the two main posts in question, although not all of the discussion. There were over 400 comments. One was by Fantasy writer George RR Martin, the other by romance novelist - Diana Galabadon - two published writers who did not like fanfiction.
Five things I want to convey to the published authors online who may or may not come across this post, but like to rant about fanfiction and self-publishing in the blogs to the great dismay, embarrassment and chagrin of their devoted readers and fans:
1. As you may be aware - the writing field is a competitive one. Everyone and their mother wants to publish their story. For every book that gets published 500 don't. That does not mean those books are awful and yours was great. Sorry to break your bubble - but the publishing industry does not work like that. It's like the movie industry in that way. It's not objective. It's not about love. They don't fall in love with your book - what they think most of the time is gee who will buy this, who can I market it to. The book industry is often driven by the trend of the moment. Be it a legal thriller or a vampire thriller. Sure great books get published now and again, but there are lot of great books that don't or not after years of pounding the pavement. John Grisham's best novel - he self-published. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole - got published post-humously and by the author's mother who struggled to do it. Literally pounded that pavement. Getting published doesn't mean you are good necessarily, it means you are persistent and have a lot of time on your hands that can be used to promoting, marketing and pushing your book.
2. Self-Publishing is NOT easy or cheap, it's wickedly hard work and cost more money and time than having someone else publish your work. Also there's a stigma attached to it, which makes it even harder. Unlike a published writer who has an editor, agent and publishing company to aid them in editing, marketing, and promotion of their work, a self-published writer has to do all of this themselves and hunt for people to help them do it. I know a lot of self-published writers, and to be honest, their novels are no better or worse than 75 - 80% of the one's that have been published. I also know what they go through and it makes the published author's life look like a cake-walk or a day in the park by comparison.
Several self-published authors if they are lucky eventually become published writers.John Grisham Beatrix Potter is an example, as is Kathryn Wall, and Janet Evanovich. But most aren't. The self-published writer pays upwards to $10,000 to get a book published, they take all the cost, and rarely make any money back. While the published writer can often make a living off of writing, the self-published writer has to work odd jobs in order to publish their work and it is considered an expense, one they often do not admit to. While the published writer has the prestige of getting books in bookstores or in libraries or even awards, the self-published writer has the stigma of reviewers refusing to read their work - because it is considered a waste of time or book stores refusing to carry them. The published writer can sit at a coffee shop all day long, linger, tap away at their laptop, and play with their cats or puppies, the self-published writer has to work a full-time day job, and writes whenever they can find a spare moment often on planes, motel rooms, late at night or early in the morning, right before they put in a full day at work.[ETC: This is not true of all published writers of course, but it does appear to be trues of quite a few - who have spouses, significant others, or grants that aid their income, or they are freelance writers. But unlike the self-published writer - they are not taking a portion of their salary to publish their book, instead their book being published is additional income. In other words - they gain, not risk losing money.]
Yet published writers, successful published writers like John Jakes, John Maxim, and others have the unmitigated gall to tell reviewers not to read self-published novels. John Jakes actually told a reviewer over lunch that self-published books were a waste of time. I have read self-published books that were better written than anything John Jakes has written in his lifetime. Yet he continues to get published. John Patterson and Tom Clancy don't even write their novels any longer - according to an article in the paper, they have ghost writers who help them, which may explain the quality or lack there-of.
3. Fanfiction despite what many published writers would like to believe is not illegal and it is older than they are. It has been going on since we started telling stories, it dates back to the legends, myths and oral narratives. How do you think urban legends got started? Someone told the orignal story of an event that actually happened to them and over time, as each new person tells it and makes the story theirs, or picks a thread of it that interested them, it gets embellished, bits and pieces added by each new teller, until well..urban legend. Folk tales and fairy tales are the results of narratives that have been retold and embellished by many different tellers. People would even take a minor character from one tale and create a whole new one. Such as say the Gypsey girl from The Snow Queen. Fanfiction dates back before the printing press. Before copyright law. It is NOT plagirism and it is NOT illegal. And it is not uncreative. It is also not something that should be belittled or degraded.
Also fanfiction is not solely written by women. A lot of men write it. I have a lot of men on my flist who write and have written fanfiction. And not just about male centric shows either, or not just adventure or action oriented. It's not as gender specific as people like to believe.
Under copyright law, fanfiction is only illegal if it is done for commercial gain, this does not include charity. And falls beneath the fair use clause. For example - if you decide to write a sequel to Catcher in the Rye - and publish it, getting money for it, then you are in violation of copyright law. Because Catcher in the Rye unlike the works of Jane Austen is not in the public domain. If on the other hand you write a fanfic about Catcher in the Rye on your livejournal or post to a web site for fanfiction, you are not in violation of copyright law and it is legal. You may also publish this fanfic in a fanzine which is distributed to fans possibly for a nominal printing fee and still not be in violation of copyright law. Copyright law only comes into effect if you are making money off the work in question or substantially depriving the original writer of money for their works. Since it is most often the opposite, most readers of fanfic tend to want more of the original author's work because of the fanfic - it does not deprive the original author of commercial gain but actually ensures they get more readers and get more money. In other words - Free Advertising. Which is why TV shows don't tend to care that much - they know the only reason Star Trek lasted far past it's cancellation date and was able to continue was well, fanfic, fanart, and fan conventions.
4. Fanfiction is in many ways a compliment to a writer, it means that someone out there has not only read your story, they actually loved it. Became obsessed with it. It played with their head. Became a part of them. They internalized aspects of it. THAT my friends is what most writers worth their salt dream about. To have a reader fall in love with your work or to have a strong emotional reaction to your work - means you did your job. Do you know how many books I've read that I can't remember the characters or story? How many I gave up one half-way through? Too many to count. The one's I loved, that I remember, that stick with me - are but a handful and without exception I've written fanfic in my own head about them. If I did not write fanfic in my head, did not write a meta in my head about a book, tv show, movie etc...then it probably didn't mean much to me and it's unlikely I'll keep it, rec it to someone else, or even bother to remember it.
As most published writers should be aware of by now - it is not booksellers, marketing people, etc that sell your novels or stories, it is your fans. Your stories are sold by word of mouth. It's no different than a post on a lj blog. You get new readers when friends post links or lurkers post links to your post on their lj. They rec you. It's by word of mouth or link that your writing or post is found.
So your fans are your life-blood. It's odd, but filmmakers, television writers, and comic book writers tend to have a bit more open view of fanfic than novelists do, possibly because they are more aware of the need for positive word of mouth. Marketing can only take you so far, without word of mouth? Particularly if you are cult show or film, with a nitch audience? You are dead in the water. Blair Witch was sold almost completely by word of mouth, same deal with Buffy.
Say what you will about Joss Whedon, but the man respects fanfic. He knows what it can do. Also a good portion of his co-writers and friends were fanfic writers. Jane Espenson wrote fanfic on Star Trek, and eventually got a gig writing for Deep Space Nine. Drew Goodard wrote Buffy fanfic, submitted a spec script for Buffy, using Six Feet Under, and got a job. In Hollywood it may be more acceptable - since you have to submit spec scripts on related shows to get in the door, not necessarily original tv show scripts. They want to know if you can write for established characters and an established universe. It's also a good skill to have for ghost-writers.
Granted, Hollywood can be twitchy about reading fanfic - but that's only because we live in a litigious society and fanfic writers have been known to sue Hollywood for stealing their ideas. The last one - I saw - was some hubbub over the Chosen script, at least I think it was that script, a fanfic writer stated that he wrote it as fanfic and Whedon stole it from him. (I found this rather funny at the time, and no it bore little resemblance.)
At any rate - published writers whining and ranting about fanfic is sort of akin to slapping your customers hands or slapping your reader across the face. Do you really think your reader who has paid money to read your story and invested time in reading it and enjoying it is going to read anything else you've written after you've slapped them for doing what exactly? Writing about one of their favorite characters anonymously on the internet to about 1500 fans, who as a result of reading said fanfic have now decided to read more of your stories? Do you think those fans will read your stories now? Do you think they'll want to? I mean I don't want to read George RR Martin right now, and I certainly will never read Anne Rice or Anne McCaffrey again.
Can you afford to lose these readers? Aren't they how you make your living? I mean we don't have to buy or read your work, we don't have to review it, we don't have to rec it to our friends and we certainly don't have to tell you we like it. Your liveliehood, dear writer, is based on our desire to read you. And there's hundreds of books and things we can do instead, our time is as precious as yours.
In short, if you are a published writer, while I respect the fact that you have the right to be upset about these things, at the same time - I think you should respect your readers and respect other writers who are not as lucky as you are. Too many published writers take the fact that they are published for granted. So you aren't at the top of the best-seller list? Big whoop. You are PUBLISHED. Someone is paying you royalties. Someone is paying to publish your work of fiction. And as a result people you've never met are reading your story. That's amazing. And you are being paid for it. My god, you are lucky. Do you know how many people would give anything for that? Who think that, being published and having people write, actually write fanfic stories based on their characters is akin to winning the lottery? Do you have any idea? I'm guessing not, or you would not be making a fool out of yourself and alienating these same people ranting about self-published writers and fanfic writers on your blogs.
Every time you do it? I make the decision not to read your books. Because honestly? Why bother. I've got other books to read, by writers who do respect these things and do not take the fact that they got published for granted.
5. Fanfiction is a way to improve writing skills and break writer's block. It's not unlike Role Playing Games, except you often are doing it by yourself. The Fanfic Writer is much like a child playing with paper dolls - using pre-established characters and setting to hone writing skills such as dialogue and plot. I wrote a fanfic once - as a means of seeing if I could do an entire story with just two people talking. No action scenes. I did another one to play with action and fighting scenes. I was suffering from a severe writer's block - the fanfic helped me free myself from that block. I've known people who have turned fanfic into original stories - they started with the fanfic characters then over time, bleed those characters out and built their own.
It is a creative enterprise. And most writers, not all, but most have done it. Many famous writers have published what amounts to fanfic. Joyce Carol Oates did a real person fanfic on Marliyn Monroe. Tom Stoppard wrote a fanfic play based on Shakespeare's Hamlet - entitled Roscrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. There's the recent spat of Jane Austen published fanfics. The famous fanfic based on Jane Eyre, entitled Wide Sargasso Sea. And of course, Ahab's Wife. People have fanfic based on the Bible, such as LAMB - by Christopher Moore.
Fanfic is a bit like dreaming - our mind is making sense of what we read, analyzing it, playing with it, turning upside down. It's no different than a musician taking a popular song, deconstructing it, changing it, smashing it with another one.
On a final note - many writers compare their novels to children and in a way they are like children, difficult, troublesome, require much feeding and taking care of, until they are finally ready to be sent out into the world to fend for themselves. But like children, once they are out there - we do not own them. The reader or whomever they meet may perceive them as they wish, interact with them as they wish, and love or hate them as they wish. Good parents like good writers have the ability to let their children go, they love them enough to share them, and to realize that the story much like a child is a gift. It's not ours. We may have had a hand in giving it life, but we didn't do it by ourselves, it may be part of our body, but it is also, assuming the story is worthy, part of the world around us. To deny others the right to see, perceive, relate to it as they will - is incredibly selfish on our part. It would be like putting a child in a plastic bubble, where he/she only sees and only receives what we give it.
Stories should not be possessions. Because when they become possessions they stop being stories, they stop being alive, thriving, and changing and twisting and enriching. They aren't real. They are dead, and over time, will be forgotten, dust, much like Ozymandias that great king whose legacy is little but dust in the wind...as the poet Percy Blysh Shelley so wisely related.
Think what would have happened to the tale of Sherlock Holmes or Dracula if no one could play with it. Would we have the stories by Laurie King, or for that matter Buffy the Vampire Slayer? The stories that stay with us are the ones that we are allowed to play with. It's well like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit - where the Skin Horse explains that the only way to become real is if a child plays with you, is allowed to love you, adore you, until your hair falls out and your joints become weak. A story that has fanfic written about it - survives. It becomes real.
It does not get encased in a glass case, fragile, like a trophy. Think of Harry Potter - how many fanfic stories...and that story lives on and on. Or Star Trek. OR Doctor Who, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Dracula, or even Sherlock Holmes.
The writer who denounces fanfic does not understand what stories are. What the point of telling them is. Fanfic is why you write a story - so that a child inside the adult reader can play with it and through their playing find their own meaning and possibly, just possibly, understand yours.
Five things I want to convey to the published authors online who may or may not come across this post, but like to rant about fanfiction and self-publishing in the blogs to the great dismay, embarrassment and chagrin of their devoted readers and fans:
1. As you may be aware - the writing field is a competitive one. Everyone and their mother wants to publish their story. For every book that gets published 500 don't. That does not mean those books are awful and yours was great. Sorry to break your bubble - but the publishing industry does not work like that. It's like the movie industry in that way. It's not objective. It's not about love. They don't fall in love with your book - what they think most of the time is gee who will buy this, who can I market it to. The book industry is often driven by the trend of the moment. Be it a legal thriller or a vampire thriller. Sure great books get published now and again, but there are lot of great books that don't or not after years of pounding the pavement. John Grisham's best novel - he self-published. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole - got published post-humously and by the author's mother who struggled to do it. Literally pounded that pavement. Getting published doesn't mean you are good necessarily, it means you are persistent and have a lot of time on your hands that can be used to promoting, marketing and pushing your book.
2. Self-Publishing is NOT easy or cheap, it's wickedly hard work and cost more money and time than having someone else publish your work. Also there's a stigma attached to it, which makes it even harder. Unlike a published writer who has an editor, agent and publishing company to aid them in editing, marketing, and promotion of their work, a self-published writer has to do all of this themselves and hunt for people to help them do it. I know a lot of self-published writers, and to be honest, their novels are no better or worse than 75 - 80% of the one's that have been published. I also know what they go through and it makes the published author's life look like a cake-walk or a day in the park by comparison.
Several self-published authors if they are lucky eventually become published writers.
Yet published writers, successful published writers like John Jakes, John Maxim, and others have the unmitigated gall to tell reviewers not to read self-published novels. John Jakes actually told a reviewer over lunch that self-published books were a waste of time. I have read self-published books that were better written than anything John Jakes has written in his lifetime. Yet he continues to get published. John Patterson and Tom Clancy don't even write their novels any longer - according to an article in the paper, they have ghost writers who help them, which may explain the quality or lack there-of.
3. Fanfiction despite what many published writers would like to believe is not illegal and it is older than they are. It has been going on since we started telling stories, it dates back to the legends, myths and oral narratives. How do you think urban legends got started? Someone told the orignal story of an event that actually happened to them and over time, as each new person tells it and makes the story theirs, or picks a thread of it that interested them, it gets embellished, bits and pieces added by each new teller, until well..urban legend. Folk tales and fairy tales are the results of narratives that have been retold and embellished by many different tellers. People would even take a minor character from one tale and create a whole new one. Such as say the Gypsey girl from The Snow Queen. Fanfiction dates back before the printing press. Before copyright law. It is NOT plagirism and it is NOT illegal. And it is not uncreative. It is also not something that should be belittled or degraded.
Also fanfiction is not solely written by women. A lot of men write it. I have a lot of men on my flist who write and have written fanfiction. And not just about male centric shows either, or not just adventure or action oriented. It's not as gender specific as people like to believe.
Under copyright law, fanfiction is only illegal if it is done for commercial gain, this does not include charity. And falls beneath the fair use clause. For example - if you decide to write a sequel to Catcher in the Rye - and publish it, getting money for it, then you are in violation of copyright law. Because Catcher in the Rye unlike the works of Jane Austen is not in the public domain. If on the other hand you write a fanfic about Catcher in the Rye on your livejournal or post to a web site for fanfiction, you are not in violation of copyright law and it is legal. You may also publish this fanfic in a fanzine which is distributed to fans possibly for a nominal printing fee and still not be in violation of copyright law. Copyright law only comes into effect if you are making money off the work in question or substantially depriving the original writer of money for their works. Since it is most often the opposite, most readers of fanfic tend to want more of the original author's work because of the fanfic - it does not deprive the original author of commercial gain but actually ensures they get more readers and get more money. In other words - Free Advertising. Which is why TV shows don't tend to care that much - they know the only reason Star Trek lasted far past it's cancellation date and was able to continue was well, fanfic, fanart, and fan conventions.
4. Fanfiction is in many ways a compliment to a writer, it means that someone out there has not only read your story, they actually loved it. Became obsessed with it. It played with their head. Became a part of them. They internalized aspects of it. THAT my friends is what most writers worth their salt dream about. To have a reader fall in love with your work or to have a strong emotional reaction to your work - means you did your job. Do you know how many books I've read that I can't remember the characters or story? How many I gave up one half-way through? Too many to count. The one's I loved, that I remember, that stick with me - are but a handful and without exception I've written fanfic in my own head about them. If I did not write fanfic in my head, did not write a meta in my head about a book, tv show, movie etc...then it probably didn't mean much to me and it's unlikely I'll keep it, rec it to someone else, or even bother to remember it.
As most published writers should be aware of by now - it is not booksellers, marketing people, etc that sell your novels or stories, it is your fans. Your stories are sold by word of mouth. It's no different than a post on a lj blog. You get new readers when friends post links or lurkers post links to your post on their lj. They rec you. It's by word of mouth or link that your writing or post is found.
So your fans are your life-blood. It's odd, but filmmakers, television writers, and comic book writers tend to have a bit more open view of fanfic than novelists do, possibly because they are more aware of the need for positive word of mouth. Marketing can only take you so far, without word of mouth? Particularly if you are cult show or film, with a nitch audience? You are dead in the water. Blair Witch was sold almost completely by word of mouth, same deal with Buffy.
Say what you will about Joss Whedon, but the man respects fanfic. He knows what it can do. Also a good portion of his co-writers and friends were fanfic writers. Jane Espenson wrote fanfic on Star Trek, and eventually got a gig writing for Deep Space Nine. Drew Goodard wrote Buffy fanfic, submitted a spec script for Buffy, using Six Feet Under, and got a job. In Hollywood it may be more acceptable - since you have to submit spec scripts on related shows to get in the door, not necessarily original tv show scripts. They want to know if you can write for established characters and an established universe. It's also a good skill to have for ghost-writers.
Granted, Hollywood can be twitchy about reading fanfic - but that's only because we live in a litigious society and fanfic writers have been known to sue Hollywood for stealing their ideas. The last one - I saw - was some hubbub over the Chosen script, at least I think it was that script, a fanfic writer stated that he wrote it as fanfic and Whedon stole it from him. (I found this rather funny at the time, and no it bore little resemblance.)
At any rate - published writers whining and ranting about fanfic is sort of akin to slapping your customers hands or slapping your reader across the face. Do you really think your reader who has paid money to read your story and invested time in reading it and enjoying it is going to read anything else you've written after you've slapped them for doing what exactly? Writing about one of their favorite characters anonymously on the internet to about 1500 fans, who as a result of reading said fanfic have now decided to read more of your stories? Do you think those fans will read your stories now? Do you think they'll want to? I mean I don't want to read George RR Martin right now, and I certainly will never read Anne Rice or Anne McCaffrey again.
Can you afford to lose these readers? Aren't they how you make your living? I mean we don't have to buy or read your work, we don't have to review it, we don't have to rec it to our friends and we certainly don't have to tell you we like it. Your liveliehood, dear writer, is based on our desire to read you. And there's hundreds of books and things we can do instead, our time is as precious as yours.
In short, if you are a published writer, while I respect the fact that you have the right to be upset about these things, at the same time - I think you should respect your readers and respect other writers who are not as lucky as you are. Too many published writers take the fact that they are published for granted. So you aren't at the top of the best-seller list? Big whoop. You are PUBLISHED. Someone is paying you royalties. Someone is paying to publish your work of fiction. And as a result people you've never met are reading your story. That's amazing. And you are being paid for it. My god, you are lucky. Do you know how many people would give anything for that? Who think that, being published and having people write, actually write fanfic stories based on their characters is akin to winning the lottery? Do you have any idea? I'm guessing not, or you would not be making a fool out of yourself and alienating these same people ranting about self-published writers and fanfic writers on your blogs.
Every time you do it? I make the decision not to read your books. Because honestly? Why bother. I've got other books to read, by writers who do respect these things and do not take the fact that they got published for granted.
5. Fanfiction is a way to improve writing skills and break writer's block. It's not unlike Role Playing Games, except you often are doing it by yourself. The Fanfic Writer is much like a child playing with paper dolls - using pre-established characters and setting to hone writing skills such as dialogue and plot. I wrote a fanfic once - as a means of seeing if I could do an entire story with just two people talking. No action scenes. I did another one to play with action and fighting scenes. I was suffering from a severe writer's block - the fanfic helped me free myself from that block. I've known people who have turned fanfic into original stories - they started with the fanfic characters then over time, bleed those characters out and built their own.
It is a creative enterprise. And most writers, not all, but most have done it. Many famous writers have published what amounts to fanfic. Joyce Carol Oates did a real person fanfic on Marliyn Monroe. Tom Stoppard wrote a fanfic play based on Shakespeare's Hamlet - entitled Roscrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. There's the recent spat of Jane Austen published fanfics. The famous fanfic based on Jane Eyre, entitled Wide Sargasso Sea. And of course, Ahab's Wife. People have fanfic based on the Bible, such as LAMB - by Christopher Moore.
Fanfic is a bit like dreaming - our mind is making sense of what we read, analyzing it, playing with it, turning upside down. It's no different than a musician taking a popular song, deconstructing it, changing it, smashing it with another one.
On a final note - many writers compare their novels to children and in a way they are like children, difficult, troublesome, require much feeding and taking care of, until they are finally ready to be sent out into the world to fend for themselves. But like children, once they are out there - we do not own them. The reader or whomever they meet may perceive them as they wish, interact with them as they wish, and love or hate them as they wish. Good parents like good writers have the ability to let their children go, they love them enough to share them, and to realize that the story much like a child is a gift. It's not ours. We may have had a hand in giving it life, but we didn't do it by ourselves, it may be part of our body, but it is also, assuming the story is worthy, part of the world around us. To deny others the right to see, perceive, relate to it as they will - is incredibly selfish on our part. It would be like putting a child in a plastic bubble, where he/she only sees and only receives what we give it.
Stories should not be possessions. Because when they become possessions they stop being stories, they stop being alive, thriving, and changing and twisting and enriching. They aren't real. They are dead, and over time, will be forgotten, dust, much like Ozymandias that great king whose legacy is little but dust in the wind...as the poet Percy Blysh Shelley so wisely related.
Think what would have happened to the tale of Sherlock Holmes or Dracula if no one could play with it. Would we have the stories by Laurie King, or for that matter Buffy the Vampire Slayer? The stories that stay with us are the ones that we are allowed to play with. It's well like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit - where the Skin Horse explains that the only way to become real is if a child plays with you, is allowed to love you, adore you, until your hair falls out and your joints become weak. A story that has fanfic written about it - survives. It becomes real.
It does not get encased in a glass case, fragile, like a trophy. Think of Harry Potter - how many fanfic stories...and that story lives on and on. Or Star Trek. OR Doctor Who, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Dracula, or even Sherlock Holmes.
The writer who denounces fanfic does not understand what stories are. What the point of telling them is. Fanfic is why you write a story - so that a child inside the adult reader can play with it and through their playing find their own meaning and possibly, just possibly, understand yours.
