Fanfic

[jhetley]

This topic keeps popping up like an internet ad, newsgroups and journals and such, so I thought I'd use it as space-filler here and see if I can stir up trouble.

I put a lot of time and effort into my characters and worlds. I'd like to get the maximum pay out of that time and effort. I don't know whether fanfic adds to or subtracts from the bottom line. But the concept makes me queasy.

Okay, this is where the men in the white coats ask me to come along quietly. That time and effort thing -- after I've lived with characters for a year, two or three or more in the case of connected books, those characters become _people_ to me. Real people with real personalities and histories, living real lives somewhere out there in another universe. I've written stuff that got cut out of the published edition, and as far as my backbrain is concerned, it still happened.

I'm often nasty to my characters. After all, torturing characters is part of an author's job, part of playing God. But somehow, having some _stranger_ playing God with my characters, my victims, making them do and say stuff out of character, STUFF THAT NEVER HAPPENED, turns me off in a big way. It feels like a violation of the character's integrity.

Not gonna call it "rape" because of PC considerations, but it _feels_ similar in kind if not in degree.

On the gripping hand, having one of my stories mean that much to a reader, be that real, there's no denying it would be a boost to the ego. Just don't let such perversions loose in the world and we'll get along.

Comments

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I don't like fanfic, and I never have, for just that reason. I think part of it has to do with how much de Lint's concept of numina, of characters becoming real in the Fields Beyond, really resonates with me. A great deal of fanfic feels, to me, like someone playing puppets with real beings. I don't really care when the subject is some cheesy tv show and the characters have all the depth of puddles to begin with. But a well crafted character, who leaps off the page and lodges in you, who has obviously lived in the original author's mind and heart for a long time...I find it incredibly creepy to see them manipulated by someone else. And I know I offend a lot of my fanfic writing friends with that view, but I can't help it. It's not an intellectual decision I've made, it's a strong gut reaction.

I know there is some very well-written fanfic out there but then my thoughts always turn to "why not take that skill and do something original with it?"

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

Going back a few decades, didn't "Tribbles" start out as something very similar to fanfic????

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Err. No.

"The Trouble With Tribbles" was a more-or-less direct steal of a sub-plot from Robert A. Heinlein's The Rolling Stones in which the twins, who have a mercantile bent, have invested in a breeding pair of so-called "flat-cats" which turn out to breed ever so much more rapidly than they had expected and were soon into everything.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Beat me to it.

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

Ah! Thank you!

I remember (of course, this could be totally a figment of my imagination) that one Star Trek episode was an "over-the-transom" unsolicited manuscript sent in by a fan.

Any idea if that memory is accurate, and, if so, which episode it was?

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I know there is some very well-written fanfic out there but then my thoughts always turn to "why not take that skill and do something original with it?"

A fair number of people eventually do. Lois McMaster Bujold is probably the most well-known, but there are a lot of contemporary genre authors who got started by writing fanfic. Marion Zimmer Bradley stated, in the introduction to one of her "Sword and Sorceress" anthologies, that several of her earliest stories were "shameless pastiches" (her own words) of authors she admired. Fanfic is a good way to practice the craft of storytelling -- structure, plotting, dialogue -- in a known setting with known characters. Then, if you want to, you can go on and start getting into the area of worldbuilding and character generation, rather than trying to develop all those different skills from scratch at the same time.

Another viewpoint: fanfic writing is a hobby. Some people want to go on and become professionals in their hobby area; others are content to do it for fun and non-profit; still others would find that trying to make money at it would destroy the fun. I don't think you have the right to tell a hobbyist, however skilled, that s/he should turn professional. I'm a pretty decent musician, but although I've written some original material, I mostly play songs written by other people. If you said something like the quote above to me about my music, I'd tell you to go to hell.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

First of all, I'm not sure how you make the leap between "original" and "professional." There are many, many writers out there who haven't gone professional who are writing solely original stuff. It's only in the last few years that I've met a lot of fanfic writers who thought of it as a way to learn to write. I do hope nobody gets the idea that the majority of writers start off using other people's work, because the vast majority that I know certainly don't.

I don't think playing cover songs is quite the same thing as fanfic. A better comparison would be painting; taking a painting from an artist who has worked on the craft for years, tearing it up to make a collage, and saying you were learning to become a better artist that way, or that it was just a hobby.

I'm not quite sure why people get so het up over a creator's feelings about his or her work and get so terribly offended by the writers who don't want their work fanficced. It seems odd that people somehow feel they have a proprietary right to something created by someone else. Yet outside the realm of the arts that sort of thing doesn't wash...I'm infertile and want a baby, that doesn't mean I get to kidnap yours and change the name and raise it as my own.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I think fanfic and music may live in different classes that overlap slightly. Music has always been performed by many more people than the composer/songwriter. The Beatles, The Doors, and others of the 60s rock generation were actually an inovation in writing much of their own stuff. Elvis didn't write "Hound Dog," for example -- he wasn't even the first to record it. Music _is_ performance, with those notations on paper incomprehensible to much of the audience. A novel or short story is an object, with the performance (hopefully) occuring in the reader's head...

[ccfinlay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can see the squeamish part happening. I think that's why I only did it once, and only touched a minor character from the original source material (who was a minor character in my story as well). It was the world-building part that fascinated me, and the chance to create backstory that explained a minor plot point in one of the original author's novels that got me started. All that stuff ended up being very easy to write out of the revision that I sold.

As for people doing it with my work, it hasn't happened yet, so I'm not sure how I'll react if it ever does. On the one hand, I like the idea that certain characters become part of a shared culture and experience among readers apart from the original work -- that's just very cool. On the other hand, there may very well be more I want to do with the characters. I found the whole reaction of certain fanfic writers to HP6 interesting in that respect, where there were people telling Rowling that she got the relationships between characters wrong... because she didn't tell the stories that the secondary writers had already written as extensions of the earlier works.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

"On the other hand, there may very well be more I want to do with the characters."

I know that's important in a lot of "careers." Rolanni and Kinzel will (probably) be mining their Liaden (TM) universe for years to come, with "new" stories filling in the history and extending unto the tenth generation. I've written three books now in the Stonefort series, and just started into the third of my Seasons. In both cases I have commercial reasons for objecting to other players in those sandboxes, as well as emotional ones.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

One of the problems for people who want to fill in the blanks in the Liaden Universe is that a bunch of those blanks are already filled... we *know* far more than we've published. We also have starts, bits, paragraphs, and mostly finished scenes sitting around. In some cases the scenes may never find a home, but they *have* happened for us, and for the characters...

Really, it's like the plans I have for the rest of my birthday cake, which sits in the freezer unused. I still want to taste it myself!