lengthy thoughts on fanfic

[swan_tower]

If you aren't aware of the Great Cassandra Claire Fandom Implosion, I won't inflict my own summary on you. This post will be sufficiently prefaced by saying that the million and one analyses and responses to that situation have sparked me to lay out my own thoughts on fanfiction. This will take a while, so you might want to get a snack first.

Point #1: Fanfic is illegal. Got that? This is the opinion of several people whose legal knowledge I trust, though I'm interested in learning about it for myself, and hope to sit in on a class this semester that will cover those kinds of topics. But you're borrowing someone's intellectual property when you write fanfic, and even if you don't make money from doing so, it's still against the law. This point is often missed by people who can't be bothered to pay attention.

Point #2: Having said that, any number of writers (both in print and media) are okay with you writing fanfic. It may be illegal, but it isn't worth anybody's time and money to sue you; a cease & desist letter tends to suffice when someone gets upset. And frankly, fanfic is a way for readers/viewers to engage more deeply with a story, and can even serve as a kind of grass-roots publicity, so just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's a bad thing. This point is often missed by people who feel persecuted when you tell them how the law works.

Point #3: The only thing that differentiates what we call fanfic from works such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is intellectual property law. Stop and think about it for a moment: they are the same thing. They just fall on one side or the other of the legal divide. In both cases, one writer is taking someone else's story and doing something with it. Maybe the story's a fairy tale and doesn't have a specific author; maybe it was written four hundred years ago and the author's long dead. Doesn't matter. You're still engaging in the same activity. The difference is your legal right to do it. Nothing prevents a work of fanfic from being as clever and witty as R&GAD, but the world tends to pass moral judgment on the former, and not on the latter. This point is often missed by those who want to claim that all fanfic is trash, but Stoppard's okay.

Point #4: Moving into the realm of opinion, I feel that it's good manners to respect the creator's wishes with regards to their intellectual property. If they don't mind fanfic, go for it. If they do mind, then be polite and stay away. If they don't mind fanfic but they object to certain kinds (frex, their underage characters having sex), then write about other things. Is there any force that can stop you from writing whatever you want? The same forces that can stop you from writing fanfic at all, which is to say that it probably won't happen (see point #2). But just because the author is willing to let you climb the fence and swim in her backyard pool doesn't mean you should pee in it.

Point #5: There is also a difference between fanfiction and plagiarism. The categories are fuzzy ones, of course, existing on a continuum. The small amount of fanfiction I ever wrote was generally of the sort where it took place in a world created by someone else, but involved my own original characters, perhaps with cameos by canon characters. I tended to be more interested in the possibilities of the setting than anything else. Other people write mostly about canon characters, perhaps with a Mary Sue or less irritating original addition. Maybe they cross one fandom with another, producing a Buffy/Highlander crossfic about the two groups of Watchers being the same. Maybe they allude to other fics. Maybe they even quote things. You hit the "plagiarism" line when you're Cassandra Claire, lifting not just characters, not just quotes, but extensive lines and scenes from other sources and not attributing them (then basking in the praise of people who say your ideas are so original and you write so well). I haven't followed that whole debate in full (I'm not sure any human being can, and I've not really tried, though I'm anthropologically fascinated by it), but what I have read included enough side-by-side textual analysis to persuade me that she did indeed rip off Pamela Dean and other writers far above and beyond what gets winked at in the illegal activity called fanfiction.

Point #6: If you're writing fanfiction to improve your craft, it will help you -- up to a point. You can refine your prose, dialogue, pacing, etc. as much in a fanfic story as anywhere else (provided, of course, that your dialogue isn't stolen wholesale). But it won't do much to help you develop characters, settings, and other large-scale elements of the craft. Its inherent intertextuality may get in the way of you learning to write a story that stands on its own. If your eventual goal is a writing career, there's nothing wrong with fanfic in principle, but there will come a time when you'll be better served devoting that time and energy to original work. And fanfic publication probably won't help you sell your own work, with two exceptions: one being work-for-hire media properties (where it may indeed net you a contract, if that's what you really want to do), and the other being (again) Cassandra Claire, who has landed a novel deal, apparently at least in part on the strength of her fanfic writing. (This, as you might guess, is a source of much of the brouhaha, and I fully expect to see the blogosphere descend on her first book like a pack of rabid weasels, waiting to catch her if she's plagiarized again.)

Point #7: How do I feel about this relative to my own position? As I said, I used to write a little fanfic, but not much; mostly I wanted to chase my own ideas. I haven't written any in years, though my mind will occasionally play with it for amusement. If Doppelganger fanfic or something based on a later book of mine starts appearing on the web, I will be flattered by the attention, and I'll probably let it go unless somebody tries to make money off it. I will not, however, read it, partially because I could subsequently stir up trouble if I later wrote something that resembled said fic, and partially because it would weird me out, watching someone else write about my characters. (No offense to y'all, but you'd probably get them wrong, relative to what's in my head. It's the nature of the beast. We don't see them the same way.)

Point #8: Hmmmm . . . I think I've hit everything I wanted to say for the moment, though I may return to this at a later date. Fanfic is a huge and complicated subject, with many byways I don't find particularly intelligent or attractive, but I issue no blanket condemnations against it. Just the occasional specific one, against specific acts of idiocy.

Comments

[dolphin--girl.livejournal.com]

Very good points. But my brain still sees a difference between fanfiction and something like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Largely, I think, because R&G is doing something neat that Hamlet isn't.

For the life of me, though, I can't tell you why I recognize them as completely different things. Maybe it's a biology thing -- if Hamlet is a wolf, R&G is the closely-related, most-museum-visitors-can't-tell-them-apart coyote, who's off occupying a different ecological niche than the wolf, and Hamlet fanfiction is a sheep that's put on some grey fur and pointed ears and is wandering around the wolf's territory going "arrooo".

Or maybe not. Again, this is the point at which my brain starts to hurt.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

They're different in degree rather than kind, IMO. R&G centers itself on minor characters; so do some fanfics. That doesn't make them substantially different from the fics that center on the main characters. Stoppard does a more complex job with his story than most fanficcers do, using it as the launching-point for some kind of weird metaphysical thoughts, but I still think he's doing the same thing. It's just that what he's adapting is in the public domain.

[kleenestar.livejournal.com]

I think there's a hugely important difference between something like R&G and something like most fanfic, though I think that difference doesn't adhere strictly to the line between "mainstream" countertexts/retellings and fanfic endeavors. The difference, to me, is that most fanfic (admittedly judging from my moderate store of personal experience) doesn't have much to say to people outside the fanfic community, and that the main reason for choosing to write in a particular universe is because the author likes it rather than because it's useful or necessary in some way to what they're trying to say.

In other words, I would argue that R&G - along with Wide Sargasso Sea, Wicked, and some of the well-written, well-thought-out fanfic that's out there - deliberately uses a particular world as its setting as part of a larger system of deliberate artistic choices which are skilfully carried through in the rest of the work. Much fanfic - along with that Gone With The Wind sequel and anyone writing in the Rainbow Six universe - is more about expressing the author's love for the world in question (or building on an existing fanbase) than about using it to convey anything meaningful to the reader.

Believe me, there's some BAD fanfic out there about stuff that's completely public domain. (Weirdly, it's immediately identifiable as falling on the fanfic side of the line; I wonder whether Jenkins or any of the other fandom scholars have tried to identify the attributes of the genre.) Have you checked the Bible fanfic communities lately? :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I could actually buy that as an alternative way of organizing texts -- instead of focusing on fanfic as riffs on copyrighted works and the others as riffs on the public domain (which is how it usually happens), you could use the term "fanfic" for those texts that don't seek to engage with an open audience, and have a separate term for derivative works that try to address people outside that pre-existing community. In other words, I disagree with you inasmuch as I chose R&G as a random example, and had I picked Scarlett instead, your point would not have stood (by your own assessment). But I think your point is a good one in a broader sense.

Still, when all's said and done, they're all works that involve playing in a sandbox someone else built. Which is the point I was trying to make.

[kleenestar.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, if you'd picked Scarlett I probably would have made rather a different argument. :)

I get your point about playing in other peoples' sandboxes, I just think it's also useful to consider the different ways for playing in them.

[dolphin--girl.livejournal.com]

I'm still "seeing" them as a difference in kind and not degree (though I would classify that godaful Oz book as fanfiction. Even if it had been good).

I can't describe it. I just look at them and know they're different. You know how some people see different numbers as different colours, or taste different sounds? Or Karina sees a story as a wonky spiral that wobbles? It's sort of like that. Fanfic, to me, looks (or feels, or smells, or whatever sense reading comprehension uses) different than works sourced in something previous.

The problem, I think, is getting into semantics of "what is fanfiction anyway"?

[teleidoplex]

A completely unrelated (and probably obnoxious) aside: technically wolves, coyotes and dogs are the same species. They can all interbreed and produce viable offspring. They've been classified differently because we like dogs, but we want to kill wolves and coyotes as vermin.

So, I guess your analogy would work if you said that Shakespeare is a dog (we love him!), Stoppard is a wolf (he may be dangerous, but he sure is cool!), and Hamlet fanfiction is a coyote (Damn vermin! Get me my shotgun...and a pie!)

[dolphin--girl.livejournal.com]

Writing geek is going to cede the floor to biology geek now...

I'd disagree with you on that one (wolves and dogs is arguable, wolves and coyotes no); if you use only the biological species concept when defining a species, that would make lions and tigers the same species too, as well as donkeys and zebras, cows and bison, false killer whales and dolphins, the ursinae bears, and I'm scared to venture out of mammals. We had to start using additional criteria when charting phylogeny, because the biological species concept alone just wasn't versatile enough once we started introducing species that wouldn't ordinarily meet to one another and discovering that they could produce viable and fertile offspring (and was never really useful for species that reproduce asexually anyway).

And some of us don't want to kill wolves and coyotes, and would rather reintroduce them into extirpated areas so we don't have to trap and kill as many beavers, which are flooding and destroying entire habitats without a predator to keep their numbers in check. ;o)

Heck, though, I can always change the analogy to moose, caribou, and... um.... wallaby-with-moose-antlers-tied-on-its-head going "uuuururrrggOOOOOhhhhhhh!!!!" [/bad moose call]