One of the annoying things about writing fan fiction is that people keep asking, "Why don't you write a story of your own? You're so good, you could be published
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I may have some strong feelings about this issue. And I may be about to rant about them at length. Sorry.
Fanfic is writing, but it's not quite the same kind of writing as mainstream professional authorship. It is no better or worse, just different. Okay, yes, I do both, and I know that the professional world on the whole does not agree with me. But hey, the professional writing world can get a bit snotty sometimes. Fellow poets, for instance, get really snide with me if I mention that I sometimes write *gasp* so-called genre fiction. They act like it pollutes, or even invalidates, my other work. I shudder to think how they'd respond if I mentioned fanfic at all.
I think it's important to understand that fanfic fulfills a different need in the writers (if not the readers) than mainstream writing does. Mainstream writing is a solo endeavor. You craft your world and words and lay them out before the public when you're done, and even though it feels startlingly naked to have people reading what you've written like that, it's still an independent experience. Fanfic doesn't feel like that to me. Fanfic feels like the modern equivalent of ancient communal storytelling. Authorship the way we see it now is a fairly modern concept. Take Euripides, the classical Greek dramatist, for example. He was one of the original masters of the AU. In his play "Helen", he basically makes what we'd call a fannish fix-it to The Iliad in the name of romance. He had the Helen who ran off with Paris turn out to be a copy of the real Helen made by Aphrodite, while all the while the real Helen was stranded in Egypt and pining away for her husband. Menelaus naturally shipwrecks in Egypt on the way back home, and the expected happily ever after ensues. If Euripides was a modern guy, he’d be on fan comms arguing how Helen/Menelaus is the real OTP 4 eva, never mind that lying tramp Paris. Or how about Milton and his Paradise Lost? It's absolutely Bible fanfic. History’s full of examples like these. Stories used to belong to everyone, and adding one's own riff used to be the standard practice of bards and storytellers everywhere. I'm not saying our current way is better or worse, but things are definitely different now. The common myths of our culture have become our TV shows and movies. The urge to share in these stories, to add some of our own imaginations and voices to them, is natural.
There’s also slightly different sets of writing skills involved. In original fiction, you have to create your characters and settings, and make them real for your readers. In fanfiction, you need to do the reverse; you take settings and characters that are already real for your readers, and you have to find a way to expand upon them while still remaining true to the soul of the original canon. I’ve heard a few mainstream writers scoff at fanfiction, calling it “lazy.” They seem to think that if fanfiction writers were really talented, they’d go create their own worlds. But for one thing, plenty of us do also write in our own worlds. For another, anyone who thinks it’s easy to write in someone else’s world has never tried it. Also, as I’ve already said, it’s a different experience. Sometimes I want the Marco Polo-like thrill of mapping my own new world....but sometimes, I want to dive into the common toychest and leave a little of myself in some of the myths of my people. With a fair amount of fanfic writing behind me now, I can say for certain that it is real work. I look at my original and fannish pieces, and I can honestly say that I don’t think the fannish works are easier to write, or lazy, or any such damn snide thing.
We do not need to be commodified. We do not need to follow the recent fetish for the mainstream publication machine. We do not need to make our creative impulses fit into someone else's narrow ideas of what they should be with no regard for what and why we ourselves want to create. There are some really outstanding authors in the wide world of fandom, and I am totally including you in that number when I say so. And all such writers deserve to be taken as seriously as any author whose works may be bought at a bookstore or watched on a television screen.
Sweet Mother of Pearl, I love you. My favorite part is the "modern myth" part, but all of this is beautifully reasoned and put, dearheart, and I think you.
And this: We do not need to be commodified. We do not need to follow the recent fetish for the mainstream publication machine. We do not need to make our creative impulses fit into someone else's narrow ideas of what they should be with no regard for what and why we ourselves want to create.
Right now, I want to rewrite The Hobbit with Bilbo paired with Thorin, sometimes as a slash pairing, sometimes as a male/female. That's what I want to explore. That's what I want to use to hone my craft. I'm HAPPY.
Yes. Thank you. I try explaining this to my parents sometimes and it's difficult because first you have to make sure they understand what fanfic is and what it can be. My mom finally gets it after some of those very definitely fanfic flavored Jane Austen productions.
Fanfic to me is often like that last season on a tv show. Last seasons on TV shows are all about plot lines that they'd never try if there were going to be held accountable in later seasons for their actions. Television will take leaps, make grand gestures, as long as they don't have to maintain it because there are gatekeepers that Would Not Approve, but as soon as those gate keepers become irrelevant or the consequences no longer an issue, a lot of television shows go interesting places in that last season.
Fanfiction is a completely different type of story telling, partially because fanfic writers are not beholden to the gatekeepers of professional fiction. (Which okay, the minimum levels of spelling and grammar I'm happy for gatekeepers to enforce, even in fandom.) Fanfic is often exploration of what 'official' writers cannot or will not explore and I think that's what makes it fascinating. Because there are no budgets, no FCC, no Citzens for Moral Children's Books (if that one exists I want off the planet by the way) to answer to in the same way there is when your writing becomes part of a larger machine intent on making a profit just as much, if not more, than telling a good story. In some ways as much as I might fantasize about using a visual medium to tell my stories, the idea of having to deal with Television and Movie execs attempting to package me to palatable for as many people as possible is... disturbing.
Also the rampant versions of Sherlock Holmes at the moment are helpful examples, explaining, "they are just fanfiction with backing, and a big budget, BUT...they can't write whatever they want like I can."
And then I could use your argument! Thank you! <3
We don't have to make it "commercial," we just have to make it for us.
My most popular fic at the moment (the one with the most hits/subscriptions on AO3) is a romance from the male protagonist's POV. I am writing it because he's one of those repressed blokes whose head is very interesting to get into. But romance novels are universally from the female's point of view unless it's same sex.
Good point! One of the things I do love about my fannish work is that I can get away with writing things that I dearly want to bring to life, but that I know I can't sell. What's marketable and what's good aren't necessarily the same thing, alas.
Fanfic is writing, but it's not quite the same kind of writing as mainstream professional authorship. It is no better or worse, just different. Okay, yes, I do both, and I know that the professional world on the whole does not agree with me. But hey, the professional writing world can get a bit snotty sometimes. Fellow poets, for instance, get really snide with me if I mention that I sometimes write *gasp* so-called genre fiction. They act like it pollutes, or even invalidates, my other work. I shudder to think how they'd respond if I mentioned fanfic at all.
I think it's important to understand that fanfic fulfills a different need in the writers (if not the readers) than mainstream writing does. Mainstream writing is a solo endeavor. You craft your world and words and lay them out before the public when you're done, and even though it feels startlingly naked to have people reading what you've written like that, it's still an independent experience. Fanfic doesn't feel like that to me. Fanfic feels like the modern equivalent of ancient communal storytelling. Authorship the way we see it now is a fairly modern concept. Take Euripides, the classical Greek dramatist, for example. He was one of the original masters of the AU. In his play "Helen", he basically makes what we'd call a fannish fix-it to The Iliad in the name of romance. He had the Helen who ran off with Paris turn out to be a copy of the real Helen made by Aphrodite, while all the while the real Helen was stranded in Egypt and pining away for her husband. Menelaus naturally shipwrecks in Egypt on the way back home, and the expected happily ever after ensues. If Euripides was a modern guy, he’d be on fan comms arguing how Helen/Menelaus is the real OTP 4 eva, never mind that lying tramp Paris. Or how about Milton and his Paradise Lost? It's absolutely Bible fanfic. History’s full of examples like these. Stories used to belong to everyone, and adding one's own riff used to be the standard practice of bards and storytellers everywhere. I'm not saying our current way is better or worse, but things are definitely different now. The common myths of our culture have become our TV shows and movies. The urge to share in these stories, to add some of our own imaginations and voices to them, is natural.
There’s also slightly different sets of writing skills involved. In original fiction, you have to create your characters and settings, and make them real for your readers. In fanfiction, you need to do the reverse; you take settings and characters that are already real for your readers, and you have to find a way to expand upon them while still remaining true to the soul of the original canon. I’ve heard a few mainstream writers scoff at fanfiction, calling it “lazy.” They seem to think that if fanfiction writers were really talented, they’d go create their own worlds. But for one thing, plenty of us do also write in our own worlds. For another, anyone who thinks it’s easy to write in someone else’s world has never tried it. Also, as I’ve already said, it’s a different experience. Sometimes I want the Marco Polo-like thrill of mapping my own new world....but sometimes, I want to dive into the common toychest and leave a little of myself in some of the myths of my people. With a fair amount of fanfic writing behind me now, I can say for certain that it is real work. I look at my original and fannish pieces, and I can honestly say that I don’t think the fannish works are easier to write, or lazy, or any such damn snide thing.
We do not need to be commodified. We do not need to follow the recent fetish for the mainstream publication machine. We do not need to make our creative impulses fit into someone else's narrow ideas of what they should be with no regard for what and why we ourselves want to create. There are some really outstanding authors in the wide world of fandom, and I am totally including you in that number when I say so. And all such writers deserve to be taken as seriously as any author whose works may be bought at a bookstore or watched on a television screen.
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Wow.
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And this:
We do not need to be commodified. We do not need to follow the recent fetish for the mainstream publication machine. We do not need to make our creative impulses fit into someone else's narrow ideas of what they should be with no regard for what and why we ourselves want to create.
Right now, I want to rewrite The Hobbit with Bilbo paired with Thorin, sometimes as a slash pairing, sometimes as a male/female. That's what I want to explore. That's what I want to use to hone my craft. I'm HAPPY.
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I am glad you're happy and making things that delight you. What good is creativity if it doesn't feed our souls like that?
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Fanfic to me is often like that last season on a tv show. Last seasons on TV shows are all about plot lines that they'd never try if there were going to be held accountable in later seasons for their actions. Television will take leaps, make grand gestures, as long as they don't have to maintain it because there are gatekeepers that Would Not Approve, but as soon as those gate keepers become irrelevant or the consequences no longer an issue, a lot of television shows go interesting places in that last season.
Fanfiction is a completely different type of story telling, partially because fanfic writers are not beholden to the gatekeepers of professional fiction. (Which okay, the minimum levels of spelling and grammar I'm happy for gatekeepers to enforce, even in fandom.) Fanfic is often exploration of what 'official' writers cannot or will not explore and I think that's what makes it fascinating. Because there are no budgets, no FCC, no Citzens for Moral Children's Books (if that one exists I want off the planet by the way) to answer to in the same way there is when your writing becomes part of a larger machine intent on making a profit just as much, if not more, than telling a good story. In some ways as much as I might fantasize about using a visual medium to tell my stories, the idea of having to deal with Television and Movie execs attempting to package me to palatable for as many people as possible is... disturbing.
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And then I could use your argument! Thank you! <3
We don't have to make it "commercial," we just have to make it for us.
My most popular fic at the moment (the one with the most hits/subscriptions on AO3) is a romance from the male protagonist's POV. I am writing it because he's one of those repressed blokes whose head is very interesting to get into. But romance novels are universally from the female's point of view unless it's same sex.
A guy falling in love? Who would publish that?
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