How to Write Better Fan Fic
The grinding of gears on the "How to Write Better Fan Fic" panel at Chi-TARDIS has an obvious source: the differences between professional writing and amateur writing.
The first hurdle in discussing those differences is the connotations of "professional" and "amateur". If you bristled just at the sight of those words, you know exactly what I mean. To get over the hurdle, we need to borrow a page from academia, and forget about trying to define what kinds of writing are somehow valid or important or good while others aren't.
Professional writing, then, is any writing done with the intention of getting paid for it. (And presumably published, although it's not unusual to be paid for writing that never actually makes it into print.) It's easy to determine if a piece of professional writing is successful: the writer is paid for it.
Amateur writing is writing done without the intention of getting paid for it. By this definition, fan fiction is a kind of amateur writing. It's much harder to determine whether a piece of amateur writing is successful. Personal satisfaction, peer acclaim - there are numerous possible criteria.
(These definitions obviously aren't perfect, but they'll do for the purposes of this posting. Keep in mind that "professional" and "amateur" here refer only to the intention of the writer, not to the status or quality of the work.)
Because the two kinds of writing have different goals, professional writers and amateur writers need to use different methods in order to succeed.
And this is where the confusion stems from. In the Fan Fic panel, I started to go on (and on, and on) about the relative unimportance of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Now, this is good advice if your goal is publication. I suspect every professional goes through a phase where they worry way too much about the wrong stuff, the stuff that's relatively easy to see. But if you're gonna get a rejection slip, it's not gonna be because you didn't use an Oxford comma. There are a world of technical things that can go wrong with stories which have nothing to do with whether you stapled your ms or misspelled "Arcturus" throughout.
Crucially, though, it's not such good advice if your goal is not to take the money while someone else does the publishing. Publishers have a staff whose job it is to polish up your rough work, from the editor who works with you on major changes at all stages of the writing, to the copy editor who proofreads the resulting ms before it goes off to the printers (or goes up on the Web page). Amateur writers don't have the luxury of a team whose job it is to make them look good; they have to attend to that final polish themselves (perhaps with the help of a beta). So for the fanficcer, spelling, grammar, and punctuation take on more importance than they do for the pro.
That said, it's still possible for an fanficcer to overestimate their importance. There's little point in proofreading a first draft; save that polish for the final draft. If someone's story is boring as rocks, don't waste time on Britpicking, suggest some ways they can introduce conflict.
On the panel, we never did manage to get around to the topic of how to write better fan fiction. I was trying to give advice on how to get published, which actually isn't much use. The panellists, I think, needed to work out where the techniques of pro and amateur fiction overlap, and where they're distinct. A few examples did pop up: both fanfic and pro fic need good pacing; the fanficcer needs to worry about eagle-eyed readers swooping on small errors (perhaps, in this area, fanfic is more like technical writing or non-fiction writing than like pro fic?). What are the pleasures that fanfic writers derive from their work, what are the pleasures their readers want and expect, and how do these compare to pro fiction? Perhaps the next panel could have pro writers and fanfic writers each describing how they have improved their own work, then looking for the similarities and differences between the two approaches. I think that'd be fascinating. Certainly less fraught. :)
A postscriptum: a couple of panellists were certain there were legal precedents involving fanfic - can someone point me to those cases?
ETA: Something I meant to add about not proofreading first drafts - not only is this likely to be a waste of time, but it can be a positive danger. If you're really determined to get the best out of the story, you may find yourself having to cut out great swathes of text, or rip the whole thing up and start again - just moving the words about a bit may not be enough to solve major structural problems. Mind you, few of us have the time and energy to put fanfic through draft after draft in this way, whereas a scribbler hoping to escape the slush pile may have no other choice.
The first hurdle in discussing those differences is the connotations of "professional" and "amateur". If you bristled just at the sight of those words, you know exactly what I mean. To get over the hurdle, we need to borrow a page from academia, and forget about trying to define what kinds of writing are somehow valid or important or good while others aren't.
Professional writing, then, is any writing done with the intention of getting paid for it. (And presumably published, although it's not unusual to be paid for writing that never actually makes it into print.) It's easy to determine if a piece of professional writing is successful: the writer is paid for it.
Amateur writing is writing done without the intention of getting paid for it. By this definition, fan fiction is a kind of amateur writing. It's much harder to determine whether a piece of amateur writing is successful. Personal satisfaction, peer acclaim - there are numerous possible criteria.
(These definitions obviously aren't perfect, but they'll do for the purposes of this posting. Keep in mind that "professional" and "amateur" here refer only to the intention of the writer, not to the status or quality of the work.)
Because the two kinds of writing have different goals, professional writers and amateur writers need to use different methods in order to succeed.
And this is where the confusion stems from. In the Fan Fic panel, I started to go on (and on, and on) about the relative unimportance of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Now, this is good advice if your goal is publication. I suspect every professional goes through a phase where they worry way too much about the wrong stuff, the stuff that's relatively easy to see. But if you're gonna get a rejection slip, it's not gonna be because you didn't use an Oxford comma. There are a world of technical things that can go wrong with stories which have nothing to do with whether you stapled your ms or misspelled "Arcturus" throughout.
Crucially, though, it's not such good advice if your goal is not to take the money while someone else does the publishing. Publishers have a staff whose job it is to polish up your rough work, from the editor who works with you on major changes at all stages of the writing, to the copy editor who proofreads the resulting ms before it goes off to the printers (or goes up on the Web page). Amateur writers don't have the luxury of a team whose job it is to make them look good; they have to attend to that final polish themselves (perhaps with the help of a beta). So for the fanficcer, spelling, grammar, and punctuation take on more importance than they do for the pro.
That said, it's still possible for an fanficcer to overestimate their importance. There's little point in proofreading a first draft; save that polish for the final draft. If someone's story is boring as rocks, don't waste time on Britpicking, suggest some ways they can introduce conflict.
On the panel, we never did manage to get around to the topic of how to write better fan fiction. I was trying to give advice on how to get published, which actually isn't much use. The panellists, I think, needed to work out where the techniques of pro and amateur fiction overlap, and where they're distinct. A few examples did pop up: both fanfic and pro fic need good pacing; the fanficcer needs to worry about eagle-eyed readers swooping on small errors (perhaps, in this area, fanfic is more like technical writing or non-fiction writing than like pro fic?). What are the pleasures that fanfic writers derive from their work, what are the pleasures their readers want and expect, and how do these compare to pro fiction? Perhaps the next panel could have pro writers and fanfic writers each describing how they have improved their own work, then looking for the similarities and differences between the two approaches. I think that'd be fascinating. Certainly less fraught. :)
A postscriptum: a couple of panellists were certain there were legal precedents involving fanfic - can someone point me to those cases?
ETA: Something I meant to add about not proofreading first drafts - not only is this likely to be a waste of time, but it can be a positive danger. If you're really determined to get the best out of the story, you may find yourself having to cut out great swathes of text, or rip the whole thing up and start again - just moving the words about a bit may not be enough to solve major structural problems. Mind you, few of us have the time and energy to put fanfic through draft after draft in this way, whereas a scribbler hoping to escape the slush pile may have no other choice.