Jim Hines speaks about Fanfiction

[sartorias]

Over here at his LiveJournal.

The take-away is that writers write.

(Curiously enough I recently read a YA novel that converses with fan fiction, by Rainbow Rowell, called Fangirl.)

Comments

[kalimac]

Sure, fan fiction can be good, bad, or indifferent, just like any other fiction. That a vast amount of it is perceived to be bad is due mostly to the low entry barriers. If an unknown writer posts a story about her original characters, perhaps nobody except her friends will be likely to read it. But if it's about Holmes or Star Trek or Harry Potter characters, then maybe a great number of people will read it, because that gives a starting point. (That's one way in which Jim is wrong: fan fiction can be easier to write. You have a ready-made set of characters and a milieu.)

My own objections to fan fiction have been grotesquely misread, but let's see if I can put them here with more success:

1) Publishing (not writing: publishing - and putting it on the open web is publishing) fan fiction based on the work of living authors who have expressed their disapproval of fan fiction of their own works, though perhaps not illegal, is stunningly rude and impolite towards the author whose work you love.

2) Abusing and insulting those authors for their objections, which is unfortunately extremely common, is even more rude and impolite, so much so that no condemnatory words are strong enough.

3) While I've enjoyed fan fiction based on other authors - for instance I've read a lot of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction with pleasure, and I've mentioned before that the script of the first Star Trek movie struck me as vastly inferior to a fan-fiction "what happened after" story I'd read a few years earlier - I am not personally very interested in fan fiction of my own favorite author, Tolkien.

That doesn't mean I object to its existence. It means it doesn't wet my own personal whistle, and I insist on the right for that to be so, regardless of the vehement orders I've gotten from fan-fiction boosters that I must embrace it. Three reasons:

i) The gap in ability between the fan-fiction writers and Tolkien is just too great. If there's ever any exception to this rule, I'll hear about it, because it will blow everybody's socks off. Peter Jackson doesn't even come close.
ii) To me, it isn't the "real" Middle-earth if it didn't come from Tolkien's brain. Maybe it satisfies your itch to fill in the gaps. It doesn't fill mine.
iii) As a Tolkien scholar, my brain is already filled up with the multiple alternative versions that Tolkien wrote. I don't have room to store much else without worrying that I'll start forgetting what came from where. I already see that happening to other scholars who can't distinguish what came from Tolkien from what came from Jackson.

[sartorias]

I enjoyed some Tolkien fan fiction back in the late sixties, when I was desperate for the experience to be renewed, and when I was a teenager, so my critical skills were even sparser than they are now. But I haven't read much since because yes, they don't have the Tolkien spark--I feel the same way about the published Jane Austen stuff. (None of which floats my boat, though I try them occasionally.) Actually, I've read much better Austen fan fiction than the published stuff.

The vexing subject of fan fiction based on characters and works of authors who have asked that it not be done is indeed, um, vexing. Fan fiction writers say, hey, you put it out there, that story exists in my head now, and I can play with it as long as I don't make money off it. Writers say, Please. This is my world, these are my characters, can you at least wait until I'm dead? I see both sides, and just stay out of a hot subject where no one cares what I think anyway.

The whole subject of fan fiction and creativity is fascinating to me, especially in the historical sense.

[lenora_rose]

It seems, as you say, decidedly more polite to leave an author's work alone if they publicly object. And there are certainly no words for being anything less than polite or kind to the creator of a work you care for enough to wish to riff on when they object to that particular form of appreciation. (There are plenty of reasons one could be rude to the creator of a work you admired, but they don't have ANYTHING to do with their policy on derivative works.)

I do think the ready made world isn't as much of an "easier to write" as you think, and for the same reasons you object to personally reading Tolkien fanfic. Having the love of the work doesn't mean having the grasp of the writer's vision. Many fanfiction versions of characters bear as much resemblance to the original writer's as you feel the attempts at Tolkien fanfic you've seen capture Tolkien. (I've seen more failures of Xander Harris than successes.) The milieu might be set but the new writer's vision of it may in fact fail to emulate it. It's a rare case when the change is improvement enough to be worthy in spite of failure to capture the original vision, and usually that comes when someone is writing fic to deconstruct something or consciously counter an objectionable point of canon, and therefore deliberately, not accidentally, recreating character or milieu. In short, the kind of imitation needed to truly capture someone else's creation is probably as hard as coming up with a wholly new figure yourself.

[kalimac]

That's a very good point. What it really amounts to is that it's hard to do this well, and that's certainly true.

[serialbabbler]

Hmmm... I wonder if trying to create fiction that imitates, but also extends, the original uses some of the same skills as trying to create an original artwork in the style of somebody famous. ("Original forgery" is such a nice oxymoron. I like that much better than "fake painting". Heh heh.)

In which case, yeah, that requires a heck of a lot of talent. I certainly couldn't do it.

[lenora_rose]

The web blog Makign Light has often had threads full of games of people writing scenes from one story in the style of another ("Lord of the Rings in the style of pick-you-own-writer" or "Marlowe in the Style of Marlowe" (where one was Kit and the other Philip). I looked on in awe, especially with the poetry ones. But I could never feel right joining in. Pastiche, at least conscious pastiche, is not my thing.

I've been known to say I write original fiction because it's easier (for me).