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

[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).