(no subject)
Adding to “fanfic vs. original fic”- discussion here spawned by Amyzoncom's thought-provoking post on the matter... come to think of it, actually I’m adding to Eliade’s brilliant comment or maybe I’m just merrily rambling away. Why do I post it here and not there? Because this is long and because I’m an idiot when it comes to using that pathetic little edit box...or rather I’m an idiot period. Oh, and speaking of idiocy, I apologize for deleting the comment within the thread but when I re-read what wrote yesterday night I was ready to go hide under the carpet and stay there.
Eliade wrote, “Perhaps there's some mysterious alchemy of visual and textual media that is key to making fan-fiction what it is.”
I'm sure there is. It's an alchemy that may also affect genre writing to a more than desirable extent. Talked to an editor friend a while back who was whining about the sh*t load of bad manuscripts that had landed on his desk that week. Said friend groaned he felt he could almost identify the favorite TV detective story of a writer from the pace and devices the author used to cut from scene to scene. He was joking, of course (ehm, I hope).
Yet, his remark reminded me of two manuscripts (polit-thriller) I read last fall (prep'ing for translation). It was an uncanny sensation when I realized I could effortlessly visualize them angle for angle, close-up, totale, and down to the last rotten special effect. (We’re not talking A or B-movie-material here. There aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to categorize them.)
We went on to bitch about the pros and cons of a literary style increasingly shaped by writers' viewing habits, and ended up speculating that such writers probably much rather dream of cashing in their film rights than selling a high number of copies. Needless to say, I found the whole subject somehow disturbing.
Eliade wrote, “So in a way, fan-fiction has the crutch of the visual medium to compensate for our loss of that panoptic, surround-sound imagination, to compensate for adulthood.”
Yep, would never be able to put it as eloquently (*Groan*, To me speaking English will always be like trying to talk fast and coherently with a bunch of marbles in my mouth), but here's an whole-hearted ITA.
As much as I concur, this still made me ask myself: What does it feel like *for me* to read fanfic?
When I start a fanfic-story, it's like tracing with the tips of my fingers, eyes closed, the texture of an intricate gobelin. The fingers tentatively run over the texture of knots and threads, they follow rough lines, smooth planes, silken threads until the picture unfolds in front of the mind’s eye. I may linger over a passage, savour a pattern, vaguely muse over its origins or variations, but then, the quality of a certain knot of metal filament surprises me and tempts me to open my eyes and examine it. There may be sloppy parts, or even holes, that make my fingers twitch, and make me want to stab my index finger through them but there's always the curiosity to get the entire envisioned picture. It's in fanfic, where I experience this pleasure derived from being familiar with canon/fanon-material, intertextual and metatext-references, and narrative techniques and almost sensual joy in effortlessly recognizing and relishing the subtleties of different creative and interpretative approaches.
Maybe this is just a geekish pleasure shared by readers/writers in the intimacy of a fandom corner, where they revel in hints and jargons no one out there in the world of the sane would get. But couldn’t it also be a four-poster-bed off the TV stage where literature and reception dismount from their commercial/academic/tell-me-what-to-think horses to get down and dirty in a passionate back and forth between meta-, inter- and subtextuality-colored sheets? Conceiving wickedly wilful pieces of insight with crippled feet and immaculate wings, with beady eyes and sensual mouths? Where kitty-soft furred plot bunnies are born with claws of steel?
Some fanfics may be graphic illustrations of points made in forum discussions, others explore a side of a character the series neglected, while a third group throws characters in an AU to see how their personalities interact when confronted with an entirely different type of problems aso. No matter where a fanfic comes from, in my mind, the stance of writer as reflected in his/her work creates a dialog between the reader and the writer on the fannish object and the role of reviews in fanfic-fandom testify to that. As a fanfic-reader I tend to take the time to read the reviews of other readers (AFTER having read the end of the story, I’m impressionable.) and sometimes, the reviews are just as or even more interesting. It's dialog, intellectual interaction, it's fun.
So, yes, familiarity with *the props* aids in building the fictional space of a story (alas, if I had known my ability to create imaginary worlds when reading would wane with age, I would have read even more in my teenage years. Nobody told me. Damn. ) but - for me - this is not what makes fanfic more attractive than original fiction. It beats ofic when it incorporates an entire dimension into the reading experience itself: The how, and maybe why, a writer deals with the material in a certain way. Might be the Austen-fan in me. Her writing was an intense dialog with a reader who did not merely read, identify, and walk off to buy the next book - eyes dilated. I'll enjoy a weird trip as much as the next addict but what makes me swoon is a writer who initiates sex with my brain while s/he fondles my linguistic taste buds.
OK, let’s not overdo it. There is crap out there, crappy crap, the crappiest of crap in terms of writing. But that is another aspect of fanfic I like. It’s inherent modesty. This is people trying. What, in this world of pretentious boredom, could possibly be sexier than people trying? (oops, there's that word again...sex. Apparently, good reading and *that* word have something in common... eroticism?)
Does that ruin me for "published literature"? Maybe. I expect more because I see what people are able to accomplish within the confines of fanfic. I do continue to read but I've become more critical and impatient of published authors and the more recent literary trouvailles of the culture vultures, at that. A lot of original fiction is alien to me and not a very enticing looking alien either... (See postmodern relativism, self-involved rambling, artificial smelling and fabric-softened PC-awareness and reactionary rediscovery of traditional values). I've caught myself gritting my teeth at a book, hissing "Get to the point, already!", making sarcastic pencil remarks in margins or even felt the itch to bitch in a letter to the author advising him/her to go take lessons in dialog writing (from a fanfic author). Haven’t though, I've yet to make myself a fool that way.
There still are authors that make my heart and brain tremble with joy but there are ten books I will toss aside for that one book that gets my imagination hot and bothered. - Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or Zeruya Shalev’s Man and Woman or Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. E.W. Heine’s Halsband der Taube has me caress the paper it’s written on. Thassilo von Scheffer’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis tears my heart and rebuilds it from shreds of flesh like the most lyrical of Greek love songs.
Umberto Eco lures me away from real life, but I doubt he’d feel flattered if he knew this is a trait he shares with Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and Douglas Adams. Matt Ruff’s rat king is one of my all-time favorite Big Bads.
I snicker at the incidental casualness that characterizes the leading ladies (of Fanny Morweiser, Ingrid Noll and Muriel Spark) when they plot their murders much in the way they plan tonight’s family dinner. I venture into the literal and figurative darkness of Mestre and Venice with Donna Leon, admittedly a temptation easily to succumb to, since I’m familiar with the cities.
The landscape of Italo Calvino When a traveler in a winter’s night... is not one you would ever find on a map but no less familiar... His novel tells of the adventures and failures of two people who search for a copy of Italo Calvino’s latest book “When a traveler in a winter’s night”. Drooling after the story the opening lines of which they’ve read at the first bookstore (all but the first page of the copy at the bookstore turn out to be blank). They set out to hunt for a complete copy of the story, only to find themselves in a literary and literal maze of seemingly original copies that all merely contain opening sentences of the sought-for story - but, oh bugger, not two openings are identical...
Getting carried away now. Doing the sanitary thing here: shutting up. The Resa *wanders off into the underwood, arms flailing, mutters incoherently*.
Eliade wrote, “Perhaps there's some mysterious alchemy of visual and textual media that is key to making fan-fiction what it is.”
I'm sure there is. It's an alchemy that may also affect genre writing to a more than desirable extent. Talked to an editor friend a while back who was whining about the sh*t load of bad manuscripts that had landed on his desk that week. Said friend groaned he felt he could almost identify the favorite TV detective story of a writer from the pace and devices the author used to cut from scene to scene. He was joking, of course (ehm, I hope).
Yet, his remark reminded me of two manuscripts (polit-thriller) I read last fall (prep'ing for translation). It was an uncanny sensation when I realized I could effortlessly visualize them angle for angle, close-up, totale, and down to the last rotten special effect. (We’re not talking A or B-movie-material here. There aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to categorize them.)
We went on to bitch about the pros and cons of a literary style increasingly shaped by writers' viewing habits, and ended up speculating that such writers probably much rather dream of cashing in their film rights than selling a high number of copies. Needless to say, I found the whole subject somehow disturbing.
Eliade wrote, “So in a way, fan-fiction has the crutch of the visual medium to compensate for our loss of that panoptic, surround-sound imagination, to compensate for adulthood.”
Yep, would never be able to put it as eloquently (*Groan*, To me speaking English will always be like trying to talk fast and coherently with a bunch of marbles in my mouth), but here's an whole-hearted ITA.
As much as I concur, this still made me ask myself: What does it feel like *for me* to read fanfic?
When I start a fanfic-story, it's like tracing with the tips of my fingers, eyes closed, the texture of an intricate gobelin. The fingers tentatively run over the texture of knots and threads, they follow rough lines, smooth planes, silken threads until the picture unfolds in front of the mind’s eye. I may linger over a passage, savour a pattern, vaguely muse over its origins or variations, but then, the quality of a certain knot of metal filament surprises me and tempts me to open my eyes and examine it. There may be sloppy parts, or even holes, that make my fingers twitch, and make me want to stab my index finger through them but there's always the curiosity to get the entire envisioned picture. It's in fanfic, where I experience this pleasure derived from being familiar with canon/fanon-material, intertextual and metatext-references, and narrative techniques and almost sensual joy in effortlessly recognizing and relishing the subtleties of different creative and interpretative approaches.
Maybe this is just a geekish pleasure shared by readers/writers in the intimacy of a fandom corner, where they revel in hints and jargons no one out there in the world of the sane would get. But couldn’t it also be a four-poster-bed off the TV stage where literature and reception dismount from their commercial/academic/tell-me-what-to-think horses to get down and dirty in a passionate back and forth between meta-, inter- and subtextuality-colored sheets? Conceiving wickedly wilful pieces of insight with crippled feet and immaculate wings, with beady eyes and sensual mouths? Where kitty-soft furred plot bunnies are born with claws of steel?
Some fanfics may be graphic illustrations of points made in forum discussions, others explore a side of a character the series neglected, while a third group throws characters in an AU to see how their personalities interact when confronted with an entirely different type of problems aso. No matter where a fanfic comes from, in my mind, the stance of writer as reflected in his/her work creates a dialog between the reader and the writer on the fannish object and the role of reviews in fanfic-fandom testify to that. As a fanfic-reader I tend to take the time to read the reviews of other readers (AFTER having read the end of the story, I’m impressionable.) and sometimes, the reviews are just as or even more interesting. It's dialog, intellectual interaction, it's fun.
So, yes, familiarity with *the props* aids in building the fictional space of a story (alas, if I had known my ability to create imaginary worlds when reading would wane with age, I would have read even more in my teenage years. Nobody told me. Damn. ) but - for me - this is not what makes fanfic more attractive than original fiction. It beats ofic when it incorporates an entire dimension into the reading experience itself: The how, and maybe why, a writer deals with the material in a certain way. Might be the Austen-fan in me. Her writing was an intense dialog with a reader who did not merely read, identify, and walk off to buy the next book - eyes dilated. I'll enjoy a weird trip as much as the next addict but what makes me swoon is a writer who initiates sex with my brain while s/he fondles my linguistic taste buds.
OK, let’s not overdo it. There is crap out there, crappy crap, the crappiest of crap in terms of writing. But that is another aspect of fanfic I like. It’s inherent modesty. This is people trying. What, in this world of pretentious boredom, could possibly be sexier than people trying? (oops, there's that word again...sex. Apparently, good reading and *that* word have something in common... eroticism?)
Does that ruin me for "published literature"? Maybe. I expect more because I see what people are able to accomplish within the confines of fanfic. I do continue to read but I've become more critical and impatient of published authors and the more recent literary trouvailles of the culture vultures, at that. A lot of original fiction is alien to me and not a very enticing looking alien either... (See postmodern relativism, self-involved rambling, artificial smelling and fabric-softened PC-awareness and reactionary rediscovery of traditional values). I've caught myself gritting my teeth at a book, hissing "Get to the point, already!", making sarcastic pencil remarks in margins or even felt the itch to bitch in a letter to the author advising him/her to go take lessons in dialog writing (from a fanfic author). Haven’t though, I've yet to make myself a fool that way.
There still are authors that make my heart and brain tremble with joy but there are ten books I will toss aside for that one book that gets my imagination hot and bothered. - Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or Zeruya Shalev’s Man and Woman or Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. E.W. Heine’s Halsband der Taube has me caress the paper it’s written on. Thassilo von Scheffer’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis tears my heart and rebuilds it from shreds of flesh like the most lyrical of Greek love songs.
Umberto Eco lures me away from real life, but I doubt he’d feel flattered if he knew this is a trait he shares with Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and Douglas Adams. Matt Ruff’s rat king is one of my all-time favorite Big Bads.
I snicker at the incidental casualness that characterizes the leading ladies (of Fanny Morweiser, Ingrid Noll and Muriel Spark) when they plot their murders much in the way they plan tonight’s family dinner. I venture into the literal and figurative darkness of Mestre and Venice with Donna Leon, admittedly a temptation easily to succumb to, since I’m familiar with the cities.
The landscape of Italo Calvino When a traveler in a winter’s night... is not one you would ever find on a map but no less familiar... His novel tells of the adventures and failures of two people who search for a copy of Italo Calvino’s latest book “When a traveler in a winter’s night”. Drooling after the story the opening lines of which they’ve read at the first bookstore (all but the first page of the copy at the bookstore turn out to be blank). They set out to hunt for a complete copy of the story, only to find themselves in a literary and literal maze of seemingly original copies that all merely contain opening sentences of the sought-for story - but, oh bugger, not two openings are identical...
Getting carried away now. Doing the sanitary thing here: shutting up. The Resa *wanders off into the underwood, arms flailing, mutters incoherently*.