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I’ve thought for a while about organizing my opinions about fanfic into a post. The recent storm of controversy roused by this post by Diana Gabaldon, as well as this response to it made me decide to finally go ahead and do it.
ETA Ms. Gabaldon has deleted her entries on the subject; however some people have managed to keep them. See this thread for links. Or find it here on Google cache for a limited time.
What Fanfic Is (and Isn't) to Me
Fanfic isn’t:
- Illegal. There has been no court ruling to declare fan fiction, as such, to be illegal. And there is a host of legal and scholarly opinion that fan fiction is, in fact, covered under the “Fair Use” provision of copyright law. That may change at some point in time, but as this article points out, the courts may very well decide in fan fiction's favor!
- Plagiarism. Plagiarism is when someone passes off someone else’s work as his or her own! You cannot have plagiarism when you give proper credit to the creator(s) of the source material. Fan fiction by its very definition gives that credit.
- Theft from those who created the source material. Theft of what? Fanfiction takes nothing from the authors or producers of canon. Their books, shows or movies still exist and are still in their possession. Fanfiction makes no money, and especially no money that would have otherwise gone to said authors or producers. In fact, it could be argued that it actually makes money for them, as fanfiction writers are more inclined to shell out their own money for books, DVDs, and other fannish objects.
- Only pornography. While I would be the first to admit that there are thousands of pornographic fanfics on the Internet, there are also millions of pornographic books in the world as well. That does not mean every book is porn, anymore than every fanfic is porn. The very existence of the “gen” category for fanfic, and the popularity of gen groups and archives, proves that. While there are indeed those who are interested in writing or reading about explicit sex, that’s not exclusive to the fanfiction world.
- Only written by those who are incapable of using their own imaginations. First of all, it takes quite a bit of imagination to go beyond what the author of the source material came up with, sometimes with OCs or AUs that are wildly imaginative. Second, what makes people think that conventionally published authors are all that original themselves? See the link to the response above!
- Just “practice” for those who want to become published authors themselves. While it’s true that many fanfic authors harbor the ambition to become conventionally published in their own rights one day, there are a great many of us who have no interest in that at all.
- Only written by 12-year-olds; or bored housewives; or nerds who live in their parents’ basements. There are as many types of fanfiction writers as there are fandoms, and while a few may fall into the aforementioned categories, the truth is that they are a minority.
Fanfic is:
- A tribute to the source material. Why does fanfic exist? “Because there is never enough canon.” Those who write (and/or read) fanfiction want more, not just more of the same story (although they want that as well) but more of certain characters, or more of a certain world, or more explanations of that unexplained gap or anomaly.
- Transformative. Fanfiction is derivative by its very nature, it needs to be derivative in order to connect the fans that read it. But it also transforms the material from which it is derived into something more than it was.
- Creative. You can pick up a book or turn on the TV, and you can sit there and consume what you have been given, and then close the book or turn off the TV and forget about it. Or you can interact with the book or the show, by imagining new scenarios or new ways of looking at what you’ve been presented with. And if you have ever tried to figure out what happened “when it was all over”, that’s fanfic.
- Literary analysis. You can analyze a story by tracing the themes and motifs used by the creator, by finding out what influences were brought to bear, by picking apart the language. All of those are story-external methods of engaging with the source material. Or, you can try to figure out within the context of the story why a character did something, or how it was accomplished within the context of that world. And that is story-internal literary analysis, and a legitimate way of exploring the text.
- Filled with variety. In conventionally published fiction, there are novels. There are some short story markets, such as anthologies, but far fewer than in years past. Poetry exists only in a rarefied atmosphere. And as for short-short forms of fiction, the market is nearly non-existent. Contrast that to fanfiction, where one may find everything from lengthy multi-chaptered sagas, to vignettes, to fixed-length-ficlets such as drabbles, to poetry of every type. One may find stories that seamlessly emulate the source material, and stories that turn it on its head. Experimentation is welcomed, not shunned as “unprofitable”.
- A legitimate hobby. There are many creative things one can do as a hobby: one can paint, or knit, or make pottery, or embroider, or sew, or cook, or one of any dozens of other avenues for expression. And there are professional painters, needleworkers, sculptors, seamstresses and chefs. Yet do you hear any of them complaining when someone makes a hobby of their livelihood? Writing fanfiction for fun is just as valid a way of spending time as knitting a scarf.
- Open to everyone. Anyone with a computer, who is in any way literate, can post a fanfiction and find some readers. Now some may think this is not a good thing, but I think that anything that encourages people to read and to write is good.
- A way to foster a sense of community. There are more ways to get “paid” for one’s efforts than money-the appreciation of a review is a fanfic writer’s usual currency, but there is also the give and take of the fandom-the writing of gift fics and exchanges are another. Friendships begun in a fandom, and bonded over shared stories, can then transcend the fandom into real life.
- Essentially different in nature than “original fiction”. In fanfiction, context is everything. With most fanfic stories, if one is unfamiliar with the fandom, the story will not make a lot of sense-or even if it does, most of the subtext is lost. Because the writers and the readers share common knowledge of the source material, the writer can make use of that knowledge to give her story more impact, and more depth, in fewer words than can the writer of “original fiction” who must spend at least some time setting up her characters and her world.
I am quite sure that there are many other things that “Fanfiction isn’t” or that “Fanfiction is”. These are the ones that jump out at me.
My own fandom experience is neither as wide nor as deep as that of some people. I mostly write in only one fandom. I write gen, and fairly traditional gen at that. I do read in other fandoms from time to time if I am familiar with the canon, and I enjoy it.
I know there are those fanfic writers who have multiple fandoms, and those who have serial fandoms, and those whose fandoms are rare and obscure.
But none of that really matters, because all of them share one common experience: they love what inspires them, and they are passionate about that love. And so they write about it, and more power to them!
The fanfic writer is an amateur. Nowadays that has somehow come to have a bad connotation. But the real meaning of the word “amateur” is “someone who does something for the love of it, instead of for money”. At one time that was thought to be a Good Thing.
I may be hopelessly old-fashioned, but I still think it is a Good Thing.