Fanfiction, Creativity, and Art
Apologies for not linking to various fanfiction articles that have sprung up all over the net recently; I've read a fair few of them, but I did not take notes.
As far as I see it, there are a number of issues that get conflated; I'd like to address them one by one.
These are my characters. I don't want anybody else to play with them
This is the argument I cannot refute because it's a very personal argument, and it incidentally happens to be one that I can fully subscribe to. Those characters, to me, are real. I've lived with them, and in their heads, for months and years. I know these people. When I get them wrong and a reader reads something into the text that I didn't put there, I will have written badly, but the character in all their complexity remains unchanged. When people write fanfic using those characters and their names and their relationships and their world, they will say things about them that are _wrong_ - events that never happened, make them say and do things that character never would, slander their name. So no, I don't want to read fanfiction about my characters, either, and I would prefer for it not to exist.
Gut level reaction. Don't argue with-. If someone then comes up and writes brilliant fanfic that nails a minor character perfectly, fleshes them out from the hints I've given, I'll probably adore it, _but that's for me to decide_.
It's not creative! It isn't art!
To me, these are two distinctively different statements.
We are likely to all agree that painting-by-numbers is neither creative (you just fill in the bits somebody else gave you in exactly the colour they told you to use) nor art (there's no decision-making involved and the product is not unique). There isn't even a great degree of craft involved in filling out the paint-by-numbers lines.
What about craft kits? Whether they're needlepoint or modelling - ships and planes, paper, whatever. You get all the material in a box, already prepared for you; you get detailed instructions on how to put it together. Is it creative? No. Is it art? Not really, since the end product is not unique - someone else with the same kit will put together something that looks the same and has the same components.
What about music? I take somebody else's instructions - printed as notes on paper - and play them in the order and according to the instructions I am given. Only I don't always do this, and -
this is the bit that is relevant to fanfic - there are enough gaps in the instructions for me to develop my own style, my own interpretation. Sometimes composers build this in - 'play a thriller here' they say, 'play a candenza there,' sometimes - as in baroque and jazz music - it is understood by everybody, composer and player alike, that what you have on paper are merely guidelines and you're supposed to embellish it and make it your own.
Musicians who don't improvise aren't creative. They don't compose music, they merely play it. But to say that they are not artists sounds... very, very strange to me. A trained listener can _tell_ who is playing a piece, who is singing a pop song. The results of musicianship are unique to that musician even when they attempt to play or sing exactly what is printed on paper just like everybody else.
If playing somebody else's music can be art - and I have a really hard time seeing how it cannot be - then writing in somebody else's world, using somebody else's characters must also be able to be art. (I'd make the distinction that both _can be_ , but aren't necessarily art - if a computer plays a piece of music it's not art; if a human being attempts to emulate a computer and brings nothing of their own to a piece of music, it's probably not art, either.)
Creation and Arrangement
This point is important enough to me that I want to pull it out again.
Some forms of art create from scratch. You compose a piece of music, you paint your own picture that you have made up. Others take what is already there - flowers, music, 3D models - and arrange them in new and innovative ways.
If I am honest, I don't see a great amount of difference between fanfiction and original fiction in this regard. Yes, fanfiction very obviously builds on one specific source, but original fiction is an endless dialogue with everything else that is written - common tropes, well-known works, stories-that-work-for-the-audience, archetypicial characters... The writers who most insist that they're creating something new! innovative! tend to be the ones that are producing the most derivative works IME - it's _hard_ to come up with something original, particularly if your brain is filled with cultural references and you rely on your first impulses instead of questioning every thought. Very often the people who put a new twist on old things - who ask 'what if' and explore - are the ones creating the most interesting things.
(Exhibit A: Yuki_onna's short story A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica.This combines well-known things (a fantastic world, an auction catalogue) and creates something new, unique, fascinating, and very, very good. I don't read many short stories, but if she weren't already on my list of authors I want to read, she'd now be firmly on it.)
From where I'm standing, the whole artistic space is a continuum that can be organised along separate axes, but the moment you try to pin art down, you're losing something, too.
For all of this, it remains that by writing fiction about other people's characters and in other people's worlds, you are limiting yourself to a certain audience of readers and to a certain place in publishing. There are many reasons why people write fanfiction, and many reasons _to_ write fanfictions; but every writer needs to decide whether this is what they want from their writing.
I'll make another post about the reasons later, as this got quite long.
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/38733.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.
As far as I see it, there are a number of issues that get conflated; I'd like to address them one by one.
These are my characters. I don't want anybody else to play with them
This is the argument I cannot refute because it's a very personal argument, and it incidentally happens to be one that I can fully subscribe to. Those characters, to me, are real. I've lived with them, and in their heads, for months and years. I know these people. When I get them wrong and a reader reads something into the text that I didn't put there, I will have written badly, but the character in all their complexity remains unchanged. When people write fanfic using those characters and their names and their relationships and their world, they will say things about them that are _wrong_ - events that never happened, make them say and do things that character never would, slander their name. So no, I don't want to read fanfiction about my characters, either, and I would prefer for it not to exist.
Gut level reaction. Don't argue with-. If someone then comes up and writes brilliant fanfic that nails a minor character perfectly, fleshes them out from the hints I've given, I'll probably adore it, _but that's for me to decide_.
It's not creative! It isn't art!
To me, these are two distinctively different statements.
We are likely to all agree that painting-by-numbers is neither creative (you just fill in the bits somebody else gave you in exactly the colour they told you to use) nor art (there's no decision-making involved and the product is not unique). There isn't even a great degree of craft involved in filling out the paint-by-numbers lines.
What about craft kits? Whether they're needlepoint or modelling - ships and planes, paper, whatever. You get all the material in a box, already prepared for you; you get detailed instructions on how to put it together. Is it creative? No. Is it art? Not really, since the end product is not unique - someone else with the same kit will put together something that looks the same and has the same components.
What about music? I take somebody else's instructions - printed as notes on paper - and play them in the order and according to the instructions I am given. Only I don't always do this, and -
this is the bit that is relevant to fanfic - there are enough gaps in the instructions for me to develop my own style, my own interpretation. Sometimes composers build this in - 'play a thriller here' they say, 'play a candenza there,' sometimes - as in baroque and jazz music - it is understood by everybody, composer and player alike, that what you have on paper are merely guidelines and you're supposed to embellish it and make it your own.
Musicians who don't improvise aren't creative. They don't compose music, they merely play it. But to say that they are not artists sounds... very, very strange to me. A trained listener can _tell_ who is playing a piece, who is singing a pop song. The results of musicianship are unique to that musician even when they attempt to play or sing exactly what is printed on paper just like everybody else.
If playing somebody else's music can be art - and I have a really hard time seeing how it cannot be - then writing in somebody else's world, using somebody else's characters must also be able to be art. (I'd make the distinction that both _can be_ , but aren't necessarily art - if a computer plays a piece of music it's not art; if a human being attempts to emulate a computer and brings nothing of their own to a piece of music, it's probably not art, either.)
Creation and Arrangement
This point is important enough to me that I want to pull it out again.
Some forms of art create from scratch. You compose a piece of music, you paint your own picture that you have made up. Others take what is already there - flowers, music, 3D models - and arrange them in new and innovative ways.
If I am honest, I don't see a great amount of difference between fanfiction and original fiction in this regard. Yes, fanfiction very obviously builds on one specific source, but original fiction is an endless dialogue with everything else that is written - common tropes, well-known works, stories-that-work-for-the-audience, archetypicial characters... The writers who most insist that they're creating something new! innovative! tend to be the ones that are producing the most derivative works IME - it's _hard_ to come up with something original, particularly if your brain is filled with cultural references and you rely on your first impulses instead of questioning every thought. Very often the people who put a new twist on old things - who ask 'what if' and explore - are the ones creating the most interesting things.
(Exhibit A: Yuki_onna's short story A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica.This combines well-known things (a fantastic world, an auction catalogue) and creates something new, unique, fascinating, and very, very good. I don't read many short stories, but if she weren't already on my list of authors I want to read, she'd now be firmly on it.)
From where I'm standing, the whole artistic space is a continuum that can be organised along separate axes, but the moment you try to pin art down, you're losing something, too.
For all of this, it remains that by writing fiction about other people's characters and in other people's worlds, you are limiting yourself to a certain audience of readers and to a certain place in publishing. There are many reasons why people write fanfiction, and many reasons _to_ write fanfictions; but every writer needs to decide whether this is what they want from their writing.
I'll make another post about the reasons later, as this got quite long.
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/38733.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.