Fanfic: fiction as dialogue?

[sartorias]

alecaustin has what I thought a very compelling question: here: what are the differences (in motivation & content) were between fanfic and writing that isn't fanfic but is still responding to/in dialogue with prior works?Wow. I think first I want to know what kind of medium. I've been listening to a lot of hip hop, and hoo boy do the artists there dialog

Comments

[dichroic]

Focusing in on the Baker Street Irregulars, I'd also ask about the same sort of difference between pastiche (which I think it's fair to describe as "the old word for fanfic") and the sort of essay BSI members seem to have spent countless hours on, determining that Holmes and Irene Adler had a son or that Watson actually had three wives and two wounds or that the mother in the story of the Yellow Face was herself of mixed race. In theory all of these are completely consistent with Canon, but in practice some of them are pretty far-fetched.

[sartorias]

Good questions indeed.

pastiche?

[marycatelli]

Heck no.

It's still a pastiche if you've filed off the serial numbers but it's no longer fanfic.

And some fanfic doesn't imitiate the works it is allegedly based on. (My fanfic-writing cousin tells of people whose stories have only the names and admit that they leave them in so people will read their stories.)

Re: pastiche?

[faeriemaiden]

Furthermore a lot of very excellent and commendable fanfiction is written in a completely different style than the original, while still remaining true to canon! :D I think -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that a pastiche would contain more conscious imitation, as it were: not necessarily a carbon copy of the original author's writing style, but something resembling it. Whereas some Harry Potter fanfiction I've read, for example, is more experimental, playing with tenses and word structure and story format and linear progression, as opposed to Rowling's fairly straight writing style.

[dichroic]

That rings true for me. I wrote a couple of crossover fics about Watson as a Squib that could as easily have been in an essay format.

[sartorias]

Yes--there are so many types of fanfic.

[lacylu42]

It seems to me that with almost any genre fiction, but especially science fiction and fantasy, every author is engaging with those that came before in a very basic sense. Will he or she follow the same tropes as other authors in the genre? Will she deliberately stay away from certain expectations or cliches?

I'm working on a fantasy novel with magic playing a central role and I find myself constantly asking, checking - have I seen this before? Is this how so and so did it?

[sartorias]

I'm thinking that a reread of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence might be useful here.

[marycatelli]

"In other words, whether a scene in which a dragon is introduced is affecting, amusing, or agonizingly dull depends primarily on the choices made by the scene's author. I say "primarily" because dragons have appeared in thousands of stories over the centuries, and almost any reader may be presumed to have been exposed to at least one such. The reader's reaction will naturally be influenced by how they feel this new dragon compares to the dragons which they have been introduced to in the past. (Favorably, one would hope. A dragon must learn to make a good first impression if it is to do well in this life.)"

From here

[alecaustin]

Good god, I'm being quoted.

...I really do sound like a pompous ass in that essay, don't I?

[taliabriscoe]

I think it's interesting that we have people like Jasper Fforde (of Thursday Next fame) and all of the homages to Austen (Bridget Jones, Austenland) that are considered just plain fiction and even get rave reviews from the critics. Yet "fanfiction" is still seen as a deragatory term.

It's almost like writing has is like classical music. Things in the public domain are fair game to reference and anything else is copyright infringement.

[taliabriscoe]

Mmm, I really changed my phrasing mid-stream there. My appologies. Hopefully everyone will get the gist.

[sartorias]

Despite the blip it makes perfect sense.

[taliabriscoe]

Oh, good. One DOES like to make sense. I wonder sometimes if all of the time spent negotiating with my four year old is starting to take a toll.

[tritoneclarinet]

Hmm... I think what fascinates me most are the fanfics that build off of other fanfics. Most specifically, a lot of fanfiction, at least in the HP-verse, builds off of fandom tropes and ideas that get picked up and included in other fanfiction until it's almost for all intents and purposes essentially the same as canon.

Recently I saw a discussion on WIKTT (Hermione/Snape shipping community) about the idea of "wards" in fanfiction, and how essentially they're never mentioned in the books themselves, but the concept (specifically spells that are placed around people or buildings to protect them from other spells/attacks from hostiles) is prevalent to the point that people can't figure out which piece of fanfiction brought it up first. These sort of little things are there to the extent that when I read the last couple of books I kept on having points where I thought "Yes, but fanfic explored this first" or "That's not right! Everyone knows that you can't do that!".

[sartorias]

Wards are Out There--I know I've been writing about them all my life. I'm sure I didn't invent them.

[thistleingrey]

Right, but if I'm understanding correctly, the issue is that JKR didn't bother to specify protective mechanisms for (say) the instructors' quarters in Hogwarts, so any HP fic writer who uses wards has picked them up elsewhere (er, elsewhence?). Often the fic writer has also rung a change of some kind upon how wards work.

I mean, if one just cast Alohomora at a door every time one wanted to open it, even the kindest teacher would've been subject to pranks a million times over....

[tritoneclarinet]

As someone who works with lots of kids, what I wouldn't give sometimes for a way to magically set up a barrier that would zap the kids/alert me if it was crossed....

(Says the woman who spent half the day trying to get the kids to stay off the podium in one of her camp's rooms, which is a known "out of bounds" area due to visibility issues.)