Why Do I Feel Like Trash for Reading Fanfic
from Locus Magazine, May 2007
I wrote my first story when I was half-dozen. Information technology was 1977, and I had only had my mind blown clean out of my skull by a new flick called Star Wars (the golden age of science fiction is 12; the gold age of cinematic science fiction is half dozen). I rushed home and stapled a agglomeration of newspaper together, trimmed the sides down and then that it approximated the size and shape of a mass-market paperback, and set to work. I wrote an elaborate, incoherent ramble most Star Wars , in which the events of the pic replayed themselves, tweaked to suit my tastes.
Walk the streets of Florence and you lot'll notice a re-create of the David on practically every corner. For centuries, the manner to become a Florentine sculptor has been to copy Michelangelo, to learn from the master. Not merely the great Florentine sculptors, either — great or terrible, they all start with the principal; information technology can be the get-go of a lifelong passion, or a mere fling. The copy can exist art, or it can exist crap — the best way to find out which kind you've got within you lot is to try.
Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge, social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their kickoff with fanfic (and many of them nevertheless work at information technology in secret), and many fan-fic writers are happy to scratch their crawling by working just with others' universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic is great — there's plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the official, licensed tie-in novels — and some is purely dreadful.
Two things are sure well-nigh all fanfic, though: get-go, that people who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they're paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is bang-up news for writers.
Great because fans who are and then bought into your fiction that they'll make it their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to their friends, fans who'll seek out your work even so you lot publish it.
Nifty considering fans who apply your work therapeutically, to work out their own artistic urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even equally our numbers dwindle. Fifty-fifty when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken in the earth of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit.
In Nihon, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called dojinshi — some of these titles dwarf the apportionment of the piece of work they pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic publishers know a adept thing when they encounter it, and these fanficcers become left alone past the commercial giants they attach themselves to.
And yet for all this, at that place are many writers who hate fanfic. Some argue that fans have no business appropriating their characters and situations, that it's disrespectful to imagine your precious fictional people into sexual scenarios, or to retell their stories from a dissimilar indicate of view, or to snatch a victorious happy ending from the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with.
Other writers insist that fans who have without asking — or against the writer's wishes — are part of an "entitlement culture" that has decided that it has the moral right to lift scenarios and characters without permission, that this is function of our larger postmodern moral crisis that is making the world a worse identify.
Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad fine art and therefore unworthy of appropriation. Some call information technology copyright infringement or trademark infringement, and every now and once again, some loony will actually threaten to sue his readers for having had the gall to tell his stories to each other.
I'm frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Civilization is a lot older than fine art — that is, nosotros have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we've had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far in a higher place the everyday inventiveness of a child who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game.
To phone call this a moral failing — and a new moral failing at that! — is to plow your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that nosotros internalize the stories nosotros honey, that we rework them to accommodate our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with My Off-white Lady . Pygmalion is at least thousands of years former — think of Moses passing for the pharaoh'south son! — and has been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends.
Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original — no two tellings are just akin — and derivative, for in that location are no new ideas under the lord's day. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That's why writers don't really become excited when they're approached by people with great ideas for novels. We've all got more ideas than we can apply — what we lack is the cohesive whole.
Much fanfic — the stuff written for personal consumption or for a modest social group — isn't bad art. Information technology's just not art. It'southward not written to make a contribution to the artful development of humanity. It'southward created to satisfy the securely human demand to play with the stories that constitute our earth. There'southward nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends — fifty-fifty if the stories themselves are trivial. The human action of telling stories to one another is practically sacred — and it's unquestionably profound. What's more, lots of retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy's wonderful There and Dorsum Again (Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman's brilliant Globe Fantasy Award-winning Was (L. Frank Baum).
The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The ascendant mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the catechism — "Would Spock ever say that, in 'real' life?" What's more, fanfic writers will sometimes employ this test to works that are of the catechism, equally in "Spock never would have said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no concern telling me otherwise."
This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because it's difficult to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that your piece of work is the yardstick against which all other piece of work is to be measured — what could be more respectful than having your work made into the gold standard? On the other paw, this business of telling writers that they've given their characters the wrong words and deeds tin feel obnoxious or insulting.
Writers sometimes speak of their characters running abroad from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters — drawn from existent people in our lives and mixed upward with our ain imagination — are autonomous pieces of themselves. It's a short leap from at that place to mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who'd set them to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer herself.
There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if nosotros are likely to fight or fondle them. Information technology'due south unsurprising that when you lot enquire your brain to model some other person, information technology rises to the chore. But that'southward exactly what happens to a reader when you lot hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his caput, trying to interpret that character's deportment through his own lens.
Writers tin can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You tin't enjoy a novel that you oasis't interpreted — unless you model the author'southward characters in your caput, you can't care about what they do and why they do information technology. And once readers model a graphic symbol, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it'south agile reading.
Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an agile fanfic writing practise. Let's stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for them.
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Source: http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/05/cory-doctorow-in-praise-of-fanfic.html
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