thoughtfulNot that it's hard to make me think about fanfic. Yesterday, for example, I spent a relaxing hour during my "lunch break" (a nebulous concept on a Sunday, admittedly, but since I worked all damn day, I wanted a lunch break) reading Glee fanfic. Most of it was Rachel/Quinn, which is not a 'ship I necessarily endorse on the show itself, but which has attracted some really awesome authors whose work I hugely enjoy. I became a professional author largely because I had been writing fanfic for so many years that I was eventually able to level up and start playing in my own sandboxes. I love fanfic. I love it. And because I've been thinking about fanfic, I wanted to make a few statements about fanfic.
Fanfic can teach you how to write.
I'm serious. If you have a good critique group, usually referred to as "beta readers," to go over your work before you post it, fanfic can be a great tool for learning how to put together a good sentence, a good paragraph, and a good overall narrative. You have to be ready to hear criticism, because the fanfic community is also a great place to go for unrelenting praise, but if you're ready, the tools for improvement are there. Playing in someone else's world is an excellent way to dodge the initial world building step, and get straight to dialog, composition, and the all-important "building a good story." It lets you hone your tools in a safe place, and that's incredibly helpful.
I didn't learn how to build good worlds from fanfic; I had to start doing my own thing before I could learn, and apply, that lesson. But I learned to write good dialog from fanfic, and I learned how to make people care. The fanfic community was hugely important to, and influential toward, my development as a writer.
Again, there are some pitfalls to this approach. Fanfic can easily become a closed circuit of production and praise, where people who want to read exactly what you're writing tell you how awesome you are, so you write the same thing over and over again, without any growth. Fanfic can seem like an excuse to be sloppy. But if you're approaching it seriously, which many really good fanfic authors do, it can teach you an incredible amount about writing, about receiving critique, and about taking editorial feedback. The first really thorough editorial feedback I ever received was on a piece of fanfic, and I have held those lessons dear to my heart since I was sixteen years old. Fanfic is an awesome learning lab, and the only credentials you need to enter are a knowledge of a fandom you'd like to write in, and the willingness to be told when you're terrible.
Fanfic gives you the freedom to do things that are difficult to do in more traditional fiction.
Some of my favorite things to both read and write in fanfic are "mood pieces," little meandering stories that don't do anything but paint a picture of a moment, or look at an event from a different direction. They're all about introspection and re-framing, and when they're good, they're amazing. But they're not the sort of thing that sells. I can (and do) write them about my published series, but they're not the sort of thing that generally winds up finding a very wide audience. And in fanfic, that doesn't matter. I've written stories with a projected audience of three. All three people were happy, and I was content.
I love AU fanfic—alternate universe stories where things went a little different, someone died or didn't die or married their season one sweetheart or it's a Shakespearean tragedy or or or. And AU is hard in traditional fiction. I've managed to play around with it a bit in "Velveteen vs.", where I have the superhero framework as an excuse, but I doubt Toby will ever meet her cross-dimensional counterpart (which is a pity, because I bet it would be fascinating). I like having the option to twist things and see how everything unfolds from a new starting point.
Fanfic can help you find your voice.
I know people who say "why don't all those fanfic writers just play in their own worlds?" And the thing is, some of them will, some of them do. People don't have to choose one or the other, absolutely, no mixing or matching. A lot of fanfic authors go on to become professional authors, and keep on writing fanfic in whatever spare time they have. I am not a special snowflake in this regard. I belong to a blizzard. There are a lot of reasons that people write fanfic. Sometimes we do it because we're in love with a setting that someone else has created. Sometimes we do it because we want to fix what we view as flaws, or create a more balanced back story for a character we feel has gotten short shift, or just because we feel like it. Sometimes we do it because we're bored.
But every time we do it, even when we're trying to sound like the original creator, we're getting a little more solid in our own voices, in the ways that we shape and approach narratives. We find ourselves in the space between someone else's story. At the end of the day, is learning to write by producing reams of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction any less legit than retelling "Snow White" eighty-seven times? I don't think so. It's less commercial, since you can't (and shouldn't) sell your fanfic, but it's still a natural part of figuring out who you are as a writer.
Not every writer will write fanfic. Not every writer needs to, or wants to. But for those of us who do, it helps us find ourselves. And that's important.
Fanfic is just plain fun.
I wrote a Josie and the Pussycats/Veronica Mars crossover fic once.
I think that sort of says it all.
Fanfic can change the way you think about a story.
I've heard a few people say that everyone who writes fanfic is a spoiling spoiler who spoils, throwing mud and slime all over something beautiful. And everyone has a right to an opinion. But while I have never had a piece of fanfic change my opinion of a story negatively, I have had pieces of fanfic make me look at the original work in a new, and much more open-minded, way. Because fanfic shows love, and love means there's something there for me to care about.
I've never read a piece of fic and thought "ew, I'm never reading/watching the source material." The opposite is very much true. Good fanfic, inspired fanfic, brings new eyes to the table, and new eyes are never a bad thing. Having my view of the story transformed makes me more willing to accept where the original narrative goes, and more likely to stick around for the ride. I've never dropped out of a fandom where I was actively invested in the fanfic. Again, the opposite is very much true.
And now, the big thing...
I cannot officially know about fanfic based on my work, but that doesn't mean I hate it.
Like many authors, I find myself in an awkward position regarding fanfic based on my own work. So here is my official stance on the subject:
Don't tell me.
I have Google spiders; it's entirely possible that I will unofficially find out about your epic Toby/Tybalt Candyland slash party. But I promise to delete that notification without clicking through if you promise not to push the story in my face. If I officially know about it, I officially have to ask you to take it down, because there's no way to prove I didn't read it if it turns out that, say, Toby and Tybalt really are going to have a threeway with the Luidaeg on the top of Candy Mountain. So just don't officially tell me about it. If you write a lot, the odds are good that you and I could end up in the same archive. That's cool. I won't fuss about it if you don't.
I love fanfic for everything it does for writers, and for readers, and if in ten years, the author of the hot new urban fantasy series shyly tells me that she got her start writing Quentin/Raj sexy boys' adventure fic, I will applaud, hug her, and probably buy her dinner. I want fanfic to thrive forever and forever, and keep producing amazing stuff for me to read. And the day the very last Toby book is published, I am doing a huge fanfic websearch, diving into some archives, and reading myself sick.
March 12 2012, 22:12:12 UTC 5 years ago Edited: March 12 2012, 22:16:52 UTC
I hope this policy of yours isn't because of the widespread false rumors about some author (usually Marion Zimmer Bradley) being unable to publish a book because a piece of fanfic had the same idea. I'm pretty sure that never really happened.
What really did happen, in Bradley's case, is that she was publishing an anthology magazine of Darkover fic alongside the canonical books, and liked something from one of the submitted stories, and asked the fic author for permission to put it into one of the canonical books, and negotiations broke down.
March 12 2012, 22:22:46 UTC 5 years ago
Jim C. Hines did an analysis of the situation in 2010. His conclusion was the same as Seanan's:
"The lesson I take from all this is to avoid potentially putting myself in Bradley’s position, and that means not reading fanfiction of my work. Sure, most fanfic authors I’ve met and spoken to have been wonderful people … but it only takes one. So if someone likes my work enough to write fanfiction, I find that flattering. But I don’t want to know about it."
(Other examples of the phenomenon exist. For example, J. Michael Straczynski shelved an episode of Babylon 5 for two years to track down and obtain clearances from a fan. Was it because the fan would actually sue? Arguably not. Was it because the fan could sue and the business was sufficiently risk-averse to not want to go near the issue until the release was in hand? Absolutely.)
March 12 2012, 22:57:34 UTC 5 years ago
All informed parties agree that Lamb (the fanfic author) came up with something that MZB hadn't (a whole story text according to Lamb, an idea according to Lackey), and MZB formally approached Lamb about using it in canon.
This has mutated through the rumor mill into a story about a "crazy fan" threatening a lawsuit because the author "coincidentally" wrote the same thing, ignoring the important details: Lamb actually came up with the idea, and MZB had not, and MZB provided Lamb with documentation of that fact in written form.
So, y'know, don't do that.
Now, since Bradley's publisher is also Seanan's publisher (DAW), maybe there's a read-no-fanfic clause in her contract, so maybe Seanan really is legally constrained in this way. But if she isn't, well, I just hate to see people depriving themselves because of paranoia over a distorted rumor.
March 13 2012, 05:00:18 UTC 5 years ago
DAW's reaction to the whole thing was to not publish the book entirely because there might be a lawsuit, not because there actually was one. I would honestly suspect it would go differently today, because seriously, lawsuit threats get thrown around pretty casually today, and it would be impossible to prove that the author had actually read the fanfiction anyway unless they commented. (Even then, it would be very difficult to prove that it was actually the author and not just somebody using their name. There are IP addresses, sure, but anyone can run an anonymizer to sidle around that. I don't believe it actually holds up in court.)
Bottom line: Authors are unlikely to run into the same problem that MZB did because most people are not going to be stupid enough to ask a fan author for permission to use material from their fanfiction. Seriously, even in the days of "Come play in my playground", that was a phenomenally dumb move.
March 13 2012, 00:24:24 UTC 5 years ago
2) How intrusive would it be for people who might be writing to know that the author could be reading them? For every one person going "what an honor," there would be five going "oh my god what if she finds me." I don't feel like limiting fannish expression like that. It seems unfair.
3) I do share Marion's publisher, and I dislike taunting my editors by seeming to invite legal action. Veracity of rumors aside, everyone at DAW remembers the bad sides of that adventure, and I don't want to be the bad child.
Not reading the fanfic today doesn't hurt me, and may protect me. I have enough to read without it.
March 13 2012, 01:38:09 UTC 5 years ago
When I say "that didn't happen", I don't mean the book didn't get cancelled (although there are disagreements over whether it was DAW or MZB who cancelled it). I mean the popular version of the story --- here was MZB, just innocently reading fanfic, when this crazy fan who had just happened to coincidentally have the same idea... --- that's the inaccurate part. MZB was courting disaster at practically every part of that chain of events.
But when I wrote the comment above, I forgot that you were being published by DAW. I can imagine that they might be a bit overly cautious about fanfic.
March 13 2012, 03:05:53 UTC 5 years ago
May 14 2012, 16:37:23 UTC 5 years ago
March 13 2012, 17:53:14 UTC 5 years ago
Well, I have written in one fandom where a comment from the author would freak me out a bit, but only because the author has been dead for nearly 20 years. OTOH, so many big name authors have played in that sandbox in the last couple of decades that they have exceeded the original author's total output, making it sort of like the professionally published equivalent of fan fiction. If one of those authors was known to be reading my poor effort, I'd be back in the "what an honor" headspace.
Off topic a bit, but writing the previous paragraph brought to mind the ultimate authorial slapdown from beyond the grave, when H. Beam Piper's legendary third Fuzzy novel was unearthed and invalidated the attempt to continue the story after his death.
May 6 2012, 15:40:32 UTC 5 years ago