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, 23:53:15 UTC 5 years ago
I will say that when IP holders aren't charging around screaming about it, it's a no harm, no foul sort of thing. This is always true of IP law, except when failing to charge around and scream about it means you've accidentally ceded some of your property rights (don't ask me, anyone, to explain how this works. I can tell you a lot about how separate property works in New Jersey or about how Bermuda arbitration are structured, but IP law is broadly not my thing, please see above on why I wouldn't touch it with a fifty foot pole and if you payed me a billion million dollars. Well. MAYBE if you paid me a billion million dollars...)
I don't write fanfic. I did, for a while, gosh, ten or more years ago, and I did it largely because it let me write without ramming into the gigantic walls that I tend to slam against in my own work, which is me hitting about one hundred and fifty pages and deciding that EVERYTHING ABOUT MY STORY IS ABSOLUTE CRAP I GIVE UP, FLINGS COMPUTER ACROSS ROOM AND HAS HYSTERICS THAT SCARE THE CAT. (Not that this has ever happened, and if my husband says it has I swear he's exaggerating.)
On a *technical writing level* I'm sure this was VERY helpful because since I didn't create the characters, and I didn't create the setting, and I didn't create the backstory, if those things were absolute unbelievable crap this was totally not my problem, so I didn't worry about it. Ergo, if I wanted to write an epic about Moombas, and someone wanted to point at me and ask how gigantic...tentacley...people with alarming fingers turned into small adorable lion-things with a one-word vocabulary, I could point them at Final Fantasy VIII and go "Beats me. Play it and then give me your theory" without trying to sit down and actually figure out how this worked.
You get to be a better writer by writing. And writing. And writing. And then writing some more. And then writing! It's sometimes much easier to do that when you're not stuck scratching your head and trying to fix a plot hole the depth of the Mariana Trench that's just derailed your entire plot.
Not that this has ever happened to me! *cough*
March 13 2012, 00:32:42 UTC 5 years ago
March 13 2012, 00:52:13 UTC 5 years ago
And assuredly, piracy is a much BIGGER and far, far more definitive problem to that respect, and people who disparage fanfic with one breath and run around reading pirated versions of books drive me to want to bash them with an Idiot Stick.
Or perhaps turn into a wolf-bear and wear their lungs as a hat.
Because REALLY.
March 13 2012, 01:29:37 UTC 5 years ago
March 13 2012, 04:11:06 UTC 5 years ago Edited: March 13 2012, 04:13:02 UTC
First edited to fix a dropped tag.
Second edit to add-I totally respect Ms. Robb's stance on fanfic though. It is her world, her characters and her rights to say whether or not she wants people to write fanfic on it.
March 13 2012, 16:45:39 UTC 5 years ago
March 13 2012, 07:55:33 UTC 5 years ago Edited: March 13 2012, 07:57:12 UTC
Organization for Transformative Works not only does Archive of our Own but also has a legal team
March 14 2012, 00:31:15 UTC 5 years ago
Here's the thing: I don't know if we'll ever see a big decision on the matter in one of the higher level courts, and unless and until we do, it's all largely theory and comparison and analogy and people trying to find an articulate way of justifying something they feel in their gut. I find it unlikely we will see A Big Decision because Large Sums Of Money Are Not Involved. Most anti-fanfic arguments boil down to "large sums of money are not involved now BUT COULD BE UNDER SOME WEIRD CIRCUMSTANCE OR UNDER CIRCUMSTANCES WE CAN GUESS MIGHT HAPPEN BUT HAVEN NOT YET." Which isn't ripe (a term of art meaning: there's an actual issue here with actual rights at stake and two or more actual parties in interest which means somebody can actually make a ruling: American Federal courts don't give advisory opinions. State courts sometimes do, but IP is usually a federal matter for a variety of reasons.)
Scary scary scary truth: *Most of law* is theory and comparison and analogy and people (often judges) trying to justify what they feel in their gut in words other than "I just think the other way doesn't sound right so it has to be this way". Law school was a gigantic lesson in "Yeah, that iron body of law you think stands between us and chaos? It's, uh, kinda doesn't exist. Except in theory! Maybe?..." So me saying THEY JUST HAVE THEORIES AND GUT FEELINGS isn't me trying to insult them, because that's what I (and most of the legal people I know, though by no means all) think about ALL THEORIES OF LAW.*
I talked on Seanan's blog about SLAPP suits a while ago in another context (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, more or less: I am big powerful company, you are little blogger who said something I don't like, I file suit I know probably won't stand up in court to scare the dickens out of you and make you shut up). Most suits against fanfic sites/authors are more like SLAPP suits than they are like a real lawsuit. It's "I have money and power and I will smack you with this to scare you into backing down."
On THAT level, although I'm not sure I buy their legal arguments, I'm glad the OTW exists. I hate legal bullies on principle. I can appreciate their Standing Up For The Little Guy Who Didn't Mean Any Harm And Just Loves The Story World even if I'm not sure fanfic isn't legally questionable, if a rights holder objects to it (if a rights holder doesn't object to it, I don't ever see a problem with it.)